AMONG THE Baltimore Museum of Art's holdings is a photograph of a crowded Tokyo street. The camera lens is trained on three women, each illuminated by a garish light, which raises the question: Is this a candid shot of hurried shoppers or a staged theatrical still?
The work of Philip-Lorca diCorcia exemplifies a trend in contemporary photography that explores the relationship between fiction and reality. He was at the top of curator Darsie Alexander's "must have" list to enhance the museum's collection.
The diCorcia photo is new and on view at the BMA.
In a nearby gallery stands a painted armchair, circa 1815. Furniture maker Samuel Gragg called his bent-wood creation "The Elastic Chair." A serendipitous dinner between the BMA's decorative arts curator, James Abbott, and a friend led to the museum's acquisition of the Gragg chair.
It, too, is part of the BMA's New on View exhibit, which opened last week and features an often overlooked but essential aspect of a museum's mission: collecting. The BMA and other top American museums are not solely about mounting big-name, marquee shows like this year's exhibit on J.M.W. Turner's fascination with the sea. They don't just refurbish and promote prized holdings, such as the BMA's famed Cone Collection, or accept donations of large personal collections.
A museum's collection must be ever-evolving, ever-expanding, ever-responsive to its patrons. A museum's collection gives it relevance, significance, prominence.
The BMA began with the gift of a single painting, William Sargeant Kendall's "Mischief," in 1914; since then, the collection has grown to 85,000 objects. The current exhibit represents a sampling of 2,000 works acquired in the past five years. The ambitions and tastes of a group of young curators, relatively new to the BMA, also are on view.
After assessing the BMA's contemporary photography collection, Ms. Alexander set out to get a diCorcia. She called his New York gallery, surveyed the prints available, and decided on "Tokyo 1994." The generosity of a New York benefactor ensured the purchase. Decorative arts curator Anita Jones had her eye on a fanciful story quilt by African-American artist Faith Ringgold, but money was an issue when she first saw Ms. Ringgold's work in the 1980s. When another quilt, "Matisse Model," appeared in a show at the museum in 1999, Ms. Jones went after it. The quilt, whose painted tableau incorporates aspects of Matisse works already in the BMA collection, was bought through an endowment program.
Curators say that when they mount exhibitions, they're presenting an argument. From the remains of the ancient city of Antioch, for example, BMA curators depicted not a city in ruins but the remnants of its vibrant past, and in so doing revealed a life in common.
But the New on View exhibit is more essay than argument. It explores the impact of collecting on a museum and illuminates the relationship between objets d'art and the community: the modern sensibilities of a 19th century chair-maker, the power of a drawing created in the gesture of throwing a basketball against a wall.
Art not for art's sake, but for ours.