Escape from the Vault: The Contemporary Museum’s Collection Breaks Out
January 25 – March 24, 2002

The Contemporary Museum’s collection comprises over 1800 works spanning 1940 to the present. Although TCM currently does not have permanent gallery space for ongoing displays of works from its collection, selections are presented as part of the museum’s schedule of temporary exhibitions each year. TCM has also announced plans to build an addition that will include a 4,000 square-foot gallery for rotating selections from the collection.

This exhibition builds on TCM’s popular Escape from the Vault program, which periodically has featured individual works brought out from storage for exhibition in the galleries. Escape from the Vault: The Contemporary Museum’s Collection Breaks Out , organized by TCM’s Associate Director and Chief Curator James Jensen, features works by seventy artists on view in the Makiki Heights galleries.

Many of the works have not been on view in several years, such as Lucien Freud’s etching Ib, Terry Allen’s assemblage The Battle of Santa Rosa, Mark Di Suvero’s steel sculpture Shadowdance, Mark Tobey’s gouache Little Wall, and Helen Shirk’s patinated copper vessel Sustaining Spirit I. Other works in the exhibition are recent acquisitions that are being shown for the first time, including Geoffrey Chadsey’s drawings of bare-chested Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, Peter Chang’s exquisite carved resin bracelet, and a pair of Toshiko Takaezu’s ceramic closed forms.

Additional highlights will include Richard Diebenkorn’s major print High Green – Version I; Dennis Oppenheim’s humorous sculpture Upper Cut; Old Toy, Enrique Chagoya’s dramatic drawing about the 1986 Space Shuttle disaster; and the paintings for the month of November from Thomas Woodruff’s Apple Canon. Works by Andres Serrano, David Hockney, Richard Tuttle, Lucas Samaras, John Coplans, Allison Saar, Gregory Crewdson, Frank Lobdell, Robert Graham and many others will also be on view.

A future Escape from the Vault exhibition will feature works by artists of Hawai‘i from TCM’s collection, including many recent acquisitions that will be shown for the first time.