A Love Letter to the CAT’s Collection 

February 1, 2025

In celebration of Valentine’s Day, this month the staff of the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum are sharing what work in the Museum’s collection they love the most. With a collection of over 4,000 works, it was a challenge pick just one! See below what they selected.

Laura Steefel-Moore, Director of Education and Community Engagement:

I’m loving Ronald Merchant’s Red Light, Red Wing. It’s a really pleasant slice of life depicting a warm Minnesota day. The figures in it look unassuming and relatable, so I like imagining myself standing near them, soaking up the bright sunlight.

Linnea Seidling, Assistant Curator of Glass:

What I love the most changes all the time, but right now I love Whole Elk Tower by Richard Marquis. I just selected it to display in the library, so I hope visitors will enjoy this fantastic, barely melted together tower of transparent murrine as much as I do.

Ashley Walker, Director of Collections:

I’m so lucky in my job because I get to examine every object in our collections, top-to-bottom, and spend time really taking a hard look at them. That said, it’s hard to choose! My favorites are changing all of the time, and we have so many wonderful, varied, and cheeky objects. I’d say my favorite collections right now are our Swedish glass, especially Ulrica Hydman-Vallien’s work, and the gorgeous pietra dura tables!

Elia Bettaglio, Preparator:

My current favorite work in the CAT’s collection is Corner of Lake and Minnehaha (smoke) by Julie Mehretu. In this work, Mehretu is cropping, enlarging, and distorting photographic references of this intersection during the protest response to murders committed by the police department. I’m enthralled by work that can be accessed through formalistic abstraction but has powerful content beneath the surface if you choose to dig a little.

Ben Albaugh, Facility Manager:

There are so many items that are worthy of being “Favorite Work in the Collection”.  If I had to choose one, I guess it would be Horizon by the artists Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová. I had the privilege of being able to view it for some months and it amazed me how much it would change through-out the day and through the days, as the light from the angle of the sun changed, how it would be different on cloudy days, how the light whether it was natural or artificial effected the impression I felt.  I think that it has a story to tell.

Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art:

Since arriving a little over a month ago, I keep returning to a drawing by Armenian-American artist Arshile Gorky, arguably one of the world’s most important figures in modern art. I can’t help but feel as if I am actually in the mind of Gorky himself, transported to a different time and place where the artist works through figuration and the margins of Surrealism into a vast new world of art making. Gorky’s first layer is a sketch of a man in profile, with soft dark eyes and strong eyebrows. At the same plane of this profile but lower on the paper is a lighter sketched image, one of an open-mouthed jagged tooth monster. Balancing this tension between these soft and jagged lines, Gorky adds layers of his confident, swooping biomorphic forms. In so doing, he moves us one step closer to the development of the gestural movement of Abstract Expressionism. I feel like I’m just sitting here with popcorn in the backseat of a car, watching history go by, and happily here along for the ride.