Above: Faith Ringgold’s Black Light Series #1: Big Black (1967), now a part of the Perez Art Museum Miami’s permanent collection. Photo credit: nmwa.org. When it opens on the Miami waterfront in December, the Perez Art Museum Miami will have a collection devoted to contemporary African-American art, thanks to a $1 million gift from Knight Foundation and real estate developer and art collector Jorge M. Perez, the Miami Herald reported. For Knight, the funding is a way to ensure the new museum both reflects and engages the community that surrounds it. “Diversity is one of our great assets. Collections that reflect the range of our cultures might challenge us; but if it’s great art, it will not only inspire us, it will connect us to one another and to our Miami home,” Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation’s president, said of the gift. PAMM has already purchased three works for the collection. According to the museum, they include Faith Ringgold’s Black Light Series #1: Big Black (1967), the first of a series in which the artist explored a dark palette and a painting that was shown in 2012 at the museum; Al Loving’s Untitled #32, (1975), an important example of Loving’s work produced during a dynamic period in the early 1970s when he began to literally rip apart his paintings and then sew back together the pieces of his canvases; and Xaviera Simmons’s Untitled (Pink) (2009) whose photographs reference and challenge Western notions of the “pastoral” or “sublime.”
