What Matters, Endures

In its ninth year, the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program once again does something quietly radical: it selects with care, resists spectacle, and insists on the power of materiality and geographic breadth. Seven artworks by six artists have entered the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, and while the gesture might appear modest in scale, the implications are anything but.

The artists, Sanlé Sory, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Fu Xiaotong, Tina Girouard, Eduardo Sarabia, and Eri Imamura, are neither united by theme nor trend. What links them, instead, is an unapologetic commitment to process, labor, and cultural specificity. The program, now a near-decade collaboration between the Dallas Art Fair and the Dallas Museum of Art continues to demonstrate how acquisitions from a commercial fair can shape and sharpen an institution’s curatorial voice without pandering to market flash.

One of the program’s strongest statements comes via the work of Sanlé Sory. His 1974 photograph Belle de Jour is a document of post-independence optimism in Burkina Faso, made exuberant by props, costume, and painted backdrops. It is a portrait of self-fashioning and regional cool, staged with precision and affection.

Tina Girouard’s textile piece, Pink Floral (Lillypad), from the 1990s, offers a different kind of cultural memory. Girouard, an artist who moved fluidly between performance, installation, and decoration, brings a sense of ritual to the ornamental. The work, made of sequins and fabric, reflects the Pattern and Decoration movement’s persistent relevance and Girouard’s own belief in beauty as political.

The acquisition of two linocuts by Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka represents another kind of resistance—to impermanence, to environmental erasure. Printed on washi paper, the works carry centuries of technique and ecological sensitivity in their fibers. Hatanaka, a Japanese Canadian artist working across disciplines, collapses past and present with prints that read like quiet protests.

Fu Xiaotong’s 150,048 Pinpricks could be mistaken for minimal abstraction if not for its intense physicality. The handmade Xuan paper, pierced thousands of times, reveals not only landscape but endurance. It is a work of accumulation, of gesture turned into image, and of repetition as a form of reverence.

With Untitled (Peyote), Eduardo Sarabia contributes a hand-painted ceramic vase housed in a wooden box—a vessel of aesthetic contradictions. Playful yet reverent, functional yet decorative, Sarabia continues his exploration of the borderlands between tradition and illegality, craft and commerce.

Eri Imamura’s Breathe is perhaps the most materially luxurious of the group, composed of 24-karat gold beads, vintage kimono fabric, and wood. But the opulence is charged with mythology and transformation. Imamura, trained in both Japanese and Native American traditions, creates hybrid forms that hover between talisman and totem.

Together, these acquisitions gesture toward a broader, slower idea of contemporary art, one where touch, time, and context matter. Through this program, the DMA continues to build a collection that resists flattening. It collects not what is loudest but what will last.