Winter Seasonal Newsletter from the O’Brien Art Foundation
February 2026
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We are delighted to welcome you to our Winter Newsletter and share our latest happenings. This is a special update offering a snapshot of the work we do to acquire new works by the undersung names of American art history. With this letter, we are thrilled to share news of our 2025 acquisitions.
Over the past year, the Foundation added more than 140 works by 91 artists, spanning a wide range of media. From this larger body of work, we are pleased to share our annual list of twelve Acquisition Highlights, offering just a glimpse of the works collected this year. In addition to this list, we celebrate the recently acquired touchstone assemblage from 1979 by pioneering New York-based artist Bonnie Lucas in our Featured Artworks. We are also grateful for generous donations of important works of art this year from Carla Becker, Pamela Hyde Smith, David Martin and Dominic Zambito, Beau Ott, Dale Roberts, The Colescott Family, Chris Walther, and the Theodore Lyman Wright Art Center at Beloit College.
The Foundation’s collaborations continue to extend beyond the collection’s immediate home in Pittsburgh. To this end, we round out this letter with a glimpse at our work with our rigorous colleagues at Chelsea Restoration Associates and Gill & Lagodich in New York, as we honor the original presentation of each object through restoration and period framing, respectively.
Yours,
Marty O’Brien
Founder, Board President & Treasurer
Stuyvesant Van Veen (1910-1988). Detail of Steel Nocturne (Pittsburgh). 1937. Oil on canvas. 32 x 50 1/4 in. O’Brien Art Foundation.
We are honored to share with you our annual 12 selected highlights of the many exciting works that entered our collection this past year. Only a fraction of our new holdings, this grouping aims to provide a snapshot of the breadth and depth of the work we do.
The majority of our 2025 acquisitions date from the 1930s through the 1980s, reinforcing our emphasis on the mid-century period and its many regional expressions. Printmaking continues to be a particularly active area of our collecting, accounting for more than half of all new acquisitions. This concentration reflects the medium’s central role in 20th century American art as a site of technical innovation and collaboration. New paintings and three-dimensional works further expand the material scope of the collection, including practices that question established hierarchies between design and fine art, commercial production and craft.
You can find the complete list of artists represented in our holdings on our website’s Collections page, annotated to indicate new additions in 2025. For inquiries about specific artists or works, please reach out via email to info@obrienartfoundation.org.
Over the course of nearly five decades, Bonnie Lucas (b. 1950) has developed a prolific body of work grounded in a devotion to craft materials and a sharp critique of the gender norms reinforced by consumer culture and art historical hierarchies. From beaded works to quasi-figurative collages and sculptural paintings, her practice treats mass-produced hobby materials—fabric remnants, plastic charms, and found undergarments—as carriers of cultural instruction.
Bonnie Lucas (b. 1950). Untitled (Baby Blanket). 1979. Mixed media. 41 3/4 x 40 in. O’Brien Art Foundation.
Citizen Artist | Delaware Art Museum | April 11–July 19, 2026
We are thrilled to lend multiple works from the collection to the upcoming exhibition,
Citizen Artist, which will be on view at the Delaware Art Museum from April 11–July 19, 2026. This include works by George Biddle, Charles Biederman, Clarence Holbrook Carter, Sydney Glen Fossum, Dale Nichols, and Stuyvesant Van Veen.
From the museum’s description:
Citizen Artist will meet a moment of national reflection with a celebration of artist workers in America. Beginning in 1933, artists painted, photographed, wrote, acted, and taught for New Deal programs including the Public Works of Art Project, the Works Progress Administration, Farm Security Administration, and the Treasury Section on Fine Arts. […] The exhibition brings artworks from the interconnected eras of the New Deal and Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) together, alongside original commissions that document, amplify and imagine new possibilities for artists’ roles today.
This exhibition is supported by Delaware 250. This organization is supported, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
Sydney Glen Fossum (1909-1978). Bureau of Relief. 1937. Oil on canvas. 24 x 36 in. The Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art.
Charles Biederman (1906–2004). String Relief (White and blue). 1936. Mixed media. 52 x 28 x 1 1/2 in. The Marty O’Brien Collection of American Art.
Conservation and Framing
Honoring an artwork’s original presentation is central to the Foundation’s approach to caring for our works. Alongside conservation treatments that support the long-term stability of materials, we prioritize frames that reflect an object’s historical context. We have been traveling to New York for over twenty years to work with Chelsea Restoration Associates and Gill & Lagodich.
The majority of our works are framed in original period frames. Others are shown in meticulously researched reproductions, which require meaningful decisions that help preserve the work itself and the conditions under which it was meant to be seen. For years, we have been making dedicated visits to New York to work closely with two trusted conservators and framers. It takes a team to achieve our mission.
Chelsea Restoration Associates, based in the Bronx, is responsible for our painting conservation. It’s owned and operated by John Powell and Amy Sokoloff, who met at Tyler School of Art, including a formative year at its Rome campus, and went on to apprentice at—and later co-manage—a respected Upper East Side restoration studio for a decade before opening their own business.
Gill & Lagodich, based in Manhattan, has been our primary framer for our paintings and works on paper collections. Co-founded and owned in Tribeca in 1991 by Tracy Gill and Simeon Lagodich, leading experts on historical American Frames, work with us to restore each work’s existing, original frame or provide authentic period frames when necessary. Nearly our entire collection is displayed in authentic period frames.
Amy Sokoloff and John Powell of Chelsea Restoration Associates
Framing of Ruth Miller Kempster’s Marta, c. 1930 with the Gill & Lagodich team (pictured left to right): Yozo Suzuki, Willie Christensen, Tracy Gill, and Simeon Lagodich
The O’Brien Art Project Foundation (DBA O’Brien Art Foundation) is a charitable organization under Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. The Foundation is located in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. We are dedicated to the preservation, understanding, and appreciation of American Art beyond the accepted canon.
