Dallas Museum of Art makes Dallas Art Fair 2025 acquisitions

On April 10, 2025, the Dallas Art Fair and the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) announced that seven artworks have been selected from this year’s fair to join the museum’s permanent collection. These acquisitions come as part of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Program, an annual gift from the Dallas Art Fair Foundation to fund the placement of works from the fair into the collection of the DMA. This year marks the ninth edition of the program, a collaborative effort which strengthens the connections between Dallas’ arts institutions and international galleries.

This year, works by Sanlé Sory, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, Fu Xiaotong, Tina Girouard, Eduardo Sarabia, and Eri Imamura will enter the museum’s permanent collection. Selections were made by the DMA’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art Vivian Li, the Nancy and Tim and Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art Ade Omotosho, Emily Friedman, Allen and Kelli Questrom Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings, and a group of fund donors.

“We are thrilled to welcome seven works from six artists into the collection. These artists—whose work ranges in date from the mid-1970s to now—represent innovations in photography, textiles, ceramics, and drawing,” Brodbeck said. “While these artists have roots in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Burkina Faso, and China, they also represent a wider diaspora of international practice that resonates perfectly with our global collection. Their attention to beauty and craft is sure to enthrall our audiences.”

Initiated in 2016, the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program has been a cornerstone of the fair ever since. For nine years, the program has enabled the Dallas Museum of Art to forge relationships with exciting contemporary artists and global galleries, and enriched its permanent collection with significant artworks presented at the Dallas Art Fair. To date, $965,000 has been funded for the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection, including this year’s grant of nearly $100,000.

“This year’s selection reflects the international breadth of talent represented at the fair, highlighting the global perspectives shaping contemporary art today,” Kelly Cornell, Director of the Dallas Art Fair, said. “Since its inception in 2016, the Acquisition Program has proudly supported a dynamic range of artists and their galleries—ensuring their work becomes a lasting part of the Dallas Museum of Art’s permanent collection.”

The selected works are:

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka
Terrain (white), 2024
Linocut on washi paper
18½ x 26 in.
Acquired from Patel Brown

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka
Terrain (blue), 2024
Linocut on washi paper
18½ x 26 in.
Acquired from Patel Brown

Eduardo Sarabia
Untitled (Peyote), 2024
Hand painted ceramic vase and wood box
Vase: 9⅞ x 6¾ x 6¾ in. 
Box: 9⅞ x 12¼ x 9¼ in. 
Acquired from OMR

Eri Imamura
Breathe, 2022
24 karat gold beads, seed beads, cut beads, vintage kimono fabric, wood
29 x 20.75 x 2.75 in.
Acquired from Turner Carroll

Fu Xiaotong
150,048 Pinpricks 150,048孔, 2023
Handmade Xuan paper 手工宣紙
Acquired from Alisan Fine Arts

Sanlé Sory
Belle de Jour, 1974
Gelatin silver print
Acquired from Yossi Milo

Tina Girouard
Pink Floral (Lillypad), c.1990s
Sequins and beads on fabric
33.5 x 35 in.
Acquired from Anat Ebgi

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka is a Japanese-Canadian artist based in Toronto. Her practice brings together historical craft technologies of her heritage including ink, natural dye, printmaking and papermaking. Her work is experience based and includes long-term community-engaged projects with collaborators in the high Arctic as well as recent collaborative performances that integrate and reinterpret kamiko, garments sewn out of washi, Japanese paper.

Her work carries forward the beauty and possibilities of environmentally sustainable traditions into the future. Her approach to wearable sculpture removes the boundaries between craft, fashion and art. Hatanaka’s intentional choice of materiality supports the concepts embedded in her work which includes interconnectedness and impacts of globalization on communities integrally grounded in specific lands and collapsing time to layer ancestry and past versions of self.

Eduardo Sarabia’s (b. 1976; Los Angeles, USA; lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico) work has largely been inspired by the independent economies and folk history of northern Mexico. He frequently works with the materials favoured by local craftspeople, using ceramic tiles, hand-woven textiles, and glass to create sculptures and installations that address the complex exchanges—social, cultural, and material—that occur when this region and its history encounters outsiders.

Without limiting himself to a critique of the “exoticization” of Mexican culture, Sarabia examines the gap separating definitions of taste (and, more bluntly, of legality). Mixing romantic visual narratives in regards to illegal matters, fine arts and commerce, creating an environment that slips between the oneiric and the openly materialistic, Sarabia’s work takes on an important exploration of understanding the physical and human consequences of economic forces.

Eri Imamura’s (b. 1977; Tokyo, Japan; lives and works between Tokyo and Bangkok, Thailand) artwork is filled with symbolism, delving into the human psyche and how we try to cope with the prevailing issues around us.

She received her BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts, the most prestigious art school in Japan. She has kept the Kimono at the core of her artistic practice; transforming the traditional garment into three dimensional soft sculptures. Seeking to test the boundaries of her medium and extend her practice into the ultracontemporary realm, Eri began a residency among Native Americans that led her to full training in Amerindian beading artistry under the supervision of Teri Greeves, a renowned beadwork artist. She received her degree with highest honors in Indigenous Studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, in 2007.

Imamura uses the most refined materials to create her sacred works including 24 K gold beads and antique silk kimono fabrics. Her subject matter stems from Japanese traditional myths, which she blends with contemporary Manga imagery to create heroic works of skill, power, and transformation.

Fu Xiaotong (b. 1976; Shanxi, China) is known for her intricate paper pinhole creations of “traditional” landscape compositions. She graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2000 and later obtained a Master’s degree in Experimental Art from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2013. Fu currently teaches at the School of Arts at North China University of Technology and resides in Beijing and Germany.

In 2019, she was awarded the inaugural Asian Female Artist Award, presented jointly by the Sovereign Asian Art Foundation and Vogue Hong Kong.

Sanlé Sory (b. 1943; Nianiagara, Burkina Faso) portraits are key documents of the exuberant youth culture in Burkina Faso following the small West African nation’s independence from France. After learning to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex 6×6 camera and process prints, Sory opened his studio, Volta Photo, in 1960, the same year his country (then called Upper Volta) began its transition from remote colony to independent nation.

He worked as a regional reporter, event photographer and record sleeve illustrator active in the city’s dynamic music scene. Most notably, however, Sory was one of Bobo-Dioulasso’s earliest and finest studio photographers. A mingling of Fula, Malian and Voltaic youths— customers and loyal friends of Sanlé— populate the photographer’s inventive studio portraits. Teenagers and 20-somethings playact as their favorite music icons, while others model modern fashions brought with them to the studio or show off their gym physiques. Some don costumes or hold props provided by Sory that appeal to their taste for the modern, such as Air Afrique flight bags, radios, telephones, lamps, record players and plastic guns. Loosely painted backdrops conceived by the artist feature scenes of leisure and modern life, such as a cityscape at night, a beachside promenade and an expansive airplane  tarmac, “anything”, Sanlé says, “to help people make the picture their own”.

In the past year, photographs by Sory have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; North Carolina Museum of Art; RISD Museum and the Tang Museum at Skidmore College. Sory was born in Nianiagara, Burkina Faso and currently lives in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso.

Tina Girouard (1946 – 2020) invested objecthood with meaning through ritual, performance, role-playing, and community participation. From the 1970s until her death, she played a galvanizing role in the founding and development of a range of alternative art organizations, including the Anarchitecture Group, the interdisciplinary cohort of 112 Greene Street, FOOD restaurant, The Kitchen, P.S. 1, the Festival International de la Louisiane, and as a collaborator in artist communities in Louisiana, New York, and Haiti.

Girouard’s first comprehensive retrospective SIGN-IN will open at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City in May 2025. After debuting at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans in 2024, the retrospective also travelled to the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) in New York.

Since 2019, the artist Estate of Tina Girouard has been represented by Anat Ebgi. The gallery presented an historic restaging of her most important performances Pinwheel (1977) in curatorial partnership with Lumi Tan and The Kitchen, NYC for the inaugural Meridians sector at Art Basel Miami Beach.