The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has acquired 112 objects through six new acquisitions made during its 39th Collectors Committee Weekend, which raised over $2.5 million from 62 members. Highlights include a rediscovered self-portrait by Virginia Vezzi (1600-38), a long-overlooked female Old Master; works by Japanese American artists Chiura Obata, Tokio Ueyama, and Mine Okubo created during the Exclusion Era; colonial-era paintings from Mexico by Manuel de Arellano; a photographic triptych by Hiroshi Sugimoto; and the Mary Hunt Kahlenberg Collection of 101 Indonesian textiles dating to the early 15th century.
These acquisitions matter because they significantly broaden Lacma's collection with historically marginalized voices—women artists, Japanese American artists facing xenophobia, and Indigenous textile traditions—while also filling gaps in the museum's holdings ahead of the opening of its $715 million David Geffen Galleries building. The Vezzi self-portrait, in particular, allows Lacma to become the only museum in the world to display a work by her alongside one by her husband Simon Vouet, correcting a patriarchal art-historical oversight.