$5,000 toward the acquisition of the 1926 painting Holiday with Wife to Be for the museum’s permanent collection, overseen by museum curator Martha R. Severens. Dickinson was an academic realist and portraitist who taught at the Art Students League and spent a portion of his early career in the South. He made paintings that reflected his experiences in Alabama and explored issues connected with race relations, education, and the transformation of an agrarian based economy.

$25,000 toward Edwin Dickinson: Dreams and Realities, a traveling retrospective exhibition with accompanying monograph, organized by gallery curator Douglas Dreishpoon, with essays by Dreishpoon, Francis O’Connor, and Mary Abell, as well as appreciations by John Ashbery, Elaine de Kooning, Norman Geske, and Michael Mazur. Considered by many to be a “painter’s painter,” Dickinson worked in both eastern Cape Cod and New York City. His personal exploration of historical conventions such as landscape, portraiture and still life produced work that was both enigmatic and veered towards abstraction.