Each year our Permanent Collection of nearly 2,500 works of art continues to grow, largely thanks to generous donors who choose to give works from their collections to Rockford Art Museum. This exhibition highlights six of our many new acquisitions from the last two years. On display, you’ll see the first Abigail Keyes Brown work to become part of our collection. Brown was a masterful oil painter known for her natural and energetic landscapes marrying Realism with hints of Impressionism. Another new addition, Tom McHale’s Flow #7, is from our 2022 Rockford Midwestern Biennial. McHale, a longtime Rockford native, was selected for our Dean Alan Olson Purchase Award and is now a fitting addition to our ever-growing collection of works from the Rockford Region. You’ll also find a new addition by George J. Robertson, an influential regional painter and art professor at Rockford Female Seminary (now Rockford University) from 1860-1885. This exhibition also includes Rockford Art Museum’s first collected work by Alan Shields, a spearheading Postminimalist artist whose work drew from craft traditions and heavily focused on texture and overtly hand-made processes, sharply resisting the sleek commercially-inspired Minimalist trends of the time.
We’re thrilled to add these exciting new works to our Permanent Collection, and moreover, to bring them into the public view as we continue to build one of the region’s largest public art collections.
New Acquisitions is organized by Rockford Art Museum Collections Curator, Frances Downey
