Displaying items by tag: donor

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.

An anonymous donor has gifted a rare and unique Auguste Rodin sculpture to the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Lausanne. The work, entitled L'Homme au serpent (The Man with Snake, 1887) has not been shown in public for over a century.

According to L'express, the small bronze was sold following the death of its original owner, Antoni Roux, in 1914, and hasn't been displayed since.

The Rijksmuseum has purchased a large canvas by the 17th-century painter Jan Asselijn at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht. The painting shows the breach of the St. Anthony’s Dike (now the Zeeburger Dike) in Amsterdam, which resulted from the St. Peter’s Flood of 1651. The purchase was made possible with the support of the Scato Gockinga Fund / Rijksmuseum Fund, the Turing Foundation and an anonymous donor. To celebrate its 10-year role as a main sponsor of the Rijksmuseum, ING also contributed to the acquisition.

Jan Asselijn (c.1610-1652), who personally witnessed the flood in Amsterdam in 1651, recorded the breach of the dam in both a journalistic and a dramatic sense.

With a $200,000 donation, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation will be the lead foundation donor for the US pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Last week, curator Okwui Enwezor announced the 136 artists and collectives included in the “All the World's Futures," the Biennale's main exhibition.

The gift was announced by the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the organizer of the US pavilion, which will feature an immersive multimedia installation from veteran video and performance artist Joan Jonas, inspired by the work of writer Halldór Laxness as well as other literary sources.

The Cleveland Museum of Art announced a $19 million campaign challenge gift from trustee and Dealer Tire CEO Scott Mueller, which nearly completes the institution's decade-long capital fundraising effort. When combined with Mueller's initial campaign commitment of $1 million, three $1 million restricted gifts, and his annual contributions, at more than $23 million, he ranks among the top donors in the museum's history.  

"Mr. Mueller's historic commitment represents the capstone of our capital campaign. We are simply in awe of his generosity and believe that these gifts further establish his standing among Cleveland's storied philanthropists," said Cleveland Museum of Art director William Griswold. "Mr. Mueller's giving has impacted so many dimensions of the museum's work and reinforces everything we're trying to accomplish."

The Lens Media Laboratory (LML), a new research facility that will apply scientific principles to the characterization and conservation of photographs and other lens-based media, has been created as part of the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH), a center dedicated to improving the science and practice of conservation globally. Paul Messier, a renowned photography conservator, will join Yale as the inaugural head of the LML. Funding for the endowed directorship and laboratory start-up has been provided by an anonymous donor.

“This extraordinary gift will catalyze the development of new methods for scholars to classify, preserve, and interpret photographs and other lens media, both physical and digital,” said Stefan Simon, director of the IPCH. “In Paul Messier, we have successfully attracted one of the foremost experts in the world, whose track record of working across a diverse range of constituencies and disciplines — from museums to individual collectors and humanities to the sciences — will be a tremendous asset to this endeavor.”

Works from the life estate of Paul Mellon, longtime VMFA donor and trustee, are in the newly reinstalled Mellon Galleries, opening on Friday, January 16. The galleries have been closed for six months to protect the art during a roof replacement. Eleven works have been reframed as a part of the ongoing Mellon reframing project.

The life estate remained with Mellon’s widow, Rachel Lambert Mellon, until her death on March 17, 2014. Mrs. Mellon held a life estate in 26 works of art originally bequeathed to VMFA in 1999 by Mr. Mellon. Among the highlights are six masterworks by Degas, Gauguin, Pissarro, Seurat, Dufy, and van Dongen.

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth received an anonymous $10 million donation. The gift, which will be put towards building the centerpiece of the two-year renovation and expansion project:  a new Museum Learning Center.

The renovation project, helmed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects—designers of the American Folk Art Museum building and the new Barnes Foundation—is part of Dartmouth’s aim of beefing up its campus arts district. The expansion will increase the museum’s current 39,000-square-foot space by 15,000 square feet, giving it more room to show off the museum’s collection, which touts some 65,000 objects including paintings by Perugino, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Rockwell Kent, along with a collection of Assyrian stone reliefs. The expansion will also add three classrooms for the use of digital technology.

The Brooklyn Museum has received a $5 million gift from the Leon Levy Foundation to endow the position of director, the museum is expected to announce on Tuesday. The gift is the largest the museum has received from a donor who was not a member of its board of trustees. Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the museum since 1997, will become, formally, the Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum.

Television journalist George Stephanopoulos has donated his extensive photography collection to the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York. The gift includes 128 works by important American and international artists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Fink, Karl Struss, and Garry Winogrand. The donation significantly enhances the museum’s existing photography collection.  

Charles A. Guerin, the director of the Hyde Collection, said, “We have been hopeful of making additions to our photography holdings, but did not imagine that such a significant group of work might come into the collection at one time. The great breadth of photography history as well as the variety of national origins represented by this generous gift by Mr. Stephanopoulos makes this a truly exciting and important moment for the growth of our permanent collection.”

Stephanopoulos is the anchor of ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” and the chief political correspondent for the television network. He served as the senior advisor for policy and strategy to President Bill Clinton.