Displaying items by tag: donations

Billionaire Ken Griffin donated $40 million to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, one of the largest gifts in the institution’s 85-year history.

The unrestricted gift from the founder of Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel will help provide education and exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, the museum said Tuesday in a statement. In recognition of the gift, MoMA will name its 1964 Philip Johnson-designed East Wing after Griffin.

The American chemist, businessman and art collector Alfred Bader and his wife, Isabel, have donated a 1658 Rembrandt painting, “Portrait of a Man With Arms Akimbo,” to the Agnes Etherington Art Center at Queen’s University in Ontario.

This is the third Rembrandt painting, among the more than 200 works of art that Mr. Bader, 91, has donated to the center at Queen’s, his alma mater, but it is considered the most significant gift so far.

On Wednesday night at the 10th anniversary gala celebrating the de Young Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco revealed 10 pledged gifts to the de Young’s permanent collection. Of the 10 works, eight were on display at the museum. The gifts are:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has brought hundreds of donated antiques out of storage to offer at Manhattan auctions this fall.

In the last few weeks, the museum has sold paintings and sculptures at Doyle New York auction house, including a portrait of Thomas Sully’s daughter Ellen Wheeler that Sully painted in 1844, which went for $17,500.

The Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, announced today it has acquired 200 new works through donation and purchase over the past year. The acquisitions include pieces by artists such as Trisha Brown, Beauford Delaney, Chuck Close, Joseph Kosuth, Liz Larner, Allen Ruppersberg, Barry Le Va, Danh Vo, and Akram Zaatari.

Deschenes’s piece Gallery 7 (2015) is a site-specific installation commissioned by the Walker, and an homage to the museum. A year-long production, it utilized the natural light from the gallery’s windows to expose a series of free-standing panels coated with photosensitive paper.

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.

A Manhattan judge has ruled in favor of Mount Sinai Beth Israel, allowing the hospital to keep $4 million in donations, including an Édouard Manet painting, given by the late heiress Huguette Clark. Her relatives had sued, claiming Clark was manipulated into giving away her fortune.

Clark spent the last two decades of her life at Beth Israel. After an operation in 1992, she opted to remain under the institution's care, rather than returning home. She died in 2011, at 104 years old.

The Honolulu Museum of Art and the Honolulu Academy of Arts (HAA) are suing art collector Joel Alexander Greene for $880,000 for previous donations.

The museum fears that Greene's works may have come from a smuggling ring—an entanglement which the institution especially wants to avoid after seven of its artifacts were seized by Homeland Security Investigations in connection to the ongoing case against disgraced Indian art dealer Subhash Kapoor.

Americans’ donations to arts and culture rose 9.2% in 2014, the highest increase in nine categories tracked by Giving USA, an annual report on charitable contributions.

Overall, however, arts and culture commanded a modest share of the philanthropic pie. Estimated gifts to arts and culture totaled $17.2 billion, according to the report compiled by Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Although that was a record high, it represented only 4.8% of the $358.4-billion total.

Bright abstracts draw visitors' eyes to one wall, then life-like full sized figures tucked into a corner might startle them. On another wall, a full-sized truck is caught mid-slither. Such displays will continue to offer visual surprises during the Walker Art Center's 75th anniversary celebrations, especially tonight, when the center unwraps some birthday presents.

They are the fruits of an effort that began three years ago, when the Walker launched a campaign to seek donated art to mark the three-quarter-century milestone. Its new show, "75 Gifts for 75 years," gives insight into the importance donations play in a museum's collection.