Displaying items by tag: Acquisitions

Whether it achieved its goal of preserving the legacy of the Corcoran Gallery is debatable, but the landmark agreement that broke apart Washington’s oldest private museum has been an absolute bonanza for the National Gallery of Art.

After its board of trustees approves the next round of acquisitions on Oct. 1, the National Gallery of Art will have accessioned about 40 percent of the Corcoran’s collection, including priceless pieces by Edgar Degas, Frederic Edwin Church, John Singer Sargent and Carrie Mae Weems.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announces the promotion of Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher to the Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design and head of the Department of Architecture and Design. In her new role, Dunlop Fletcher will set the overall vision for the department, overseeing acquisitions, exhibitions and publications. She previously served the museum as assistant curator from 2008 to 2013, and as associate curator since 2013.

“We are grateful to Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher for her tremendous contributions to the museum,” said Neal Benezra, SFMOMA director. “I am certain she will continue to expand the Department of Architecture and Design when the new SFMOMA opens in spring 2016, with her breadth of knowledge, curatorial expertise and deep connections to our community of innovative designers.”

It’s a tidy fantasy that artists birth masterworks in a single assured gesture. It’s equally illusory to think that there are fixed ways for a museum to present an artist’s output. Three thematically related fall exhibitions at the Cantor Art Center explore the various spheres of influence and process in order to illuminate the complexities of making and appreciating art. “Edward Hopper: New York Corner,” “Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed,” and “Artists at Work” are autonomous shows that together open up inspiring new angles from which to view familiar artists.

The Nasher Sculpture Center announced yesterday that, following a gift of $750,000 from the Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation, the museum will form an acquisitions fund for work by women artists.

“It is the Nasher Sculpture Center’s great fortune to be granted this generous acquisitions gift, and we could not be more grateful to Ms. Doolin or excited about the possibilities this gift affords,” museum director Jeremy Strick said in a statement.

A rare early portrait by Mary Cassatt (1844–1926), a self-portrait by Jan Miense Molenaer (1610–1668), a groundbreaking work by Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), and a remarkable photograph of Alice and Lorina Liddell by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, are among works recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Three rare illustrated books and a portfolio, all highlighting aspects of the New World, were donated by Harry W. Havemeyer in memory of his father, Horace Havemeyer. Harry W. Havemeyer also pledged an extraordinary collection of 117 early American views and historical prints assembled by him and his father, in whose memory the pledge was made.

Nine photographs by Paul Strand (1890-1976), one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, have been acquired by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where they have gone on public display until September 20. Taken from Strand’s series of Hebridean photographs from South Uist in 1954, the works are the first examples of his Scottish work to enter into a public collection in Scotland.

This major acquisition, supported by the Art Fund, is composed of nine vintage black and white portraits of Scottish lives and landscapes in South Uist, an island in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.

Coinciding with the release of a quasi-confession from Bill Cosby, whose art collection is on view until early 2016 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African art, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden announced Tuesday the acquisition of new works by a dozen artists and artist groups from Iran, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the U.K., and the United States.

As a child, Hamish Parker had to be dragged round the British Museum by his father. Now, decades later, he can’t keep away, making regular visits and extraordinary financial gifts to enable the acquisition of important treasures.

Parker is a British fund manager who has become one of the museum’s most generous benefactors. He is also one of its most private and low-key supporters.

Eli and Edythe Broad have been regular visitors to Art Basel along with the founding director of the Broad, Joanne Heyler. But this year the collectors are giving the fair a miss: opening the Broad on September 20, a $140m, 120,000 sq. ft museum on Los Angeles’s Grand Avenue, has had to take priority.

Heyler is busy overseeing the installation of the inaugural hang in the Diller Scofidio + Renfro-designed space, which will feature works from the Broad’s own collection and that of the Broad Art Foundation, which they established in 1984.