Collectors Evening
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Mark your calendar for Collectors Evening, our highly anticipated night of elegance, art, and entertainment. Your support of this event gives you the opportunity to make a difference by casting your vote for your favorite work of art to add to the High Museum’s collection.
This year’s Collectors Evening will take place on October 3, 2019.
For more information, call 404-733-5335 or email casey.murphy@high.org.
CE 2019 Co-Chairs
Tim Schrager
Lucinda Bunnen
Michelle Edwards
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Platinum Level: $12,000
-Preferred seating for ten at Collectors Evening 2019; one vote per person
-Invitation to attend VIP cocktail reception and early viewing
-Recognition as a Platinum donor in the Collectors Evening Program and Highlife magazineGold Level: $5,000
-Four seats and four votes at Collectors Evening 2019
-Invitation to attend VIP cocktail reception and early viewing
-Recognition as Gold level donor in the Collectors Evening program and Highlife magazineHost Committee: $2,500
-Two seats and two votes at Collectors Evening 2019
-Recognition as a Host Committee member in the Collectors Evening program
-Recognition as a Host Committee member on Collectors Evening invitation, with a commitment by June 24, 2019Collectors: $1,000
-One seat and one vote at Collectors Evening 2019Sponsored by
Presenting Sponsor
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Kristie and Charles Abney
Robin Aiken and Bill Bolen
Ron and Susan Antinori
Spring and Tom Asher
Jennifer and Scott Bates
Rosemary and John Brown
Carolynn Cooper and Pratap Mukharji
Marcia and John Donnell
Sarah Eby-Ebersole and W. Daniel Ebersole
Howard and Helen Elkins
Peggy Foreman
Jacqueline Friedlander
Jim Getzinger and Joel Desmarteau
Helen C. Griffith
Jean and Jason Hanges
Sara and Jeff Hehir
Jack and Ellen Holland
Robin and Hilton Howell
Liza and Brad Jancik
Bobbo Jetmundsen
Katie and West Johnson
Baxter Jones and Jiong Yan
Sarah and Jim Kennedy
Anna and Hays Mershon
Sandy Moon and Les Stumpff
Victoria and Howard Palefsky
Karen and Richard Parker
Pollack Family Fund
Patty and Doug Reid
Tricia and Maurice Rosenbaum
Judy and Arnie Rubenstein
Louise Sams and Jerome Grilhot
Sara and Paul Steinfeld
Judith and Mark Taylor
Lisa Cannon Taylor and Chuck Taylor -
Modern and Contemporary Art/Photography
Michael Rooks and Sarah Kennel
Shirin Neshat
Iranian, born 1957
Possessed, 2001, 16mm and 35mm film transferred to digital video, 13:01, with sound
Proposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2019Haunting and mesmerizing, Shirin Neshat’s film Possessed (2001) interrogates the complexities of gender, politics, and public space in the Middle East. Neshat, a renowned Iranian-born artist living in New York, shot the work in Morocco using 35mm black-and-white film. The film shows a distraught woman as she roams the streets of a walled city without a chador, the traditional Islamic veil. Her increasingly aberrant behavior is initially ignored until she mounts a platform. Soon, a crowd gathers and begins to argue, some condemning her madness while others defend her. As she quietly slips away, she leaves in her wake chaos and dissent. The conclusion is provocative and ambiguous: does she symbolize the radical force of a woman who refuses to remain silent or the repressive violence of a patriarchal society? Neshat’s technical mastery heightens the film’s dramatic impact. She interweaves closeups referencing silent movies with long tracking shots and cuts edited in sync with the gripping soundtrack. Poetic and troubling, the film exemplifies what Neshat has characterized as the drive “to make sense out of shambles, to distill essence out of chaos.”
A key work by an internationally renowned artist, this proposed acquisition is the last available in an edition of six and would greatly strengthen the Museum’s growing collection of time-based media. If acquired, the work would anchor the next rotation on the Skyway Level of the Anne Cox Chambers Wing featuring works exclusively by women, in celebration of the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.
American Art
Stephanie Mayer Heydt
Thomas Sully
American, 1783–1872
Girl with a Fan (Blanche Sully), 1837
Oil on panel
20 x 17 inches, signed with conjoined initials TS and dated 1837, lower left
Proposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2019Raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where his family managed the town’s performance hall, Thomas Sully gained early experience in the world of theater that paved the way for his success as a painter. Actors were his first subjects, and Sully quickly learned to infuse drama into his work—swiftly making him one of America’s most sought-after portraitists.Theatrics come to the foreground in Sully’s painting Girl with a Fan. The sitter is Sully’s daughter, Blanche, intriguingly posed with an extravagant feather fan. As one of the artist’s so-called fancy pictures, the painting was not so much a likeness of his daughter as it was a rendering of mood as conveyed through an idealized female form. Sully endowed his rosy-cheeked women—positioned to accentuate their long, curved necks—with a grace that many considered on par with the best examples of a Renaissance Madonna.
Sully painted Girl with a Fan with mass distribution in mind. Indeed, the image swiftly appeared as an engraving, published alongside stories and poems in popular annuals. Before museums and public collections were available in America, it was in print that artists made their reputations. Sully reached his largest and most devoted audience by releasing his work in these wildly popular publications that circulated to middle- and upper-middle-class households across America.
European Art
Claudia Einecke
Louis Valtat
French, 1869–1952
Les Couturières (The Dressmakers), 1918
Oil on canvas
32 x 26 inches
Proposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2019European art at the High is short on figurative paintings like this one, which engage us directly through their uncomplicated, homely subject matter. However, in Les Couturières the mundane motif of two dressmakers examining a length of cloth is elevated to a matter of high art by the refined, condensed composition and exquisitely nuanced palette.This appealing work is by one of the masters of early twentieth-century modernism, Louis Valtat. Stylistically, Valtat is best seen as an intermediary between the Nabis and the Fauves, two groups of artists intent on creating new, pointedly modern ways of representing, stressing simple shapes and heightened color, respectively. While Valtat never formally joined either camp, he learned from both.
Les Couturières is a superb example of Valtat’s mature style: the two figures are outlined graphically in black, with little attempt at giving them individuality. Rather, set in a constricted space, with areas of luminous color like stained glass, this is a work about the relationship of forms and lively, sinuous patterns, which Valtat balances with consummate mastery. At the High, Les Couturières would stand in dialogue with paintings by Nabis founding members Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard and a similarly simplified Synthetist still life by Émile Bernard.
Decorative Arts and Design/Folk and Self‑Taught Art
Kevin Tucker and Katie Jentleson
Unidentified Artist
Barbershop Stand and Shelf, ca. 1940–1950
Polychromed wood and metal
49 1/2 x 26 x 13 inches
Proposed purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2019This brightly colored, hand-carved barbershop stand is a rare example of Southern vernacular furniture with important ties to both folk and decorative arts. The set consists of a chest of idiosyncratically fashioned drawers and a freestanding shelf that once were used to hold haircutting and shaving implements in a West Virginia barbershop. They are constructed from reused pieces of old furniture, including chair rods and drawers from other chests. The unidentified artist added many bands of v-notched wood and finished the set with rich shades of red, light blue, mustard yellow, and black paint, giving it an otherworldly appearance that suggests it also might have served a spiritual function in its past life.
In the High’s collection, there are several examples of African American self-taught artists, including Elijah Pierce and Ulysses Davis, who used their barbershops as places for not only hairstyling and wood sculpting but also Christian ministry. In addition to this point of kinship with the work of Davis and Pierce, this altarlike stand would serve as a vital counterpoint to both elite and vernacular examples of decorative arts masterpieces in the collection, including the Herter Brothers’ Cabinet, a rarely seen “tramp art” chest, and Tejo Remy’s much beloved You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory Chest of Drawers.