Displaying items by tag: Acquisitions

In the year 2015, the Walker Art Center will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its founding as a public art center with a series of WALKER@75 exhibitions and programs beginning with "Art at the Center: 75 Years of Walker Collections." The exhibition launched October 16, 2014 with an opening-night party and weekend-long Walktoberfest celebration. Curated by the Walker’s executive director Olga Viso and guest curator Joan Rothfuss, the exhibition looks at 75 years of collecting at the Walker—a history distinguished by bold and often prescient acquisitions that challenge prevailing artistic conventions and examine the social and political conditions of the day. Many of the works collected breach the boundaries of media and disciplines and reflect the Walker’s multidisciplinary programming, which includes film and video, design, visual art and performing arts. Art at the Center also traces how the collection was shaped by the respective visions and collecting philosophies of its five directors as well as the generosity of the Walker family and key patrons.

Tate has acquired 100 works as an addition to their collection thanks to The Outset /Frieze Art Fair Fund to benefit the Tate Collection. The selection panel includes Agustín Pérez Rubio (Artistic Director, MALBA, Buenos Aires) and Laurence Rassel (Director, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona) and also Frances Morris (Head of Collections, International Art, Tate), Ann Gallagher (Head of Collections, British Art, Tate), Tanya Barson (Curator, International Art, Tate) and Clarrie Wallis (Curator, Contemporary British Art, Tate). The fund is organized and financed by Outset and in 2014 enjoys continued support from Leviev Extraordinary Diamonds. The annual fund at Frieze London, allows Tate to acquire important works of art at the fair for the national collection. This year the Fund is set at £150,000.

Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate said of the fund: “For more than a decade, the Outset Contemporary Art Fund has played a major role in helping Tate to build the national collection of contemporary art for the benefit of audiences across the country and in London. We are immensely grateful to Outset for this support."

Last month, Colby College Museum of Art put on a view a 1968 painting by Joan Mitchell that museum director Sharon Corwin believes is the best example of abstract expressionism in Maine. Next month, the Portland Museum of Art will unveil an 8-foot-tall steel “Seven” sculpture by Robert Indiana, once rejected by the Prince of Monaco, in the pedestrian plaza out front.

The two works share few similarities, but they represent the latest high-profile acquisitions by two leading museums in Maine and highlight the challenges facing curators and museum directors as they shape collections across the state.

In both instances, the museums acquired the art because benefactors took personal interest in bringing it to Maine.

A total of 23 libraries and museums across the UK will be able to add to their core collections with a £5m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

The financial boost will enable the institutions to "go shopping" for new artifacts over a five-year period.

Among the projects to benefit from the cash is one to develop a collection on Polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.

The Louvre kicked off its latest crowd-funding campaign on Tuesday with an appeal for a million euros to help fund the €12.5 million purchase of a jeweled piece of 18th-century furniture, known as the “Table of Peace,” which belonged to a French diplomat who negotiated the end of a Bavarian war.

After two years of budget cuts in state aid for cultural institutions, the Louvre is the second major French museum to turn to Internet fund-raising this month to pay for projects and acquisitions. For the first time, the Musée d’Orsay last week called for €30,000, or about $37,600, in contributions to help finance the €600,000 restoration of Gustave Courbet’s enormous painting of his studio, “L’Atelier du peintre.” By Tuesday, it had collected more than €20,000.

I am standing in a private dining room on the seventh floor of the London offices of UBS, the global financial services firm. A table is set for lunch, with a menu promising bresaola with caponata followed by roast lemon sole. Before the powerful guests arrive, though, I am whisked away. As I go, my eye is drawn to some art hanging on the wall: a pair of rare, large watercolors by the contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. These are just two of the 32,000 objects that make up the UBS Art Collection, which includes paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, video works and sculptures from the last 50 years.

Corporate art collections are hardly a new phenomenon. In the late 1950s, the American plutocrat David Rockefeller decided that Chase Manhattan Bank should start acquiring art.

Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado may be missing a boat load of art, but it’s also found quite the pile of cash. According to a report in Germany’s FAZ, the institution has discovered a previously unknown Swiss bank account containing over €1 million, which is part of a fortune bequeathed to it in 1991.

The account belonged to Manuel Villaescusa Ferrero, a lawyer and real estate mogul who bequeathed the entirety of his €42 million ($56 million) fortune to the Prado to be used for new acquisitions. The substantial gift has already been used to purchase works by El Greco, Georges de La Tour, Sánchez Cotán, Juan van der Hamen y Léon and Goya.

As “Birth of a Museum”, the preview show of the Louvre Abu Dhabi's collections, ends today, 28 July, at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Manuel Rabaté, the chief executive of Agence France-Muséums, which manages relations between the planned satellite in the Gulf and its French partner institutions, has told Le Figaro that 300 loans from 13 French museum partners – including the Musée du Louvre, Musée d'Orsay and Centre Pompidou will be announced “by the end of this year”. He also revealed the terms of the loan agreement.

Rabaté, who is based in Abu Dhabi, said the loans will be rotated over a ten-year period, with each work remaining in the Gulf for around a year at a time, and displayed alongside the “500 acquisitions making up the permanent collection.”

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has named Martino Stierli its new Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Stierli, who currently teaches the history of  modern architecture at the University of Zurich, will begin at MoMA in March 2015. His duties will include overseeing the Department of Architecture and Design’s special exhibitions, installations from the collection, and acquisitions. Stierli succeeds Barry Bergdoll, who stepped down in 2013. Now a professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, Bergdoll continues to be a part-time curator at MoMA. 

Stierli’s scholarly research has focused on a range of topics, including architecture and media, the photographic and cinematic portrayal of architecture, the intersection of art and architecture, the transatlantic exchange in postwar and postmodern architecture, and the role of travel in architectural education.

Good fortune or just plain chance sometimes dictates the collecting directions of art museums. That is certainly the case with the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which received a bequest of 96 Neo-Impressionist works in 1979 from W.J. Holliday, a local publisher and art collector. Combined with a significant landscape it owned previously by Georges Seurat and seven targeted acquisitions since, the 131-year-old institution lays claim to being the most important repository in the U.S. of works in the eye-grabbing pointillist style.

Capitalizing on that signature strength, the museum has organized "Face to Face," which it bills as the first-ever look at Neo-Impressionist portraiture, a subject that has received less attention than the landscapes, seascapes and urban scenes more typically associated with the style. The two-venue exhibition was seen earlier this year at the ING Cultural Centre in Brussels.