For four decades, MCASD’s Director’s Circle has helped shape the Museum’s permanent collection through their contributions toward the purchase of art. Prospect is an annual exhibition that highlights artworks being considered for acquisition, which are displayed in dialogue with pieces already in the Museum’s holdings. As a title and an idea, Prospect evokes both searching and potential, suggesting how MCASD’s collection might deepen and expand.
For its 40th anniversary, Prospect 2025 features five sculptural artworks that are characterized by a state we might describe not as “either/or,” but as “both/and.” Whether wall-bound or seen in the round, these hybrid objects commingle categories and genres that are usually seen as separate, including art, fashion, craft, design, and technology, among others. Prospect 2025 features artwork by Hugh Hayden (b. 1983), Daniela Gomez Paz (b. 1992), Ryan Preciado (b. 1989), Sarah Rosalena (b. 1982), and Bárbara Sánchez-Kane (b.1987). These artists reveal new directions in current art practice, even as they take cues from found-object artworks created almost a century ago. The influence of Surrealist Merit Oppenheim (Switzerland, 1913–1985)—who famously covered a teacup and saucer in antelope fur (Object, 1936)—looms especially large here. Taken together, the artists featured in Prospect 2025 revel in both the ordinary and the strange, conversing with both the present and the past—to imagine new possibilities for the future.