Chase Langford Painting Acquired by the Palm Springs Art Museum
Whitewater Wash, oil on canvas, 72 x 84 inches.
The Palm Springs Art Museum Board of Trustees, upon the recommendation of the Collections Committee, Curator Sharrissa Iqbal, and Executive Director Adam Lerner, have approved the acquisition of the painting, Whitewater Wash, by Chase Langford for its permanent collection.
Chase Langford employs artistic abstraction as a means of engaging with aspects of natural and urban environments. His compositions take shape from a lifelong interest in maps and his experience studying cartography at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1980s. After working as a staff cartographer in the UCLA Geography Department, Langford began incorporating techniques from map-making into his fine art practice.
Owing to the interdisciplinary underpinnings of his practice, Langford identifies as a “Geographic Expressionist.” Whitewater Wash, 2023 exemplifies the artist’s interpretation of a geographic subject through visual abstraction. The work is characteristic of Langford’s “Morphic” series of paintings, which is a predominant focus of his practice. In Whitewater Wash, rows of horizontal forms in distinct tones and painted textures are suggestive of both geological strata and topographic maps.
Langford’s work is in the collections of the Long Beach Museum of Art, the USC Keck School of Medicine, Four Seasons (Hong Kong), John Hopkins Hospital, MGM Cotai (Macao), U.S. State Department, and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation among others.
– Sharrissa Iqbal, Curator, Palm Springs Art Museum
Museum purchase funds provided by Dr. Robert Maietta and Robert Julian Stone. Whitewater Wash is currently on view at the Museum.