Dallas Museum of Art Acquires Four Works by Professor Sugawara-Beda
Four artworks by Professor Nishiki Sugawara-Beda were acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art at the Dallas Art Fair and will be added to the museum’s permanent collection.

Art professor Nishiki Sugawara-Beda will have their work added to the permanent collection at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). The artworks, titled KuroKuroShiro – The Four Seasons, were acquired by the museum at the Dallas Art Fair earlier this month and were hand selected by the DMA’s Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck and Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art Dr. Vivian Li. The selections made by Dr. Brodbeck and Dr. Li were funded by the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program, an annual gift from the Dallas Art Fair Foundation that places works from the fair into the DMA’s collection.
“I am very honored and grateful to be a part of the permanent collection at such an institution like the DMA,” says Sugawara-Beda. “There are many great artists and artworks in this world, and I am very lucky to be included among some of them at the DMA.”
Sugawara-Beda’s KuroKuroShiro — The Four Seasons incorporates a variety of materials and techniques into the pieces. Through the combination of rich fabrics, abstracted painted landscapes, and even hand-written fortunes, each of the four pieces represents a season of the year: spring, summer, fall and winter.
She worked with Japanese merchants in Nara, Japan to select fabrics suitable to pair with her abstracted landscape paintings and while layering the meanings of these patterns with her landscapes, she began to see the four seasons emerge. Her spring and summer landscapes paired perfectly with a peony and arabesque pattern and the fall and winter landscapes with a Shokkou pattern. To add another personal touch to the pieces, she wrote out four positive fortunes on red fortune paper and, after shuffling them, rolled the fortunes up into