Displaying items by tag: foundations

The J. Paul Getty Trust is plugging a fresh executive into what's perhaps the art world's most counterintuitive job: getting rich folks, corporations and charitable foundations to make big cash donations to an organization that already sits on a pile of investments more than $6 billion high.

The Getty announced this week that Janet Feldstein McKillop, head fundraiser for St. Matthew's Parish School, a K-8 Episcopalian parochial school in Pacific Palisades, will step into a job whose only previous occupant did not gain a lot of discernible traction.

The Smithsonian Institution said on Monday that it planned to raise $1.5 billion by 2017 in its first institution-wide fundraising campaign and had already raised more than $1 billion of that sum from private individuals, foundations, corporations and other donors.

In an era of tighter federal funding the Smithsonian is increasing its private fundraising efforts to pay for its stepped-up ambitions at its sprawling network of museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park and research centers, one of the largest collections of museum and research centers in the world.

The lineup of scheduled “Dialogues” for this year’s edition of EXPO Chicago, which runs September 18–21 at Navy Pier, touches on virtually every corner of the art market, from grant-making at charitable foundations and the changing nature of collecting, to the history and importance of performance art, photography, and public art.

First up on the schedule for Friday September 19, is a conversation between Elizabeth Smith, the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Joel Wachs, president of the Andy Warhol Foundation, and Christy MacLear, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. They will discuss their respective foundations’ initiatives, including grant-making activities and legacy programs.

The Swiss government has launched a website that will help claimants, museums, and researchers track Nazi-looted artworks that have made their way to Switzerland. Switzerland became a hub for Nazi plundered artworks following World War II. The country was a popular place for Jewish art dealers who were fleeing the Nazis and many Swiss museums, collectors and dealers acquired works stolen from the Jews by the Nazis.

The new site will provide visitors with guidance on provenance research, links to relevant databases and archives, and details on Swiss museums’ own analyses of their collections. Switzerland is one of 44 countries that sanctioned the Washington Principles on returning Nazi-looted art in public collections in 1998. Under the policy, governments agreed to find “just and fair” solutions for the victims of Nazi plundering and their heirs as well as to allocate resources to identifying looted art. In spite of Switzerland’s cooperation, it is still believed that there is a fair amount of Nazi-looted artworks in Swiss collections. Provenance research has only been conducted among a select few of the government museums, private collections, and foundations that have artworks from this tragic period.

Switzerland’s newly launched website for tracking Nazi-looted artworks is www.bak.admin.ch/rk.