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AUDIO 10: Frank McEwen Shona Stone Sculpture Collection  The Frank McEwen Collection of Shona Sculpture This exemplary collection of over 90 Shona stone sculptures from Zimbabwe, Africa, belonged to Frank McEwen, the first director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. A visionary and mentor, McEwen encouraged and internationally promoted the now famous Shona art movement. The mostly deceased artists represented in this collection were the founding fathers of Shona movement and forever changed art history. Their unique semi-abstract organic style of stone sculpture led Newsweek in 1987 to report that ‘Shona sculpture is perhaps the most important new art form to emerge from Africa this century.’ Upon Frank McEwen’s death, these sculptures passed from the Museum of Modern Art where they had been stored following a 1968 traveling exhibition organized by the museum to McEwen’s son, Frank McEwen Aldridge. Atlanta real estate developer John Hardy Jones subsequently purchased the works and gifted them to the Morgan County African American Museum. John Donaldson of Atlanta later aquired the works and in 2007, he gifted the collection to the Madison Museum of Fine Art. The sculptures in this Shona collection hold artistic and historic importance for collectors, art historians, and museums around the world. The founding fathers on the Shona movement represented in this collection participated in groundbreaking exhibitions and won critical international acclaim during their lifetimes. As with other definitive art movements like Cubism, Impressionism, and Pointillism, the founders of the Shona movement forever changed art history. Although subsequent sculptors may create works in the Shona tradition, as with every other art movement, historians and museum curators deem the founding innovators to hold the most significance. Shona sculptures by many of the artists represented in this collection are held in the permanent collections of museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rodin Museum in Paris, the Museum of Mankind in London, the London Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, and the Kresge Museum in Lansing, Michigan. Previous • Back to List • Next |