UB Anderson Gallery to present tribute to David Anderson

A special exhibition celebrating the life of David K. Anderson and his generous contributions to the arts at UB and in the Western New York community will open in the UB Anderson Gallery Nov. 22.

“A Tribute to David K. Anderson” will run through March 6 in the gallery at One Martha Jackson Place off Englewood Avenue near the South Campus. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 1-5 p.m. on Sunday.

In December 2014, the David Anderson estate was settled and included an endowment to the UB Anderson Gallery, as well as a donation to the university of more than 900 works of art. It also provided donations to 12 other art and educational organizations in Western New York.

The settlement of the estate was the culmination of Anderson's generous gifts to UB, which also included the UB Anderson Gallery with all of its contents, the house adjacent to the gallery on Englewood Avenue, several donations of modern artworks starting in 1986 and the Martha Jackson Gallery Archives, as well as cash donations to support general operations, exhibitions, catalogue publication and educational programs. 

Comprised of selected artworks donated to UB by Anderson, “A Tribute to David K. Anderson” will fill the entire UB Anderson Gallery. In anticipation of this exhibition, conservation work was done on some artworks, allowing them to be on view for the first time in many years. Among them are a group of fragile, mixed-media sculptures and collages shown in “New Forms - New Media,” the groundbreaking and innovative 1960 exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery that was filmed by CBS and broadcast over national television.

A special broadside has been printed for the UB exhibition featuring a 1978 painting, “Interlock,” by Julian Stanczak and a poem written for the occasion by Michael Basinski, curator of the UB Poetry Collection. Stanczak’s first solo exhibition in 1964 in New York City was at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Martha Jackson’s title for the exhibition, “Optical Painting,” was adapted immediately by the press to define the 1960s’ Op Art movement of abstract paintings with optical effects.

The son of the renowned New York gallerist Martha Jackson, Anderson fell in love with abstract art as a high school student, inspired by a Willem de Kooning painting that hung in the living room where he did his homework each evening. While pursuing business studies at UB, Anderson spent summers working in New York City at the Martha Jackson Gallery, where he used his administrative skills to initiate extensive inventory and documentation systems for the gallery.

“I nearly drove my mother crazy,” he once said in an interview. But his detailed recordkeeping — and recognition of the importance of recordkeeping — became the foundation of the Martha Jackson Gallery Archives that provide photographic documentation of more than 120,000 artworks that entered the Martha Jackson and David Anderson galleries, as well as vital provenance information for scholars, curators, dealers, auction houses and collectors worldwide.

A prominent gallerist and collector in his own right, by 1959 Anderson had opened David Anderson Gallery, devoted to works on paper, downstairs from his mother’s gallery. In 1961, Anderson and Jack Mayer opened the Anderson-Mayer Gallery in Paris. Returning to Manhattan six years later, he assisted his mother before taking over her gallery upon her death in 1969.

Anderson soon focused his attention on preserving his mother’s legacy. He and gallery staff organized a traveling exhibition and catalogue, “The Private Collection of Martha Jackson,” that circulated for two years. In 1974, he donated a large and prestigious Martha Jackson Collection of modern art to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The collection includes “Letter Tenement” by Claes Oldenburg (1960), “Ten Formal Fingers” by Jim Dine (1961) and a 1953 “Portrait of Martha Jackson” by Larry Rivers. Eleven years later, he donated an equally prestigious collection of artwork to the National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In 1979, the Martha Jackson Gallery closed and Anderson and his family moved back to Buffalo. With the advent of personal computers, Anderson was convinced he could restore the gallery business outside of New York City.

“When I first saw the abandoned school building that would become my Buffalo gallery, located in the student residential section near UB, I bought it with the intention of sharing it with the university,” he said. 

Converting the building into a state-of-the-art exhibition space, Anderson managed it as a commercial gallery from 1991 before donating it to UB in 2000. Located between the North and South campuses, Anderson’s stated intention was to provide an academic center in the visual arts for the university and the community that focused on preparing future gallery and museum professionals through experiential learning and object-based research, sustaining interest in the arts through educational programs and encouraging collaborations between the university and its national, international and regional communities.