In Focus

As part of Billy Collins’s appearance at Arts & Letters Live in 2004, the DMA commissioned him to write a poem in response to a work of art of his choice in the DMA’s collection.

A biombo is a moveable folding screen comprising multiple painted panels. Developed in colonial Mexico, this innovative piece of furniture reflects the popularity of Japanese byobu, folding screens with paper or wooden panels.

In 1938, at the height of his career, acclaimed American Modernist Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was commissioned by Fortune magazine to explore the theme of power in a series of works to be reproduced as a portfolio in the magazine.

Jean-Léon Gérôme was among the most famous and most reproduced artists during the second half of the 19th century. His history paintings, which focused on themes of antiquity, European history, or orientalism, were admired by large crowds every year at the Salon. Gérôme married the daughter of the Paris dealer and art publisher Adolphe Goupil, who established a successful branch of his gallery in New York in 1846.

The Bather is among the most important surviving drawings by Renoir. It relates, without question, to the famous painting Blond Bather, 1881, in the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown. Renoir is said to have painted this work in Naples while on his first trip to Italy, where he studied the art of the ancient world and the Renaissance, as his fellow Frenchmen had done since the late 16th century.

An okyeame is a counselor, spokesman, or linguist serving a chief or Asantehene (king). They are the leader’s primary orators, diplomats, protocol officers, prosecutors, and prayer officiants. They must have a masterful command of Asante traditions, history, and public relations. Among royal attendants, linguists are visually distinguished by their tall wooden staffs decorated with gold.

Robert Low Brandon Kirby (1852–after 1918), was an Assistant Inspector with the Gold Coast Constabulary from 1881 to 1885. Amid tense relations between the Asante kingdom and the British Empire, Brandon Kirby completed two missions to the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). It was during the second of these visits that he obtained photographs of his trip and two examples of Asante gold regalia.

The great communal houses of Indonesia's traditional peoples reflect man's place in a tripartite cosmos, where humans live in the middle world, on earth, between heaven and the underworld. Notions of duality, portents of cardinal directions, and the dictates of the first ancestors are honored in these often elaborate buildings that are in many ways a microcosm of each group's belief system. Often the houses of aristocratic clans were beautifully embellished with carvings and painted designs.

Concentrations 34: Shirin Neshat, Soliloquy was a special exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art from January 13 - April 2, 2000. The following is an essay from the brochure accompanying the exhibition, written by Suzanne Weaver, then-Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art.