Displaying items by tag: national gallery of canada

Last Spring, the Canadian Artists’ Representation (CARFAC) took to the Supreme Court following an eleven-year battle with the National Gallery of Canada to reach an agreement on copyright laws and artist fees. Now it looks as like it has landed an important victory. The collective — which serves Canadian artists much like a union, and calls itself “the national voice” of Canada’s professional artists — has been issued a unanimous decision from the bench that allows an appeal on behalf of artists.

Long battling the NGC, CARFAC regards this decision to represent a landmark victory. This appears especially true because the court typically takes two or three months to decide its ruling, but as the Ottawa Citizen notes, “the judges made their ruling for the artists within minutes of hearing arguments from both sides.”

After 15 months without a director, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco will appoint Colin B. Bailey, a deputy director at the Frick Collection in New York, the head of the consortium. Bailey, 57, is a renowned specialist in 18^th and 19^th century French art and has been at the Frick since 2000.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the modern-leaning M.H. de Young Memorial Museum and the neoclassical California Palace of the Legion of Honor, was left leader-less after the death of its previous director, John Buchanan, in 2011. The city of San Francisco and a private board of trustees oversee the museums, which collectively are the largest public arts institution in San Francisco and one of the largest art museums in the state of California.

The announcement, which was made by the museum board on Wednesday, March 27, 2013, comes after a considerable period of tumult among the museums; the past year has included tense labor negotiations, firings of senior staff members, and scathing criticism of the board’s president, Diane Wilsey. Wilsey, an art collector, philanthropist, and prominent San Francisco socialite, has been accused of using the museums’ resources for her own benefit and of nepotism.

The museums’ recent troubles have not deterred Bailey’s excitement to join the Fine Arts Museums. His abundance of museum experience includes stints at the National Gallery of Canada, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.