The Marieluise Hessel Collection

The foundation of the Center's permanent collection is the Marieluise Hessel Collection of 1,780 paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper, artists' books, videos, and video installations from the mid-1960s to the present. The collection is international in scope, with works by more than 900 artists including Carl Andre, Janine Antoni, Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, Anne Chu, Francesco Clemente, William Copley, Dan Flavin, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Yayoi Kusama, Robert Kushner, Robert Mapplethorpe, Paul McCarthy, Gabriel Orozco, Raymond Pettibon, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Doris Salcedo, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, and Christopher Wool, as well as major works from movements such as Arte Povera, Pattern and Decoration (P&D), Minimalism, and Transavantguardia. Works are continually acquired for the collection. Recent additions include works by Robert Gober, Thomas Hirschhorn, Roni Horn, Rosemarie Trockel, and Franz West, as well as two major new commissions for the Hessel Museum—a walkway designed by Lawrence Weiner that incorporates his signature text works, and a large-scale installation by Korean-born artist Do-Ho Suh with thousands of diminutive figures buried below the glass floor of the Hessel Museum's entrance gallery.

Do-Ho Suh Floor, 1997-2005 PVC figures, glass plates, phenolic sheets, and polyurethane resin. 157 1/2 x 157 1/2 inches. Site specific installation in the CCS Bard Hessel Museum

The permanent collection also has works that have been given to the Center by Eileen and Michael Cohen, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Asher Edelman, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Robert Gober, Joan and Gerald Kimmelman, Eileen Harris Norton and Peter Norton, Toni and Martin Sosnoff, Thea Westreich, and Ethan Wagner. Many of the gifts are works from the 1990s by young and mid-career artists.

The collection also provides the basis for faculty research and teaching. CCS faculty members Rhea Anastas and Michael Brenson recently edited Witness to Her Art, a major anthology of writings on important exhibitions by Jenny Holzer, Nan Goldin, Rosemarie Trockel, Cady Noland, and other women artists whose works are well represented in the collection. Witness to Her Art will be launched at the inauguration in November.