Museum & Institutional Acquisitions

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce recent museum and institutional acquisitions by The Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX; The Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; The Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA; The J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA; Thrivent Art Collection, Minneapolis, MN; and Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Boston, MA. We extend our most sincere gratitude to all the curators and patrons who made these acquisitions possible.

Mimi Smith

July 12, News at Noon, 1978

Television Drawings Series

Graphite and colored pencil on black Fabriano paper

30 x 40 in (76.2 x 101.6 cm)

34 x 44 x 2 in (86.4 x 111.8 x 5.1 cm) framed

Collection of The Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX

Mimi Smith

Violence in America, Good Evening, 1977

Television Drawings Series

Ink and graphite on Fabriano paper

22.5 x 30 in (57.2 x 76.2 cm)

26.5 x 34 in (67.3 x 86.4 cm) framed

Collection of The Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX

These two drawings by Mimi Smith will be included in the Menil Drawing Institute's forthcoming exhibition, Lines of Resolution: Drawing at the Advent of Television and Video.

Produced during the 1970s and1980s, Mimi Smith’s Television Drawings were created before the advent of 24-hour news channels and encapsulate the artist's desire to relate her work to her life and ours. As a stay-at-home mother of two young children, she would often have the TV on in the background while working. She recalls, “I began to do these drawings because the constant information of the world invading my studio and home was not avoidable. However, I was still involved with the basic theory of relating my work to experiences in a society that are shared by many people.” The drawings function as a journal of her life and times, with important events being recorded directly as they were being reported on TV — their continuity often disrupted by the distractions she faced as a young mother.

Griselda Rosas

El pájaro del queso (The Cheese Bird), 2025

Charcoal on paper

64 x 36 in (162.6 x 91.4 cm)

65.25 x 41.25 in (165.7 x 104.8 cm) framed

Collection of Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA

Griselda Rosas

¿Quién es? ¿Soy yo? (Who is it? Is it me?)

¿Quiénes yo? "Ba dum tss" (Who am I? "Ba dum tss"), 2025

Embroidery, watercolor, and line stitching on paper

51.25 x 50.75 in (130.2 x 128.9 cm)

56.25 x 56 in (142.9 x 142.2 cm) framed

Collection of Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA

Griselda Rosas uses a broad range of media, including charcoal, watercolors, and textiles, to share her experiences of living on the US/Mexico border. By combining elements of classical folklore, Indigenous mythologies, and children's stories with her son Fernando's drawings, she creates “monsters" — stand-ins for conquest, corruption, and cultural appropriation — to examine global conflict and the nuanced challenge of existence on the borderlands, as well as the impact of the Spanish conquest and arrival of Catholicism on Mexico's Indigenous populations. For Rosas, textiles are not just an alternative to pigment or pencil but also a mode of world-building, a way to construct new life forms that embody what it means to live between two cultures, constantly negotiating language and identity.

Evita Tezeno

Big-boned Sally and Little Milton, 2024

Acrylic, mixed media collage and buttons on canvas

60 x 48 in (152.4 x 121.9 cm)

61.5 x 49.5 x 1.5 in (156.2 x 125.7 x 3.8 cm) framed

Collection of Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

"Big-boned Sally and Little Milton" depicts a stylish, radiant woman named Sally and her dapper partner, Milton, embodying joy and community through their vibrant presence and fashion. This collage-painting, employing richly patterned hand-painted papers and heirloom buttons inherited from her grandmother, a seamstress and quiltmaker, is inspired by Tezeno's childhood in South Texas in the 1960s and 70s, as well as the influence of great Black modernists such as Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, and William H. Johnson. Scenes of joy animate Tezeno's vision of a Black America filled with humanity.

Chris Engman

Paper Ill, 2016

Ink on Paper series

Digital pigment print with artist’s frame

42.5 x 42.5 in (108 x 108 cm) framed

Collection of The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Gift of Gage Tucker and Michael LaCorte.

In this work by Chris Engman, the objectness of the material upon which photographic images are printed is brought into focus. We are used to looking through the surface of photographic prints at the illusion of space that they create. In this case, the viewer is doing exactly that, and to a heightened degree, while simultaneously looking at an image of a thing that is doing something very different: the paper within the paper is asserting itself as an object of its own right, whose qualities have relevance, whose existence has implications. An illusion is created and an illusion is shattered. This is an image that does something images do not usually do: it acknowledges, explicitly, that it is an image. 

Ken Gonzales-Day

Into Eternity, Claremont, 2007

Searching for California's Hang Trees series

Archival ink on fiber rag paper

36 x 43 in (91.4 x 109.2 cm)

Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

Collection of Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA

Ken Gonzales-Day's Searching for California Hang Trees is a photographic series and research project that documents the history of racial violence in California by photographing trees associated with over 350 reported lynching sites, primarily from the period 1850–1935. The project aims to recover this erased history, particularly the disproportionate number of lynchings of Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants, rather than just white victims as commonly depicted in traditional "Wild West" narratives. Through landscape photography and meticulous archival research, Gonzales-Day uses the trees as silent witnesses and living memorials to bear belated historical witness and to disrupt the colonial erasure of non-white bodies in the landscape. 

Danica Phelps

Studio Mortgage, 2025

Graphite on paper

55 x 110 in (139.7 x 279.4 cm)

Collection of Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Boston, MA

Danica Phelps' new Mortgage Drawings examine her encounters with real estate investments and personal constraints. Several years ago, when interest rates were more favorable, Phelps broadened her real estate portfolio to enhance her income and improve her financial circumstances. This endeavor led to the acquisition of four properties, which serve as the foundation for large-scale drawings representing each bank mortgage—where each line drawn symbolizes a dollar owed to the bank. These lines emanate from the center of her body and extend as far as she can reach in every direction. The drawings delve into her economic and physical limits, reflecting her financial struggles and the challenges of an aging body, including a rotator cuff injury. They also illustrate the effort to condense as much labor as possible into a compact space, even within large-scale works. The process of drawing thousands of lines daily is deeply meditative. This method also highlights the contrast between the collective and the individual: while the lines blend into an indistinguishable mass within the drawing, they become distinct when viewed individually at their ends. The white spaces in the drawings signify the portion of the mortgages that had been paid off by the completion date of each drawing.

Exhibitions

View of Ken Gonzales-Day: History's "Nevermade" at USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Ken Gonzales-Day

Ken Gonzales-Day: History's "Nevermade"

USC Fisher Museum of Art

Los Angeles, CA

Through March 16, 2026

To Make Us Free: Witnessing Activism at Whitman and Beyond

Maxey Museum, Whitman Collegee

Walla Walla, WA

September 27, 2025 - March 13, 2026

Mimi Smith

Lines of Resolution: Drawing at the Advent of Television and Video

The Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, TX

October 4, 2025 - February 8, 2026

Evita Tezeno

Solace and Sisterhood

The Driskell Center

University of Maryland, College Park

Through December 5, 2025

(Click to see more)

Edra Soto

Memory, Loss

Philadelphia Drawing Center

Philadelphia, PA

Through November 22, 2025

Vaivén: 21st Century Art of Puerto Rico and its Diaspora

Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota

Minneapolis, MN

Through December 6, 2025

View of Griselda Rosas’ exhibit at the 2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social, OCMA.

Griselda Rosas

2025 California Biennial: Desperate, Scared, But Social

Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA

Through January 4, 2026

Click to see more

Phung Huynh

Living Here 

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, East Gallery

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Through December 20, 2025

Laura Krifka

Spatial Affinities

Center for Fine Arts Galleries

Towson University, Towson, MD

October 4, 2025 - January 25, 2026

Tristram Lansdowne

Wicked Wells & Window Wipeouts: Ryan Crowley and Tristram Lansdowne

Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX

October 4, 2025 - January 25, 2026

Francisco Maso

Nuestro Vaivén (Our Sway)

Ringling Museum of Art

Florida State University, Sarasota, FL

October 4, 2025 – March 22, 2026

Ken Gonzales-Day & Francisco Masó

Counter/Surveilance: Control, Privacy, Agency

Wende Museum, Culver City, CA

Through October 19, 2025