Museum Spotlight: Phoenix Art Museum

It has been a while since we’ve highlighted the activities of one of our member museums, so I wanted to take the opportunity to shine a light on the way the Phoenix Art Museum has incorporated Museum Exchange into its programming. I was fortunate to visit the museum earlier this spring and was impressed by how they have activated their sprawling museum complex with focused collection displays amidst their rotating thematic exhibitions. As one might expect given its geographic location, the museum has dedicated space to works by Latin American, Latinx, and Native American artists. Phoenix also has a growing Asian and South Asian population, and art from those regions is strongly represented as well.

Navin Rawanchaikul, Paradise in Anyang, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 96 in. Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Gift of the Tilton Family Collection.

One wing of the museum is devoted to art from Asia and South Asia and as I headed into that area, I was greeted by an electric painting by Thai artist Navin Rawanchaikul that came to the museum via Museum Exchange and the Tilton Family Collection. Heading in another direction, I was stopped in my tracks by another work that came through Museum Exchange, one of Mokha Laget’s dynamic canvases, Longhouse (2017), hanging in proximity to a classic 1963 Victor Vasarely, bridging European modernism and contemporary Southwestern reinterpretations in a tidy conversation.

Right: Mokha Laget, Longhouse, 2017, acrylic and clay paint on shaped canvas, 50 x 80 x 2 in.

Selig Family Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs Olga Viso said of the partnership:

The access that Museum Exchange has provided our museum to potential donors across the country has brought exceptional artworks our way…some 19 works by 14 artists since 2024. We have filled notable gaps in the Museum’s collection of painting and sculpture from the 1990s and 2000s, with recent gifts of representative examples of works by Enriquez Martinez Celaya, Mark Dion, Guyton/Walker, and a monumental installation by Matthew Ritchie. These are all works we could not afford to go back and purchase today. We have also acquired exceptional works by lesser-known figures such as Donald Locke, who had a deep connection to Arizona in the 1980s and 1990s.

Donald Locke, Departure for Cythera, 1992, wood, plexi, acrylic, collage, and mixed media on canvas, 50 x 84 in. Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Gift of the Estate of Donald Locke.

Seeing the impact of these donations after just two years of participation is heartening and is mirrored by other member museums who have shown a similar level of engagement with our catalogues and who have built the Museum Exchange offerings into their acquisition strategies. The range of material on offer also means that a museum such as the Phoenix Art Museum with its highly specific demographic and curatorial criteria can thoughtfully add to their collection just as easily as a museum in the Northeast or the deep South, essentially establishing a new pipeline for patronage that didn’t exist before. We look forward to bringing you other success stories such as this as the effects of our donation network continue to show themselves on the walls of museums across the country.