New Artworks at Mia

Growing the Collection

Each year Mia acquires new artworks for its collection as a way to deepen our understanding of the grand, evolving story of world art. In the museum’s early years, the imperative was to collect widely—to fill the galleries with beautiful objects, the more the better. The goal? To rival European institutions and instill civic pride.

Now, 110 years on, we have a world-class collection, and our accessioning is selective and strategic. Mia focuses on fewer, more significant works that can complement existing strengths in the collection and fill historical gaps.

“Our collection is mature, and there’s not an urgency to collect everything we can,” says Matthew Welch, Mia’s Senior Deputy Director. “Now it’s the case of finding that special, rare object; to acquire fewer but better, more noteworthy works; and to value depth over breadth.”

In addition to the “fewer but better” rule, Mia’s collecting goals in FY25 included diversifying the collection, further developing our collection of Latin American art, adding judiciously to our already exceptional Asian collection, and expanding our European paintings beyond France. Here are a few of the highlights from FY25.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

Mountains over Lake Hallstatt is Mia’s first Austrian 19th-century painting, first Austrian landscape painting, and first work by the Austrian academic painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, who dedicated his art to the close study and accurate rendering of nature.

Outside Austria, his paintings are rare, particularly in the United States. The acquisition helps broaden Mia’s strong holdings of European 19th- and 20th-century painting beyond French and German art, letting us tell a more interesting and complete history of 19th-century European art overall.

Workshop of Paul Preuning

Paul Preuning’s work has been sought after since museum decorative arts collections were first established in the 19th century: the British Museum acquired a jug in 1855, the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1855 and 1866. During World War II, several examples were seized by the Nazis, restituted after the war, and now appear in major collections such as the Rijksmuseum and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In fact, nearly all the world’s major collections have a Pruening, and now Mia does too. It’s a significant addition to our collection of Renaissance ceramics, which until now has been relatively modest for a museum of Mia’s size and history.

Blanche Hoschedé-Monet

María Berrío

El Dorado, Mia’s first work by Colombian María Berrío, joins our growing roster of works by Latin American artists. Berrío’s works have been collected by major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

This large-scale collage is part of a series that delves into the importance of rituals and how they have been emptied of meaning over time.

Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam is a major figure in the field of Latin American art and beyond. This is his first work to enter Mia’s collection.

I Am the Light is a painting that allows the museum to address the history of modern art in a more comprehensive way, sparking conversations about cultural exchanges and how European artistic traditions are transformed by the social realities of Latin American countries.

Chinese Ritual Wine Vessel

Carrie Mae Weems

What at first glance appears to be a vibrantly hued composition of painted rectangles is, in fact, a photograph of a boarded-up storefront—knotty plywood, effaced graffiti, and all. Mia has two other works by Carrie Mae Weems in the collection.

This one joins important works by Lorraine O’Grady, Adrian Piper, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, and Mickalene Thomas, all recently acquired, enabling the museum to tell a richer, more diverse story of photography in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Algernon Cecil Newton

Gego

With this sculpture, Mia now owns works by the three most influential figures of kinetic art (Gego, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Jesús Rafael Soto), who brought international recognition to Venezuela from the late 1950s onward. It’s the first by Gego in Mia’s collection.

The sculpture exemplifies her use of modular structures, and how their repetition and layering evoke a sense of infinite growth and immersion. This acquisition helps the museum tell the extraordinary story of postwar abstraction in Latin America.

Japanese Tea Bowl

This deformed tea bowl dates from a short-lived period when practitioners of ceremonial tea gatherings vied with each other to push novelty to the limit. It corresponds to what contemporaries described as the “warped” aesthetic of Furuta Oribe (1544–1615), a distinguished tea master and samurai who played a pivotal role in the evolution of tea culture.

Mia has very few Oribe ceramics from this period. This one was included in the exhibition “Turning Point: Oribe and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan” that was shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2003–4, and was arguably one of the best works in that exhibition.

Louis Welden Hawkins

Takeuchi Ryūa

Many museum collections around the world, including Mia’s, own prints by Takeuchi Ryūa, but his paintings are far rarer. This pair of six-panel folding screens is Ryūa’s largest and most important of his known paintings, and some would say his masterpiece. They greatly enhance Mia’s developing collection of early 20th-century Japanese paintings.

Executed on silver leafed paper to emphasize the underworld nature of the subject matter, the right screen depicts skeletons as a courtesan procession and the left skeletons at play.

Jesús Rafael Soto

Santiago Rusiñol

This painting enriches Mia’s already wide-ranging collection of 19th-century European art, which includes artists from France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. But our examples from Italy and Spain have been more limited.

Patio in Sitges complements recent landmark acquisitions of large-scale works by Joaquin Sorolla and Ramôn Tusquets y Maignon, and adds variety to the scale and subjects of Mia’s modern Spanish paintings.

John Singer Sargent

Mia has been fortunate to have a group of five paintings by John Singer Sargent on extended loan from the Myron Kunin Collection since 2014, of which this work is the first to enter the permanent collection as a gift.

These works, along with Luxembourg Gardens at Twilight and The Birthday Party, constitute one of the finest presentations of Sargent’s work among our peer institutions. Courtyard, Casa del Chapiz is a particularly welcome addition, enriching our emerging collection of late 19th-century Spanish painting with one by an American artist traveling to Spain to paint.

JoAnn Verberg

Circle of Manuel de Arellano

This life-size Virgin of Guadalupe is the first Latin American religious image from the colonial period to enter the collection. As an important symbol of European colonization (under the pretext of spreading the Catholic faith), it fills a significant gap at Mia. And its large dimensions make it unlike any other depiction of the Guadalupe in any major collection.