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This exhibition features the gifts and promised works from Donna and Cargill MacMillan, Jr.,  who have been building a personal collection of the art of their time for more than 20 years. The exhibition features more than 75 contemporary sculptures, paintings, design objects, and works on paper from the era’s most well known and art historically significant artists. It will inaugurate newly designed galleries in the Steve Chase Wing, which completes the museum’s dramatic changes following three years of transformative renovations.

A truly memorable unveiling of the newly designed galleries for contemporary art in the Steve Chase wing has been made possible by Donna and Cargill MacMillan, Jr. The entire wing is being installed with works from their exceptional collection, which they have promised to the Palm Springs Art Museum. These works, purchased because the couple loved them as objects that evoked passionate responses, will delight visitors with pleasures as far ranging as the art is eclectic. Featuring more than 116 contemporary sculptures, paintings, design objects, and works on paper from the art of our time by 75 of the era’s most well known and historically significant artists, the gift is a fitting tribute to the dramatic and transformative renovations at the Palm Springs Art Museum. This exhibition organizes the works from the MacMillan collection into six overarching themes that summarize major art movements since the 1960s.

The first gallery traces the historical roots of the collection. In the 1960s, Pop Art burst onto the art world’s consciousness by appropriating imagery from mass media and photography, which challenged notions of high art as practiced by the reigning post-WWII Abstract Expressionists. Legendary New York gallery dealer Leo Castelli championed this new generation of artists, which included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and James Rosenquist among others. Joined by conceptual artists, especially the Fluxus group in New York— represented in the MacMillan collection by video artist Nan June Paik—the artists in this gallery have come to define the aesthetic sensibility found within everyday subjects, a concept that signaled the shift from modern to contemporary art.

Continuing the radical developments initiated by the art historical upheavals of the 1960s, the second gallery features works based in assemblage and hybridity. These artists create by mixing different forms or combining elements. The most famous practitioner of this methodology, Robert Rauschenberg, creates literal combinations through a jumble of commonplace objects and imagery. Other artists working in this mode blend traditional categories of high and low art in order to rethink established art historical frameworks, evident in Richard Arschwager’s non-utilitarian and strange handcrafted objects, the found object constructions of Lucas Samaras and Tony Berlant, and the graffiti inspired mixed media drawings of Cy Twombly and Jim Dine.

Minimalism and reductive strategies are represented in two galleries. The first includes international contemporary artists who are heirs of a Los Angeles aesthetic from the 1960s that explored the potential of seductive finishes made possible by new industrial materials and manufacturing technologies. This surface seduction is evident in the luster of Teresita Fernandez’s acyric cubes, the sheen of Gary Hume’s painted bronze, the glint of Mona Hatoum’s burnished steel, the gloss of Anish Kapoor’s lacquered aluminum, and even the slick shine of Tokujin Yoshioka’s glassine paper chair. The companion gallery demonstrates a minimalist commitment to art that is stripped down to its fundamentals. Donald Judd, Ellworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Wendell Castle, David Simpson, and Jennifer Bartlett explore geometric forms, strong color, and repetition as a way to emphasize structural elements, making the viewer more aware of the object and the space it occupies rather than anything it might represent.
Another gallery is devoted to recent artists who re-imagine familiar myths and symbols, reinvigorating the interest in figuration and representation, to initiate powerful psychological dramas. German artist Anselm Keifer’s sculpture of the goddess Nossis, with her paint-splattered dress topped by an open, lead book, provides a study in spiritual contrasts between the ecstatic frenzy of intuitive wisdom and the cold, hard logic of legal texts. Artists Anthony Gormley, Gavin Turk, Jim Dine, Lynn Chadwick, Lynda Benglis, Julie Mehretu, Deborah Oropollo, and Pae White contribute variations on symbols of abjection, beauty, destruction, hope, history, dreams, transience, and permanence. Also in this gallery is work by Louise Bourgeois, often acknowledged as the most significant woman artist alive. Sculptures such as her large bronze spider and disconcerting claw are highly symbolic objects whose psychological references are linked to the creative potential of the unconscious and the irrational explored in surrealism.

Once contemporary artists broke from abstraction, it was probably inevitable that they would push art as far in the opposite direction as possible. A sixth gallery demonstrates the extent to which artists have addressed the challenge of realism, creating works that strain the viewer’s belief in the limits of artifice and, thereby, question the very notion of reality. They are represented by the hyper-realist female nude sculpture by John De Andrea, a witty group of bronze trashbags by Gavin Turk, the photo-realist still lifes of Don Eddy and Paul Wonner, the video of wild flowers created by Jennifer Steinkamp’s computer-generated imagery, and a delicate, glass tendril by Jim Hodges. Jennifer Bartlett, Sarah Charlesworth, Judy Dater, and Judith Shea call attention to the ways artistic representation translates the viewer’s experience of reality.

A complementary exhibition of works on paper will be presented from November 14, 2009 through February 7, 2010 in the Jorgensen Gallery and Marks Graphics Center.  Among the artists working in contemporary printmaking, it features works by Georg Baselitz, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Franenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Joan Mitchell, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Edward Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud, and Tom Wesselman.

In addition, the exhibition highlights major gifts and promised works from the MacMillan collection already on permanent display in the museum’s gardens and public spaces, including Yoshitomo Nara’s out-sized puppy, Jim Dine’s monumental double hearts and his multi-colored Venus, Barry Flanagan’s playful acrobatic hares, Peter Shelton’s tree-like figure, Bertil Vallien’s luminous sand cast glass boat, and Chihuly’s elegant glass reeds and floats.

The promised and completed gifts represented in this remarkable exhibition signal Donna and Cargill MacMillan’s impressive commitment to making the Palm Springs Museum one of the finest mid-sized museums in the country. We have known them to be generous and unstinting in their support throughout a long association with the museum, and it is with deep gratitude that we acknowledge the MacMillan’s confidence and faith in the museum’s ability to care for and exhibit the works that they have so lovingly collected over the years.  It is a legacy that changes the face of the museum and will bring great joy for many years to everyone in the area who loves contemporary art.