The 10th annual acquisition program brings five artists and six remarkable works into the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
Ten years ago, the Dallas Art Fair and the Dallas Museum of Art started something quietly ambitious — a fund dedicated to taking the best work shown at the fair each year and making it part of Dallas’s cultural legacy forever. This week, that program hit two milestones at once: its tenth anniversary and its 78th acquisition, passing $1 million in total contributions.
This year’s selections bring works by Nicole Eisenman, Gloria Klein, Caroline Monnet, Hasani Sahlehe, and Raymond Saunders into the DMA’s permanent collection. Spanning the mid-1970s to the present, the six pieces move across textile, painting, relief, drawing, and collage — and each one carries the kind of weight that makes a permanent collection worth visiting.
The Works and the Artists
Nicole Eisenman’s Foghorn (2018) is a wooden relief, stained and set in a custom artist frame, acquired from Anton Kern Gallery. Eisenman lives and works in Brooklyn and is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow whose work appeared in both the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Her solo exhibitions have traveled from Munich to London to Chicago, and her reputation as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American art is well established.
Gloria Klein’s Untitled (1974) is an acrylic on canvas acquired from Anat Ebgi. Klein, who was born in Brooklyn in 1936 and passed away in 2021, came of age in the shifting cultural landscape of 1970s New York. Her abstract paintings use dense, diagonal repetition to evoke the psychological charge of crowds, visual overload, and coded language — color as a carrier of meaning about the complexity of people and society. A forthcoming monograph on her work is due in 2026. Klein’s work is already represented in major collections including the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin.
Caroline Monnet’s Kingdom (2026) — made from roof underlayment and polyester thread — was acquired from Blouin Division. Monnet is a multidisciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and French ancestry whose work confronts colonialism’s impact through Indigenous methodologies. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Gallery of Canada, among many others.
Hasani Sahlehe’s My Prayer (2025) is a large-scale acrylic gel and airbrush work on canvas, acquired from CANADA gallery. Sahlehe, born in 1991 in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, creates immersive abstract paintings that draw on sound, memory, and ancient architecture to build what he describes as sacred space through color and texture. His work is already in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art and the Georgia Museum of Art.
Two works by Raymond Saunders round out the acquisitions — Untitled (1990–2000) and HK 83, both mixed media on paper, acquired from Andrew Kreps Gallery. Saunders, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1934 and passed away in 2025, spent decades building one of the most singular practices in American art from his studio in Oakland — layering paint, found materials, chalk-board surfaces, and handwritten notations into works that read, as one description puts it, like jazz: dissonant at first, then deeply coherent. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others.
Why This Program Matters
“As we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the acquisitions fund, we are proud to welcome works by these important artists into the collection,” said Dr. Vivian Li, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA. “These acquisitions reflect our ongoing commitment to Indigenous, LGBTQ, women, and African diaspora artists who are forging bold and compelling paths.”
Since the Dallas Art Fair Foundation launched the acquisition fund in 2016 with an initial gift of $50,000, donors have contributed more than $1 million — enough to place 78 works into the DMA’s collection over a decade. The Foundation has raised more than $3 million total in support of the DMA, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and Dallas Contemporary.
“What the Dallas Art Fair does best is bring the voices shaping contemporary art to Dallas,” said Dallas Art Fair director Kelly Cornell. “Through the Acquisition Fund, that caliber of work enters the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection — creating a lasting cultural impact well beyond the fair.”
See It Yourself
The Dallas Museum of Art is free and open to all visitors, Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., located in the heart of the downtown Arts District.
Dallas Museum of Art Website: dma.org Dallas Art Fair: dallasartfair.com Instagram: @dallasartfair
