Displaying items by tag: institutions

Paris’ Musee du Louvre and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the Legion of Honor and the de Young Museum, announced that they have reached a mutual agreement and will collaborate on a series of exhibitions and exchanges. The institutions will share works from their incendiary collections over the course of the next five years including antiquities, paintings, decorative arts, prints, drawings, textiles, and sculptures.

The Louvre and Fine Arts Museums have been working on the arrangement for the past two years and will celebrate its commencement with the exhibition, Royal Treasures from the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette. The show, which opened on November 17 and features a collection of decorative arts from the French monarchy, will be on view through March 17, 2013.

The agreement will allow each world-renowned institution to broaden their international reach and inhabitants of each city will have a new selection of masterpieces to view. Loans between the museums may include entire exhibitions or single objects.

After Hurricane Sandy battered the east coast, art institutions from the Lower East Side to upstate New York felt the effects. Art galleries including R 20^th Century in SoHo, Rachel Uffner Gallery on the Lower East Side, the New Museum on the Bowery, Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea, and Storm King Art Center upstate in Mountainville were without electricity as of yesterday. Eyebeam and Zach Feuer in Chelsea suffered serious flooding. Water levels reached above five feet inside Feuer’s gallery, destroying the entire exhibition on view. Most of the gallery’s permanent inventory is kept on storage racks higher than five feet so Feuer has hope that those works will be salvageable.

Once dealers have fully assessed and dealt with the damages to their galleries and inventories, they will be faced with increased insurance premiums. While many galleries have liability and short-term travel insurance, they do not usually insure art.

In addition, some of the city’s most anticipated galas were cancelled due to the hurricane. The Studio Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and the New York Public Radio all put their galas on hold because of Sandy. Hopefully the hit to New York’s gala season won’t affect the fundraising efforts tied to such events.

The Museum of Craft and Folk Art (MOCFA) will be closing its doors on December 1, 2012, the date marking the institution’s thirtieth anniversary. Founded in 1982 by craft artist and well-known sculptor, Gertrud Parker, MOCFA is the only folk art museum in Northern California.

After three decades, the Museum’s overseers felt that their mission, to bring recognition and legitimacy to craft and folk art in the contemporary art arena, had been achieved. The poor climate for smaller art institutions was undoubtedly a contributing factor.

Although the art market and leading museums now embraces contemporary artists who borrow from craft traditions, the innovative and daring venues that helped these artists get there are suffering. For instance, this past summer amid financial troubles, the American Folk Art Museum in New York was forced to sell its building on 53^rd Street to the Museum of Modern Art and move to a smaller venue.

The MOCFA has exhibited hundreds of artists and significant local and national craft and folk art collections over the years. The Museum is devoted to collaborating with artists on commissions of new work as well as promoting artist-led projects and public programs. MOCFA has worked ardently to provide a place for makers and artists to come together and create, discuss, and learn. The Museum’s final exhibition, Fiber Futures: Japan’s Textile Pioneers, will be on view from now until December 1.