Fine Collection looks back in history at Carnegie Museum of Art

Browse through the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Galleries and you will see an eclectic collection of contemporary art: a chaotic sculpture of a man bound in yellow ratchet straps, fluorescent lights in the shape of a lightning bolt graduating odd shades, a model roller coaster with rays reminiscent of a sunset behind it neatly captured in a windowed wooden box.

Eric Crosby, the exhibition’s curator and Henry J. Heinz II director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, says the works are not individual, but one family’s curatorial lineage.

This special exhibit is The Milton and Sheila Fine Collection. Milton — a local art and Jewish culture magnate — died in 2019, but his name is not foreign to the Museum of Art’s hallways.

“[In 1992] Milton became the board chair of the museum and forged a really important relationship with the leadership of the museum at a time when the Carnegie International was becoming more prominent in its programming,” Crosby says.

In 2007, Fine and his now-widow Sheila founded The Fine Foundation, which invests in arts, medicine and Jewish life projects in the region, but Fine got his start in the arts when he became a trustee for the Carnegie International in 1983. 

Around the same time, he began collecting art with direct input from the museum, specifically through Jack Lane and John Caldwell — who were respectively director and curator at the time.

The result, Crosby says, is a collection that reflects the Carnegie International and Museum of Art’s interests over time.

“Milton and Sheila developed the collection with the expressed intention of ultimately donating it to the museum, so it was really important for them to be collecting alongside museum staff in the sense that they didn’t want to be duplicative of the museum’s collection,” Crosby says. “They wanted to help bolster its strength and fill in historical gaps.”

The collection was transferred to the museum when Fine died nearly five years ago. The current exhibition opened on Nov. 18, 2023, and will close on March 17 — 10 days ahead of the fifth anniversary of Fine’s death.

Once it closes, the exhibition will join the museum’s collection of some 34,000 works. Crosby anticipates a few pieces he considers to be “masterworks” will join the permanent collection.

One is a 2007 Mark Bradford painting titled “Noah’s Third Day.” Crosby says while Bradford’s work was featured in the 2008 Carnegie International, the museum did not collect it at the time.

“The painting was inspired by — or rather, a response to — the destruction of the Katrina disaster,” Crosby says. “At the time, he was working in New Orleans with arts organizations and local communities, so it’s very intimately tied to and responding to the real disaster that was unfolding.”

Posters and other printed imagery from the city were collaged together forming a constructed canvas for Bradford’s abstract painting.

Other masterworks in the Fine collection are notable for the legal precedents of appropriation and copyright infringement they brought about, and also simply for artistic prowess.

“As the collection matriculated into the museum, we really began to see the remarkable impact it has in terms of telling a broader history of contemporary art from the 1980s forward,” Crosby says. “That’s really the genesis of the collection, and our exhibition and publication are celebrating the extraordinary generosity and sharing with the public what [the Fines] have accomplished.”

The Milton and Sheila Fine Collection is open in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Galleries until March 17. Tickets — which include admission to both the special exhibition and the permanent collection — are available on the museum’s website.