Displaying items by tag: Museums

Frieze London and the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) have teamed up on a new acquisition fund to support museums across the United Kingdom, which will help offset the shrinking local authority investment in arts and culture facilities, and highlight the fantastic work of regional museums. The Collections Fund at Frieze, an amount which currently stands at £50,000, was awarded to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art after a competitive application process open to CAS's 70 Museum Members across the UK.

The court case begins today in Amsterdam to determine the future of a collection of gold, precious gems, a ceremonial helmet, and other treasures from the Black Sea region. Four different museums in Crimea are taking legal action to force the Allard Pierson Museum in the Netherlands to give back treasures in an exhibition entitled, The Crimea: Gold and Secrets from the Black Sea, loaned before Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory. The Netherlands does not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea.

Public museums and other cultural spots in Paris will reopen Monday following a temporary closure in response to terrorist attacks in the French capital.

The museums and landmarks, which include the likes of the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, will reopen at 1 p.m. local time after a minute of silence, the French Culture Ministry announced Sunday.

It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to fight the return of artwork stolen from Jews during the Holocaust, even museum academics who have an interest in keeping the works in their collections. Not only does there seem to be a moral imperative to right these nearly century-old wrongs. On the face of it, such battles are simply bad public relations.

Yet the past decade has seen a series of high-profile, protracted restitution battles across the U.S. and Europe. The case of the so-called Gurlitt hoard, wherein more than 1,200 pieces of (mostly) stolen art was discovered in a Munich apartment in 2012, has yet to be fully resolved.

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) has released a list of protocols for museums to help protect artworks or archaeological objects that are currently at risk of destruction. “Protocols for Safe Havens for Works of Cultural Significance from Countries in Crisis” applies to works threatened not only by violent conflict or acts of terrorism — a growing concern, as ISIS has made clear — but also by natural disasters. The ongoing Syrian Civil War, however, seems to have served as the impetus for this issuing, with AAMD President Johnnetta Cole condemning the intentional damage as “reprehensible acts of violence and brutal vandalism.”

The fashion industry stepped in once again to help fund ailing Italian museums. This time, Florence-based Gucci and Salvatore Ferragamo made major donations, reinforcing their commitment to Italian arts and culture.

On Monday night, the Uffizi Gallery re-opened eight rooms following extensive renovations funded by a €600,000 ($678,702) donation from Ferragamo, WWD reported.

Audrey Irmas, a longtime donor to Los Angeles art museums and Jewish causes, will sell a large 1968 “blackboard” painting by Cy Twombly that she's owned since 1990 and use $30 million of the predicted auction proceeds of more than $60 million to help build a new events center at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown.

The 55,000-square-foot Audrey Irmas Pavilion will be designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the firm led by noted Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.

In the annals of Native American art history, Ralph T. Coe (1929-2010) ranks as one of the good guys. A scion of a wealthy Ohio family, he grew up amid Impressionist art, but he appreciated the aesthetic value of Indian art and strove to persuade reluctant art museums, which mainly recognized its ethnographic significance.

Trained in art history at Oberlin and Yale, and eventually director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, “Ted” Coe made his first purchase—a Northwest Coast totem pole—at age 26. By the time he died, he left some 2,000 pieces to the Ralph T. Coe Foundation, which has lent about 200 of them to the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian here for “Connoisseurship and Good Pie: Ted Coe and Collecting Native Art.”

Some of France’s best-known museums, including the world famous Louvre in Paris, will soon be opening their doors to visitors seven days a week, French President François Hollande announced Monday.

The Louvre, along with its Paris neighbor the Musée d'Orsay and the Château de Versailles, located just outside the French capital, will open week-round from this autumn, Hollande said.

For two consecutive days this summer, I indulged in “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Not the sins, per se, but a seven-venue collaboration (think: exhibition as pub crawl) spread throughout Connecticut and New York, involving seven members of the Fairfield/Westchester Museum Alliance.

The FWMA’s inaugural group effort, “The Seven Deadly Sins” had each arts institution tackle one unique sin, and it ran the gamut in terms of approach, originality, quality and success. Representing about 90 artists, mostly household names, “Sins” comprised roughly 200 works from the 15th to the 21st century, in nearly every medium.