Displaying items by tag: donation

The Worcester Art Museum announced today that it has obtained a gift of $4 million to endow its director position, which is currently held by Matthias Waschek. The gift, which the museum is touting as the largest award for a staff position in WAM history, came from the Myles & C. Jean McDonough Foundation, on behalf of Jean McDonough. The position will now be named the C. Jean and Myles McDonough Director.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College announces a major gift of over 500 photographs from photographer, curator, and collector Jack Shear. 

Shear’s extensive donation serves as a visual history of photography from its inception in the 1840s to the present day. The collection chronicles different photographic processes, techniques, and artistic approaches from an early half-plate ambrotype of Niagara Falls to a Polaroid self-portrait by a young Robert Mapplethorpe. Historic works include important examples by photographic pioneers such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

A long-running legal battle between the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the US arm of the Armenian Apostolic Church over the ownership of a group of 13th-century manuscript pages has ended with a compromise. The Getty has agreed to acknowledge that the church is the rightful owner of the eight brilliantly illustrated pages. The church, in turn, has pledged to donate the pages to the museum. The manuscript pages have been in the Getty’s collection since 1994, when the museum bought them from an Armenian American family.

Lee Boyd, an attorney for the church, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the settlement represents the first restitution of art from the Armenian genocide.

Before artist and philanthropist Mary Koch died in 1990, she asked her daughter-in-law, Liz, to watch after some things that were dear to her once she was gone.

One of them was the Wichita Center for the Arts.

“She was so passionate about it,” said Liz Koch, an honorary trustee for the Center.

She and her husband, Charles, and their family’s foundations are now fulfilling Mary Koch’s wish in a significant way: They’re giving $10.5 million in land and money for a new home for the Center, which started in 1920 as the Wichita Art Association.

Maurice Tuchman, the first full-time curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has donated his papers to the Getty Research Institute, the GRI is expected to announce Thursday.

Tuchman held the LACMA position from 1964 to 1994 and was responsible for mounting pioneering shows and projects, including the lauded Art and Technology program, which championed emerging light and space artists such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell and paired artists with Southern California technology companies from 1966 to 1971.

The Columbus Museum of Art announced that its new wing will be named the Margaret M. Walter Wing in recognition of Robert D. and Margaret “Peggy” Walter’s transformational $10 million donation to the Columbus Museum of Art. The Walters’ donation remains the largest gift in the Museum’s history and became the foundation for the Museum’s Art Matters Endowment and Capital Campaign.

The Walters are long-time supporters of the Museum. Peggy Walter began leading Museum tours as a CMA docent in 1971 and later joined the Museum’s Women’s Board auxiliary. She has also helped guide the Museum as a member of the Board of Trustees since 1994.

An upstate New York museum known for its collection of work by Rembrandt, van Gogh and Picasso says it has received its largest donation of modern artwork in years.

The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls announced Friday that 55 works by some of the world’s leading modern artists are a gift from Werner Feibes and the late James Schmitt.

With the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill and Frederic Church’s home Olana, a New York state Parks Historic Site, in Greenport, it’s fair to say that Greene and Columbia counties form the heartland of the Hudson River School of Painting.

As such, movement in the art world that pertains to their works is always of interest to many in the area, and there has, in fact, been movement.

The Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri, which has trained or employed artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Robert Rauschenberg and Nick Cave and is celebrating its 130th anniversary, announced Tuesday that it had received a donation of $25 million, one of the largest gifts ever to an American art school.

The money, from a donor who has asked to remain anonymous, will be used to bolster the school’s general endowment, improve and renovate its campus adjacent to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and, in the form of a challenge grant of $6 million, sharply increase the number of scholarships the school is able to give out.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has received a $2 million gift from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation to support its award-winning education programs, Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney, announced today. Over the next five years, the Foundation's gift will provide essential support for the Museum’s education programs which serve children, teens, seniors, and the community at large.

“The Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation’s generous gift recognizes that education is one of the cornerstones of the Whitney’s mission.