Alumnus Gerald Mead promises artworks, leading to "25 for 25" exhibition at UB Art Galleries

[Originally published at: https://www.buffalo.edu/art-galleries/exhibitions/2024-25/25-for-25.html]

Description

25 for 25: Promised Gifts from the Gerald Mead Collection is an exhibition celebrating collector, educator, and independent curator Gerald C. Mead Jr.’s longstanding relationship with UB Art Galleries and his transformative promised gift of 25 works to mark their 25^th anniversary.

For nearly four decades, Mead has built an encyclopedic collection of works by artists associated with Western New York, carefully assembling over 1,900 pieces that reflect the region’s deep artistic history. This exhibition highlights 25 significant works from Mead’s collection that have been pledged as future gifts to UB Art Galleries, ensuring they will become a lasting resource for students, scholars, and the broader Buffalo community. Featured artists include Laylah Ali, Cory Arcangel, Charles Burchfield, Ellen Carey, Wendell Castle, Allan D’Arcangelo, Nancy Dwyer, Hollis Frampton, Robert Longo, Elizabeth Murray, Cindy Sherman, and Michael Zwack, among others.

Mead’s connection to UB Art Galleries is deeply personal. As an alumnus of UB’s MFA program and a former adjunct professor in the Department of Art, his engagement with the university spans more than 40 years. He has exhibited at UB Art Galleries as both an artist and curator, lent works to major exhibitions, and authored catalog essays for UB-organized shows. This donation builds upon that legacy and reflects Mead’s commitment to making his collection an ongoing resource for the university through future planned gifts.

Celebrating 25 Years of UB Art Galleries

In 2025, the University at Buffalo Art Galleries marks its 25th anniversary—a milestone that invites reflection on the evolution and breadth of our permanent collection. This yearlong celebration honors a foundational moment in 2000, when David K. Anderson made a transformative gift to the university: the Anderson Gallery building, a significant collection of modern and contemporary art, and the Martha Jackson Gallery Archives. This pivotal donation, together with the merging of the Center for the Arts Gallery, laid the groundwork for what is now UB Art Galleries.

Since then, the UB Art Galleries Collection has grown into a dynamic resource encompassing post–World War II American art, expansive holdings in modern and contemporary prints, drawings, and photographs, and selected ethnographic works. These collections and archives serve as active sites of research and inquiry, regularly engaged by students, faculty, and scholars, and are featured in exhibitions around the world.

Throughout 2025, UB Art Galleries will spotlight the richness of its holdings through a variety of formats—exhibitions, publications, digital features, and public programs—offering new opportunities to explore the depth and resonance of our collections. This anniversary year underscores our commitment to advancing art as both inquiry and creative practice, and to supporting ideas that are urgent and relevant to our time and place.

While I am an alumnus of the UB Art Department (MFA '08) and taught in the department from 2006-2010, my relationship with the UB Art Galleries spans four decades and will continue well into the future with my promised bequest gift of 25 works from collection on the occasion of the UB Art Galleries 25th anniversary in 2025.   

It has been my pleasure to have been associated with the UB Art Galleries as an exhibiting artist in numerous group exhibitions (the first of which was in 1996) and two solo exhibitions (1997 and 2008). I have also served a guest curator on two occasions. As a collector, I have lent work from my collection to major retrospective exhibitions of the work of Bruce Adams, Walter Prochownik, Charles Clough, Elizabeth Murray and Christy Rupp over the years, and most of those works were reproduced in the accompanying exhibition catalogs. In 2012, I was honored to share works by the most significant artists in my collection in the exhibition Fifty @ Fifty: Select Artists from the Gerald Mead Collection, organized on the occasion of my 50^th birthday. I have also written catalog essays for publications accompanying exhibitions at both the UB Art Gallery (Alberto Rey in 2010) and the UB Anderson gallery (Hyeyoung Shin in 2013).

Gerald Mead