Displaying items by tag: gift

When Ralph Esmerian, owner of the jewelry company Fred Leighton, filed for bankruptcy and was sentenced to six years in jail for fraud in 2011, the American Folk Art Museum felt the repercussions. Esmerian, a prominent donor and former chairman of the institution, had promised the museum 263 works from his illustrious collection. Since Esmerian’s downfall, the museum has been working with a trustee of the case to reach an agreement, which was recently realized.

The settlement between the Folk Art Museum and Esmerian states that the institution is entitled to 53 of the artworks he promised to donate. While the chosen pieces are yet to be specified to the public, they were selected for their exceptional quality and include portraits, needleworks, fraktur, sculpture, pottery, and scrimshaw. The retained works will enhance the museum’s collection and aid its educational mission.

The Folk Art Museum will be forced to part with the other 210 promised works, which will most likely be sold at auction in an effort to settle other bankruptcy estate claims.

The Vancouver Art Gallery received a generous donation of photographs including American photographer Robert Frank’s (b. 1924) historic work, Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey (1955) from his landmark series, The Americans. Other new acquisitions include photographs by Greg Girard (b. 1955), Rodney Graham (b. 1949), Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), and over 100 works by Canadian artist Charles Gagnon (1934-2003).

Gagnon, a prominent figure in Quebec’s art world, was a student of the work of Frank. The gift of 111 of his photographs was made possible by Gagnon’s estate. The works join an already substantial collection of the artist’s work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which includes paintings and works on paper.

Andrew Gruft and Claudia Beck, art patrons who have made a number of generous donations to the Gallery over the years, are responsible for many of the most recent acquisitions including the Frank addition. Gruft and Beck were pivotal in the formation of the Gallery’s collection and helped make the museum one of the most notable institution’s for historical and modern photography.

Thanks to a generous gift from longtime museum donors, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art added 37 new pieces, including vessel forms and sculpture, to their permanent glass collection. The acquisition includes works by notable glass artists such as Michael Glancy (b. 1950), Klaus Moje (b. 1936), Ann Warff Wolff (b. 1937), and Richard Marquis (b. 1945).

LACMA’s glass art collection, which focuses on studio glass from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s, contains more than 100 objects, most of which came from Greenberg and Steinhauser who started donating to the institution in 1984. The museum’s relationship with the couple is so strong that earlier this year Greenberg and Steinhauser invited LACMA officials to handpick works from their personal collection for the museum. Besides their substantial glass gift, Greenberg and Steinhauser made a monetary donation to LACMA to go towards educational programs about glass.

Greenberg and Steinhauser’s collection boasts 400 to 500 works and is considered among the top five studio glass collections in the United States. The couple began avidly collecting in the mid-1970s and slowed down around the mid-1990s when sculpture and nontraditional forms became more prominent than the vessel art they adored. The duo has since taken to collecting contemporary photography.

In celebration of the studio glass movement’s 50^th anniversary, Greenberg and Steinhauser decided to disperse most of their collection to a number of institutions across the country. The couple will keep 15 to 20 sentimental pieces for themselves and the rest of their works will go to LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the Corning Museum of Glass. Greenberg also hopes to donate works to the Smithsonian, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, the Mint Museum, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the Racine Art Museum, although arrangements with those institutions still need to be made.

Major Surrealist art collectors, Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch, are hoping to donate their impressive holdings to the city of Berlin. The only problem is there doesn’t seem to be room in any of the museums for the works. Worth nearly $200 million, the Pietzsch’s collection includes pieces by Salvador Dali (1904-1989), Max Ernst, (1891-1976) Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), and Joan Miro (1893-1983). The result of over fifty years of fervent collecting, the Pietzsch’s collection is currently hanging on the walls of their home in a suburb of Berlin.

The Pietzsches lent their collection to Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for an exhibition in 2009. The show drew almost 200,000 visitors and proved that their holdings would be an asset to the city’s art offerings. Upon seeing the public’s high level of interest in their collection, the Pietzsches decided to donate the works to Berlin after their deaths; their only stipulation is that the works be kept on permanent display.

Earlier this year, officials suggested moving the Berlin’s Old Master paintings to make room for 20^th century works but an online petition and spate of angry newspaper columns ensued. Authorities are currently working on plans to accommodate the gift.

One option currently being explored is the construction of an entirely new museum to house the Old Masters collection. If the city decides to do so, the Gemaeldegalerie at Potsdamer Platz would be freed up for 20^th century art, including the Pietzsch’s collection. Currently, the only space in Berlin for 20^th century art is at the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie. However, the space is too small to display all of Berlin’s holdings, much less the Pietzsch’s expansive collection.

Officials aim to release alternative plans to accommodate the Pietzsch gift during the first half of 2013.

Longtime supporters of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Sam and Helen Zell, donated $10 million to the institution on behalf of the Zell Family Foundation. It is the second substantial gift the museum has received in less than seven months.

Business and publishing magnate, Sam Zell, and his wife, Helen, hope to create “The Zell Fund for Artistic Excellence” through their sizable gift. Helen served as the chair of the museum’s board from 2004-2008 and has served on various other museum committees. She is currently chairman of the collection committee.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, the museum’s director, said, “The museum is extremely grateful for this generous gift.” Grynsztejn plans to use the money to help underwrite programs like the museum’s outdoor summer plaza series, exhibitions, and artist residency programs, expand its education lectures and programs, and to help pay off debt stemming from the museum’s mortgage on its building at 220 E. Chicago Ave.

The museum received another $10 million gift in April of this year from Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. Edis, a trustee since 1981, and Ms. Neeson are longtime supporters of the museum.

The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has acquired a number of 18^th and 19^th century prints by James Ensor (Belgian, 1860 – 1949) and Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (French, 1736 – 1810). An anonymous collector gifted the works to the museum. “Prints are a significant collecting priority for us,” said Marcia Reed, chief curator of special collections at the Getty. The gift will flesh out the museum’s already impressive Ensor holdings and will add a solid representation of Boissieu’s work.

Among the Ensor prints are three hand-colored etchings that are exceptional examples of his work from the 1890s, the period that is considered to be his artistic peak. Two of the three prints were inspired by Edgar Allen Poe stories and bear the skeletons, masks, and crowds of people that Ensor often included in his work. The Getty already has a compilation of Ensor’s correspondence and manuscripts including 100 signed postcards and letters, 16 prints, and his masterpiece, Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 in its collection.

The gift of Boissieu’s work includes 23 etchings that span the artist’s career. Well-known as a painter and draftsman, Boissieu was also a renowned printmaker and was highly regarded for his work during the 18^th century. The collection includes several sheets of Boissieu’s studies of heads – both human and animal.

The Getty Museum plans to host a major, monographic exhibition of Ensor’s work in 2014. The show will include the prints gifted to the Research Institute.

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced yesterday that it had received a $1 million grant from the Keith Haring Foundation. The endowment is to go towards exhibitions in the Museum’s downtown Manhattan building, which will open in 2015. Designed by Renzo Piano, the building is currently under construction and will allow the Whitney to increase the size and range of its exhibitions, programs, and permanent works on view.

The Museum began working with Haring in 1983 when he was presented for the first time in a Whitney Biennial and in The Comic Art Show at the Museum’s downtown branch. Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney said, “Keith Haring was an extraordinary artist, exuberant, humane, passionate, and unflinching in his honesty. The Whitney has been a staunch supporter of Keith’s work for thirty years and this grant is a testament to our enduring relationship with Keith, his work, and his legacy.”

A year after his death, Haring went on to appear in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and in 1992 in an Independent Study Program exhibition, The Power of the City/The City of Power. The artist’s first full retrospective, Keith Haring, took place at the Whitney in 1997. He was also featured in American Century: Art and Culture 1950–2000 in 1999 and in 2010, the museum grew its Haring collection through a gift from longtime supporter of the Whitney, Emily Fisher Landau. The Whitney now counts four of his works in its permanent collection.

On November 5^th, the Cleveland Museum of Art will auction off one of its six Claude Monet paintings in New York. Wheat Field (1881) carries an estimated price of $5–$7 million and the museum hopes to use the funds from the sale to strengthen its early 20^th century European painting and sculpture collection, an area that has been lacking.

The Museum decided to auction Wheat Fields shortly after David Franklin was named the Museum’s director in 2010. Franklin did not think the painting could hold its own next to to the other five Monets in the museum’s collection including a widely admired Water Lily painting and the seminal, Red Kerchief.

Since Wheat Field was donated to the museum in 1947 as an unrestricted gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon, the museum is able to sell the painting without fear of complaint from the donor’s family. The Museum would like to acquire a painting by The Scream artist, Edvard Munch, or Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneering Russian abstractionist, to help round out their collection.

After recent financial struggles, the American Folk Art Museum received a hefty gift from David L. Davies, a former trustee and noted folk art collector who passed away in March, and his partner Jack Weeden. The $1 million bequest came as a welcome surprise after the recent hardships the museum has endured.

In July of 2011 the Folk Art Museum was forced to sell their 53rd Street home to the Museum of Modern Art in order to pay back a nearly $32 million debt related to a bond payment. In addition to vacating their flagship location, the museum's director, Maria Ann Conelli, resigned and the museum canceled a highly anticipated exhibition in Venice. The museum was in need of the good news.

Now located in a smaller building in Lincoln Center, the Folk Art Museum will use the money to establish the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions. Davies, a trustee of the museum for two decades, also donated a number of artworks to its collection including Morris Hirshfield's The Artist and His Model (1945). Hopefully the positive news signals fruitful times to come for the Folk Art Museum.