At the Wellin Museum, we are continually shaping our collection in order for it to better reflect the diversity of our campus community, so that all students can feel a connection to or a reflection of themselves in the artwork on view. I’m happy to highlight five recent additions to the collection, all created by talented artists, who are women.
 

1. Francesca DiMattio - Combining the aristocratic ceramic tradition of porcelain with the more utilitarian material of stoneware, DiMattio creates an ebullient mash-up of high and low, traditional and contemporary in this 2016 sculpture, named Sevres II after the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, which created royal tableware for the French court in the eighteenth century.
   
   
    
2. Margarita Cabrera - Cabrera’s soft sculptures of cacti embroidered by immigrants who had crossed over the Mexican-American border were featured in a solo exhibition at the Wellin last spring. Cabrera often dwells on themes of labor in her work, as seen in Iron Will (2013), which combines screenprint and a collage of thread and vinyl—materials she uses in her sculptural practice. Some of the imagery seen here evokes the artist’s Mexican heritage and religious traditions.
   
   
3. Nicola López - Shards is one from the series "Sunsets and Blue Skies" completed in 2018 at the Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University. The set incorporates digital images that López shot in her home state of New Mexico of sunsets made brilliant by particles in the air from forest fires and features laser-cut elements that represent mankind’s intervention in and destruction of the natural landscape.
   
   
    
4. Sang-ah Choi - Choi creates intricate cut-paper pop-up dioramas utilizing traditional Korean pen and ink techniques. In Landscape 4, the artist uses a variety of materials from ink wash to pencil to create loose and abstract imagery that at times appears figurative. Here she employs the pop-up technique minimally, but effectively, by cutting, ripping, and folding paper to create a unique interpretation of an artist’s book.
   
   
    
5. Marion Greenwood - This portrait features an unknown resident artist or writer at the Yaddo colony in Saratoga Springs, NY, which welcomed its first group of artists, writers, and musicians in 1926. The drawing—a recent gift of Janis Conner and Joel Rosenkranz to the Wellin—was likely executed in the late 1920s, and while more research needs to be done, it may feature writer John Herrmann. Inspired by Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Greenwood traveled with Herrmann and his wife writer Josephine Herbst to Mexico in 1933 and took up mural painting.