Phoenix Art Museum Receives $5m Gift to Expand Sri Lankan and South Asian Art Galleries

Key facts

• The Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona received a $5m gift from philanthropist Sukumar Nagendran.
• The gift will expand the museum's Asian art galleries from around 6,000 sq. ft to 10,000 sq. ft.
• A new 2,000-sq.-ft Nagendran Gallery for the Art of Sri Lanka and South Asia will be created.
• More than 4,000 works in the museum's over 21,000-piece collection come from artists who live, work in or are from Asia.
• Nagendran is an Arizona-based philanthropist, physician and biotechnology executive, president and head of research and development at Taysh Gene Therapies.
• Nagendran was introduced to the museum a decade ago by philanthropists Coleene and Barry Fernando.
• The Fernandos donated more than 130 works and a collection of related photographs, and provided significant loans.
• In November, the museum will inaugurate the Nagendran Gallery with the exhibition Pala Pothupitiye: Mapping a Sri Lankan Consciousness, curated by Tushara Bindu Gude.
• The exhibition will pair Pothupitiye's work with historical Sri Lankan art, including illustrated palm-leaf manuscripts, Buddhist sculptures and mid-20th-century photographs by Quintus Fernando.