Displaying items by tag: campaign

A Napoleonic medal cabinet has been saved from export from the UK after a successful fundraising campaign to buy it for the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London.

In January, on the recommendation of a reviewing committee administered by Arts Council England, the British government decided to defer granting an export license for the cabinet until July, allowing the V&A time to raise the required sum of £534,000.

Next month, billboards and signs in select cities across the country will get major makeovers as part of the Art Everywhere U.S. campaign. The project, which is being organized by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, will put images of 58 artworks from the aforementioned museums on display at 50,000 sites across the United States. The initiative was inspired by Art Everywhere UK, which was launched last year by beverage mogul Richard Reed. 

Earlier this year, the five participating museums created a master list of 100 American artworks from their combined holdings and asked the public to vote for their favorite pieces.

President Barack Obama has nominated Jane Chu as the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Chu is the president and chief executive of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, Missouri. Chu, who was born in Oklahoma to Chinese immigrant parents, spearheaded a $414 million campaign to build the center, which opened in 2011.

After earning an associate’s degree in visual arts at Nebraska Wesleyan University, Chu focused on piano studies as an undergraduate at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas. She earned a master’s degree in music from Dallas’ Southern Methodist University, a master’s degree in business administration from Rockhurst University in Kansas City, and a doctorate in philanthropic studies from Indiana University.

The NEA, an independent federal agency that funds and promotes artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation, has dropped its funding from $167.5 million in 2010, to $138.4 million in 2013. Chu’s considerable experience in arts funding and administration would greatly benefit the NEA. The agency’s former chairman, Rocco Landesman, retired in 2012. The NEA’s senior deputy director, Joan Shikegawa has been the acting chairman since then.

Chu’s appointment will have to be approved by the Senate.

Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which has been plagued by financial troubles for years, has quadrupled its endowment to over $100 million in the past nine months. Just last year the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offered MOCA $100 million to merge its two facilities with its own larger facilities. MOCA turned down the offer, opting to remain independent and launch a fundraising campaign for its endowment.

The campaign garnered the support of nearly 30 donors including financier and philanthropist Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, who bailed the museum out nearly six years ago with a $30 million donation, and Jeffrey Deitch, MOCA’s former director. The museum is still searching for a permanent director following Deitch’s tumultuous departure.

MOCA is currently the only museum in Los Angeles dedicated solely to  collecting and exhibiting contemporary art. Its collection includes works by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg.

On December 18, the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced that it had successfully completed a five-year, $54 million campaign to endow 29 staff positions across the institution’s full range of operational departments. The campaign began in 2008 after the museum received a $27 million grant from H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, then chairman of the institution’s board of trustees, and his wife, Marguerite. The campaign challenged donors to match the grant, million for million, in exchange for the right to endow and name the positions.

The Lenfests, who have donated over $100 million to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to date, are the institution’s largest financial donors. Their challenge was met by 27 donors, 19 of whom are making their first gift of such magnitude.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s endowment now totals $408 million.     

The prestigious Winter Antiques Show, which is in its 60^th year, will present a loan exhibition honoring the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Fresh Take, Making Connections to the Peabody Essex Museum will present over 50 paintings, sculptures, textiles and decorative objects from the Peabody Essex, one of the country’s oldest and most progressive museums. The exhibition will be on view during the entire run of the Winter Antiques Show, which will take place from January 24, 2014 to February 2, 2014 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

Highlights from Fresh Take, Making Connections to the Peabody Essex Museum include an 18^th century inlaid ivory chair from India, a mahogany dressing chest by Thomas Seymour (circa 1810) and a 19^th century portrait of the author Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Osgood. Jeff Daly, formerly a senior design advisor to the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will design the exhibition.  

Fresh Take will coincide with the Peabody Essex Museum’s 215^th anniversary. The institution recently embarked on a $650 million campaign and expansion that will place the museum among the top 10 art institutions in the country in terms of gallery space and total endowment.  

Irina Antonova, the 91-year-old director of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts who has helmed the institution for 52 years, has been let go after just recently renewing her five-year contract. The announcement, which was made on Monday, July 1, follows a battle waged by Antonova to bring a collection of Impressionist art, which was sent to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg by Joseph Stalin, back to Moscow.

Antonova’s vision was to restore the once magnificent State Museum of New West Art in Moscow, which housed paintings by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). Stalin shuttered the museum in 1948 after his regime deemed the collection too far removed from Soviet art. The Museum of New Western Art’s collection, which was assembled by Russian art collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, was later divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage Museum.

Antonova first made her campaign public in April 2013 when she appealed to Russian president Vladimir Putin during a televised call-in show. The plea sparked controversy with the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. After a heated battle, the state intervened and suggested creating an online “virtual museum” as a compromise between the two parties but Antonova refused.

Since the Pushkin’s announcement earlier this week, Antonova has been moved to the ceremonial post of the museum’s president. Marina Loshak, an established curator, will replace Antonova.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. announced that Oprah Winfrey will donate $12 million to support the capital campaign of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Winfrey donated $1 million in 2007, bringing her total contribution to the project to $13 million. She has been a member of the museum’s advisory council since 2004. To thank her for her generosity, the Smithsonian will name the museum’s 350-seat theater the Oprah Winfrey Theater.

The museum, which is currently under construction, is expected to cost $500 million by the time it reaches completion. Congressional funding provided half of the capital and the rest is being raised by the museum. The museum is situated on 5 acres of land and sits next to the Washington Monument. It will be the 19^th Smithsonian museum.

Wayne Clough, the Smithsonian Secretary, said, “At its heart, the National Museum of African History and Culture is a showcase for a richer, fuller picture of the American experience. The Oprah Winfrey Theater will bring untold stories alive through films, performances, artistic expression and public dialogue.”

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is slated to open in late 2015.

Unhappiness over jobs, pay, and pensions has led workers at numerous museums, galleries, and heritage sites across the UK to go on strike. The walkout has affected some of the country’s biggest art institutions including the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and Tate Liverpool. The National Portrait Gallery released a statement apologizing to patrons and explaining that it was “necessary for some gallery rooms to be closed” due to the strike.

Walkouts are expected to continue through the weekend. Employees of the Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum are expected to participate in the strike but the institutions will remain open to the public. Workers at national heritage sites, including Stonehenge, are planning to take action on Sunday, June 2, 2013.

The nationwide strike is part of a three-month campaign over an ongoing dispute about workers’ rights. The PCS union, the largest civil service union in the UK, is planning a national strike to take place at the end of June.

Francois-Henri Pinault, a French billionaire and CEO of the luxury-goods brand, Kering (formerly PPR), has announced that he will return a pair of Qing dynasty bronze statues to China. The looted bronzes were part of a 2009 auction at Christie’s in Paris that sparked a campaign in China aimed at putting an end to intimidation by foreign powers. Officials from Beijing have applauded Pinault’s efforts to create a more camaraderie-focused dynamic between France and China. Pinault is the owner of the Artemis Group, Christie’s holding company.

The works to be returned to China are the bronze heads of a rat and a rabbit, which were part of a group of 12 animal heads that were looted from Beijing’s Summer Palace by French and British troops in 1860 during the Second Opium War. Since emerging as a powerful international force in recent years, China has been campaigning for the return of the works. Five of the bronzes have been given back to China and one is in Taiwan while the whereabouts of the remaining four pieces remain a mystery.

The bronzes being returned to China by Pinault were previously owned by French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and were put up for auction in 2009 following his death. Chinese officials voiced opposition at the time of the sale and an advisor to a Chinese government fund placed the winning bid on the bronzes but never ended up paying for them. The works were returned to Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent’s former partner.

Pinault is working with the Cultural Heritage Administration to get the bronzes back to China as quickly as possible. The decision is a clever move on Pinault’s part as his businesses, which include Gucci and Puma, have been thriving in China’s growing consumer economy.