COLUMBUS, OH.- The Columbus Museum of Art announced a transformative gift from the Scantland Family that includes 27 works of art and a $2 million endowment gift for the newly named Scantland Family Executive Deputy Director of Learning, Experience and Engagement. The gift ensures that innovation, collaboration, and experimentation remain at the center of the Columbus Museum of Art’s core beliefs by fostering connections between the museum collections and the Columbus community. Significantly, this is the first wave of gifts of art from the Scantland Family that inaugurates the Columbus Museum of Art’s Scantland Collection, which includes a diverse roster of exciting and thought-provoking contemporary artists currently practicing such as Felipe Baeza, Derek Fordjour, Deana Lawson, GaHee Park, and more. All of these works will be exhibited in Present Generations: Creating the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, on view June 25 through May 22, 2022 and will be accompanied by a host of educational programming with the featured artists throughout the coming year.

“This gift from the Scantland Family is truly transformational and will have an incalculable impact across the Museum,” said Nannette V. Maciejunes, Executive Director, Columbus Museum of Art. “This forward-thinking gift adds important new artists and voices to the Museum collection and empowers us to more broadly represent our shared human experience at this moment. An endowed position at this level makes a bold statement about our commitment to learning and community engagement at the Museum. We thank the Scantland Family for their unwavering support of the Columbus Museum of Art and our city’s cultural community.”

The newly endowed position reaffirms CMA as a widely acknowledged pioneering leader in the field of museum learning. For the last decade, the Museum’s groundbreaking work has served as a model to more than 80 other museums around the country, and in 2013, CMA was awarded the National Medal for Museums and Libraries from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The Scantland Family Executive Deputy Director of Learning, Experience and Engagement continues this work internally by focusing on structures that allow staff to strategically question the way museums have historically operated, encourage collective input and voice, and foster a workplace culture that allows creativity to thrive. Facing outward, the position ensures that the community and visitors stay at the center of the museum’s work.




“We are thrilled to support the Columbus Museum of Art’s pioneering leadership and collection,” said Pete Scantland. “The museum is an integral institution in Columbus and our commitment to the CMA is all about supporting our hometown, our neighbors, and our community. Art’s ability to transform and engage has never been more important than in this moment when we all need to explore and embrace how a wide range of experiences and perspectives makes our community, and really our world, stronger and more empathetic. Our entire family looks forward

to an ongoing and meaningful relationship of support. It is our hope that through this initial gift and subsequent ones, we will help the museum to more fully tell the story of art made during our generation and at this momentous period in our history. ”

With an ongoing commitment of gifts to the CMA, the Scantland Collection ensures that its ambitious program to collect the art of the present will remain part of its community for generations to come. The CMA’s renowned collection of modern painting consists largely of once-private collections of contemporary art, such as the Ferdinand Howland Collection, Sirak Collection, and the Schiller Collection. The Scantland Collection joins this venerable legacy of gifts to become the next significant pillar of the Museum’s permanent collection. From its position in Columbus, Ohio, the Scantland Collection is committed to a global perspective on the creative energies of this moment; its intention is to form an evolving and wide-ranging picture of art in the mid-21st century.

This initial gift of art includes work by Felipe Baeza, Cristina BanBan, Greg Breda, Coady Brown, Lucy Bull, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Somaya Critchlow, Julie Curtiss, Jadé Fadojutimi, Derek Fordjour, Louis Fratino, Jerrell Gibbs, Aaron Gilbert, Jenna Gribbon, Lauren Halsey, Alexander Harrison, Angela Heisch, Jammie Holmes, Deana Lawson, GaHee Park, Hilary Pecis, Devan Shimoyama, Emily Mae Smith, Vaughn Spann, Claire Tabouret, Ambera Wellmann, and Robin F. Williams.

Present Generations, the Columbus Museum of Art’s inaugural exhibition of the Scantland Collection, includes works by 27 artists. The show features a variety of mediums including painting as well as photographic and sculptural installations that illustrate the exuberance of contemporary art practice as it also grapples with urgent and underlying social concerns. Poignantly, many of the works have stylistic roots within the Museum’s modernist collection including enigmatic paintings by Coady Brown, Julie Curtiss, Aaron Gilbert, and GaHee Park that recall those by Magic Realist painters such as Paul Cadmus and George Tooker. Louis Fratino looks to artists like Demuth and Charles Sheeler in his work, while Jerrell Gibbs’s painting is directly inspired by works of Matisse in CMA’s collection. In addition to lush abstractions and ecstatic figurative paintings, Present Generations also includes powerful photographic and sculptural works by Derek Fordjour, Lauren Halsey, and Deana Lawson. Throughout the exhibition, many works engage historical forms and narratives as a way of acting upon and being alive in the present moment reminding us that our history always informs our present and that art has a never ending ability to tease out those relationships.