Denver Art Museum Reveals 2025 Acquisitions

Mori Tetsuzan (1775-1841) was born in Osaka and adopted by his uncle Mori Sosen, a famed painter of animals, to continue Sosen’s artistic lineage. Likely at his uncle’s urging, Mori later studied with Maruyama Ōkyo, founder of the naturalistic school that bears his name; appointed as an official painter for the Kumamoto domain, Mori Tetsuzan brought the Maruyama style to the Kanto region. Mori is best known for combining realism with decorativeness, as in this set of four sliding doors with a rendering of two tigers on one side and a painting of birds on the other.  

Though she was a prodigious talent, the artistic achievements of sculptor Camille Claudel’s artistic achievements were long obscured by her tragic life story: her relationship with Auguste Rodin, her teacher and lover, and her confinement in a mental hospital during the last decades of her life. Conceived after her breakup with Rodin and representing her determination to distinguish her work from his, this intimate sculpture was one of Claudel’s few commercially successful pieces. It was ultimately editioned in 65 different versions, including some, like this one, that doubled as electric lamps.

The subject of a 2025 survey at the Denver Art Museum, Tokio Ueyama (1889–1954) moved to the United States at age 19 and studied fine art in San Francisco, Southern California, and Philadelphia. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was incarcerated with his wife Suye at the Granada Relocation Center (known as Camp Amache to its internees), a concentration camp for Japanese Americans in Colorado. Until their release in 1945, Ueyama taught adult art classes to 150 students and continued to make oil paintings, including this sensitive portrait of a woman.

After encountering European geometric abstraction, Venezuelan-born painter and sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005) moved to Paris in 1950, living and working there until his death. In France, he became a leading practitioner of Kinetic art—art that moves or appears to move—inviting viewers to enter his sculptural works and walk around inside them. Closely related to his kinetic artworks, Soto’s paintings likewise depend on the viewer’s participation for their effects; this one, for example, appears to pulse and vibrate as one looks at it.

In this wall piece, Guatemalan-born, Los Angeles-based artist Jackie Amézquita addresses the long destructive effects of banana plantations on the people and ecology of Central America. To make the work, Amézquita laid bananas on strips of copper, covering the fruit with plastic domes. The decaying bananas corroded the metal, leaving their imprints on its surface, while fruit flies traveled between the domes through plastic straws.

Since the 1990s, when he started using emerging software like Photoshop in silk-screened works, American artist Tishan Hsu has imagined how digital technologies might transform our visual world, our consciousness, and even our bodies. Since then, rapid advances in computer imaging and 3-D printing have afforded the artist the tools he needed to produce hybrid pieces like this one, which combines silicone protuberances and an enveloping digital “skin.”

Of Sicangu Lakota, German, and Welsh ancestry, Dyani White Hawk is known for beaded sculptures and paintings that highlight the role Native American art has played in the history of abstraction, a history that until recently was discussed as the province of white artists. Her use of beadwork puts particular emphasis Native women, whose artistry has often been downplayed in the Western canon. Her ten-foot-high columnar sculpture Visiting, composed of strips of beadwork, pays tribute to the vertical sculptures of George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, 1919–2000) and Jim Denomie (Ojibwe, Lac Courte Oreilles Band, 1955–2022).