The Delaware Art Museum has acquired 67 works in the last 18 months in a bid to enrich and diversify its catalog.
The museum purchased works by 37 artists, including five watercolor costume designs regional artists Howard Pyle painted for the Broadway play Springtime.
"And they’re quite lovely and fairly large. You know they needed to be to provide enough detail to the people who were actually going to make the costumes," Chief Curator Heather Campbell Coyle said.
Pyle’s work is a backbone of the museum, but Coyle said the museum is trying to broaden the collection by adding more works by women and people of color.
The museum acquired the large panel painting Smile that artist and University of Delaware professor Peter Williams created while on a residency in New Orleans.
"It’s huge, the color is great. It tells the story about the fabric of New Orleans, as well as the people there. And it gets into his interest and the psychology of being Black in America today," Cambpell Coyle said.
The museum acquired pieces by Gretchen Moyer, Margo Olman, Helen Farr Sloan, Elizabeth Osborne and Barbara Bodichon.
The recently acquired works date from the mid-1800s through 2016. They include photographs, paintings, prints, sculptures and decorative arts.
Delaware Public Media' s arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from theDelaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.