Displaying items by tag: endowment

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.

New York City's Park Avenue Armory has announced that the Thompson Family Foundation has donated $65 million towards a programming endowment.

The endowment allows the Armory to increase the number and frequency of performing and visual arts presentations. More importantly, the money increases the reach of its arts education initiatives for underprivileged public school children.

In an effort to maintain the financial future of Russborough, a historic Georgian house in Ireland, a selection of Old Master paintings from The Alfred Beit Foundation will be on offer at the Christie’s London Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale on July 9.

Nearly 300 years old, the heritage home requires constant restoration and upkeep entrusted to the Beit family, notable patrons of the arts. The proceeds of the sale will go to an endowment fund managed by the Beit’s that will ensure the future of Russborough.

Randolph College has sold Ernest Martin Hennings’ “Through the Arroyo” and Edward Hicks’ “A Peaceable Kingdom,” college president Bradley Bateman announced Thursday.

The two painting were the last of a set of four masterpieces the college announced it would sell to boost its endowment. That decision, announced in 2007, has been a source of controversy for the college.

She lived much of her life in New York City luxury, but Mary Griggs Burke never forgot her Minnesota roots.

Museums around the world courted her, hoping she would bequeath to them her legendary collection of Japanese art, but it was to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts that she left the bulk of it: 700 pieces of rare Japanese and Korean art, spanning 5,000 years, along with a $12.5 million endowment.

The bequest from Burke, announced Monday, catapults the Minneapolis museum’s Japanese collection into the top tier of U.S. museums.

The Rhode Island School of Design has received $2.5 million from David Rockefeller to endow a curatorial position at the school’s museum and to support a new gallery.

RISD announced Monday that Rockefeller’s pledge would fund and expand the museum’s collection of decorative arts and design.

RISD says the majority of the money will go toward a position to lead the department of decorative arts and design.

Sotheby’s has announced that its upcoming spring auctions of Contemporary Art in New York will feature a selection of works donated by artists in support of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. While the list of donations has not yet been finalized, approximately 35 works will be offered in Sotheby’s evening and day sales on May 12, 2015, and May 13, 2015. Proceeds from the auction will benefit MOCA’s endowment.

All of the artists who have donated works to the sale, including John Baldessari, Mark Bradford, Mark Grotjahn, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, and Ed Ruscha, have strong ties to MOCA.

Patience, says architect Annabelle Selldorf, is a virtue she’s acquired over time.

That’s fortunate, as it’s probably going to be at least 2019 before the renovation she is designing for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is completed. More fundraising ($50 million for the project; $20 million for an operating endowment), more permitting and more planning has to be accomplished before construction could start in 2017.

“We’re finding our way, and we’ll do whatever it takes, come here as frequently as they will allow us, and develop the design little by little as funds become available, as permits are within reach,” said Selldorf, who was engaged by the museum nearly a year ago. “It’s a long process, but I feel the path is very clear.”

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum director Anne Hawley, whose 25-year tenure began with a notorious art heist and culminated in a successful $180 million capital campaign, announced Wednesday that she plans to step down at the end of the year.

Hawley said she has been quietly weighing the decision for two years now, as the museum completed fund-raising efforts that included $114 million for the museum’s sleek 2012 expansion, designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, and an additional $50 million to fortify the museum’s endowment.

The High Museum of Art has announced that Katherine Jentleson will become its curator of folk and self-taught art. The position, which has gone unfilled for nearly two years, was endowed last summer through a $2.5 million gift from Atlanta patrons Dan Boone and his late wife Merrie Boone.

Jentleson, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at Duke University and the 2014-15 Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, will start at the High in September, She has worked at New York’s American Folk Art Museum and curated or assisted in organizing exhibits at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, N.C.