Modern & Contemporary
The AMAM’s post-1900 holdings of modern and contemporary art are impressive for a small college museum, owing to the prescience of a number of directors, curators, and art historians at Oberlin.
he collection is indebted to the efforts of Ellen H. Johnson, William Olander, Charles Parkhurst, Sharon Patton, Richard Spear, and Athena Tacha, and to the generosity of many artists and donors, notably Joseph and Enid Bissett and Ruth C. Roush.
The collection includes outstanding examples of Expressionist, Cubist, and Surrealist paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by artists such as Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, Arshile Gorky, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso. Among the museum’s highlights is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s singular, iconic painting Self-Portrait as a Soldier.
Holdings of American postwar art are especially deep, with works from all the major movements, including Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, New Realism, and Photorealism. Many of the towering figures of mid to late 20th-century American and European art are represented, among them Josef Albers, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Jasper Johns, Yayoi Kusama, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Elizabeth Murray, Alice Neel, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Diego Rivera, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol.
African American artists represented in the collection include Romare Bearden, Chakaia Booker, Willie Cole, Leonardo Drew, Renée Green, Horace Pippin, Alison Saar, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Fred Wilson.
The AMAM also has strengths in Latin American art, with works by Enrique Chagoya, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Alfredo Jaar, Roberto Matta, Vik Muniz, Gabriel Orozco, Doris Salcedo, Fanny Sanín, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Francisco Toledo.
The grounds of the museum feature important early outdoor works by Mary Miss and Robert Morris, as well as Claes Oldenburg’s first permanent outdoor sculpture, Giant Three-Way Plug, installed in 1970. That same year, the AMAM purchased Eva Hesse’s seminal sculpture Laocoön, and subsequently accepted, as a gift from Hesse’s sister, the Eva Hesse Archive, the largest collection of material about and created by Hesse in any public institution, which includes working drawings, collages, photographs, diaries, datebooks, and letters.
