Gift of A Lifetime: the James Pearson Duffy Collection September 14, 2011

For forty years, James Pearson Duffy was an avid collector who had an uninhibited approach to looking at and acquiring art, collecting what he was drawn to and using intuition to guide his choices. This exhibition explores his generous bequest to the DIA, which includes sculpture, paintings, prints, and drawings. Duffy's interests were wide ranging, and his gift includes objects as diverse as contemporary photography, mixed-media work by Cass Corridor artists, and Chinese sculpture. Works on view include those by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Georges Braque, Philip Guston, Gordon Newton, and Jane Hammond, among others. Duffy collected art locally and in New York for his Grosse Pointe apartment, and he commissioned site-specific works for the Jefferson Avenue warehouse of his family business, an industrial pipe and pipe-fitting company. In certain ways, the New York and Detroit artists had many commonalities, including a shared love of untraditional materials and an emphasis on the process of making art that celebrated the touch of the creator's hand.