Displaying items by tag: notforprofit

On 11 and 12 December 2014 Sotheby’s New York will present 175 Masterworks To Celebrate 175 Years Of Photography: Property from Joy of Giving Something Foundation, a single owner sale of the most significant collection of photographs in private hands today. The works to be offered date from photography’s earliest years in the 1840s to contemporary 21st Century color images and include major photographs from all of the medium’s most important practitioners including: Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, William Eggleston, Robert Frank, Gustave Le Gray, Irving Penn, August Sander, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston, among others. The collection was meticulously put together over decades by Howard Stein (1926-2011), one of photography’s greatest collectors, whose vision and keen understanding of the medium informed his purchases. Mr. Stein donated the collection to the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the photographic arts, which is the sole beneficiary of the sale. Highlights will be shown in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Paris prior to the full exhibition in New York. The pre-sale estimate of $13/20 million is the highest ever for a Photographs auction.

BRIC, a Brooklyn-based not-for-profit organization that presents contemporary art, performing arts and community media programs, will open a 40,000-square-foot complex in the borough on October 3, 2013. The $35 million project transformed the historic Strand Theatre into a contemporary art gallery, a performance space with seating for 240-400 patrons, a public access TV studio, a glass-blowing studio and more.

BRIC’s new building will also include the BRIC House Fireworks Residency, an initiative aimed at facilitating collaborative projects by artists working in different media; the program is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund.The exhibition Housewarming: Notions of Home from the Center of the Universe will inaugurate the building’s brand new, 3,000-square-foot gallery. The group show will present works that explore the concept of home.

Leslie G. Schultz, BRIC’s president, said in a statement, “Since 1979, BRIC has used many wonderful spaces in Brooklyn to present artistically excellent and highly accessible programming. The essence of this building’s design – an inviting public cultural space and a welcoming home for the artists in Brooklyn – is entirely consistent with, and indeed was inspired by, the mission of our organization to serve artists and the public in a welcoming and informal environment.”

In February, the Fred L. Emerson Foundation and the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York announced that they would sell a significant painting by the English-born American artist and founder of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole (1801-1848). The sale of the work, titled Portage Falls on the Genesee (1839) is intended to benefit the institution, which opened to the public in 1955 and became a registered National Historic Landmark in 1964.

Portage Falls was given to the American politician William H. Seward while he was the governor of New York prior to the Civil War. Seward went on to serve as Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson and after his death his home and its contents were donated to the Fred L. Emerson Foundation. The Foundation opened the Seward Museum but it became a fully independent, not-for-profit institution in 2009; the Cole painting was retained by the foundation.

The work, which depicts what is now Letchworth State Park in western New York, has been on view at the Seward Museum for 170 years and not everyone is pleased with the Foundation’s decision to sell it. A group known as the Seward Legacy Preservation has formed and will hold their first meeting at the Auburn Public Theater in Auburn, New York on Monday, April 29, 2013. Members of the organization, which include descendants of Seward, will fight to restore the painting to its former place in the Seward House. The painting is currently being kept in a secure storage location.

Portage Falls is said to be worth millions of dollars, which the Foundation and the Seward Museum plan on splitting when the painting sells.