CAA News Today

The Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri has accepted a $25 million gift from an anonymous donor. The funds will go toward the school’s general endowment, campus improvements, and, in the form of a challenge grant, student scholarships, endowed professorships, and visiting professors.

The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia has received a major $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award, a Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Implementation Grant, will support the construction of a collections storage expansion project.

The Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Chicago, Illinois, has opened the new location of its expanded Paris Center in the historic hôtel Lévis-Mirepoix. The facility includes a larger and improved event and library facilities and a collaborative exhibition space with the Fondation Custodia.

The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, has received a one-time grant of $50,000 from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art to research and digitize part of its American glass collection.

The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has joined the Google Cultural Institute and contributed 1,061 high-resolution images of works of art from its collection to the institute.

From left: Karen Pence, Juliet King, and Kim Hodges during a reception at the Governor’s residence (photography provided by the Indiana First Lady’s Charitable Foundation)

The Herron School of Art and Design, part of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, has accepted a $1,000 grant from the Indiana First Lady’s Charitable Fund. The award will support the school’s graduate program in art therapy.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has launched a new online video series, called The Artist Project. The museum will produce a season of clips in which one hundred artists respond to the permanent collection, choosing either a single work or galleries that spark their imagination.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has accepted a three-year grant of $1,500,000 from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art to help reinstall and reinterpret its American art collection.

The Society of Architectural Historians, based in Chicago, Illinois, has received a three-year $150,000 grant from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation for general operating support.

The Society of Architectural Historians, based in Chicago, Illinois, has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the Tawani Foundation to support activities related to the organization’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland has received a $300,000 grant from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art to help support the exhibition Matisse/Diebenkorn and its catalogue.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, has accepted a $150,000 grant from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art in support of the exhibition This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Reimagining Representation in American Art and its catalogue.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has accepted a $15 million gift from Felda and Dena Hardymon to support campus expansion and programs. In recognition of the donation, the institute’s board decided to name the director’s position after the couple.

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has received a $200,000 grant from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art. The institution will use the funds to reinstall and publish on its collection of American art.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has earmarked a $350,000 grant from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art for the exhibition Donald Judd and its accompanying catalogue.

The New York Studio School in Manhattan has accepted a $30,000 grant from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art to help digitize part of its lecture program archive.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, has won a two-year $275,000 grant from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art to reinstall and reinterpret the Renwick Gallery’s American craft and decorative art collection.

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minneapolis has received a $200,000 grant from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art to help produce the exhibition International Pop and its catalogue.

The Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, has won a three-year grant of $1.5 million from the Henry Luce Fund in American Art. The museum will use the funds for the open storage of its American art collection and archives in the new West Campus Collection Studies Center.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has won the 2014 Apollo Award for Museum Opening of the Year. The award is given annually by the art magazine Apollo.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota has accepted an $8 million gift from the Duncan and Nivin MacMillan Foundation to endow the director and president’s position.

The Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has won the 2014 Frances Smyth-Ravenal Prize for Excellence in Publication Design from the American Alliance of Museums for its catalogue of the exhibition New Jersey as Non-Site.

Yale University Press in New Haven, Connecticut, has received an $840,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to establish a new electronic portal on which curated and customizable art and architectural-history content will be made available to consumers and institutions.

The Archives of American Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, has received a $413,000 award from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support a survey of archival collections related to American art that are located in the Chicago area, as well as a few other initiatives on Chicagoan art, artists, and archives.

The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has accepted a $85,000 award from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support the exhibition The Left Front: Radical Artists in the “Red Decade,” 1929–1940.

The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, has developed a three-day conference called “Global Encounters in Early America” with support from a $25,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington has received three generous gifts totaling $1.7 million to fully endow the museum’s Curator of the Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art. Two donations were given anonymously, and a third came from Peggy and Ed Woolard. The endowment will be named the Annette Woolard-Provine Endowed Curator of the Bancroft Collection, in honor of the Woolards’ daughter.

The Maine College of Art in Portland has received accreditation for its ten-month master of art in teaching program by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and the state of Maine. The college has also accepted funding from the Bob Crewe Foundation to initiate a program that explores the intersection of music and art.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia has received a three-year $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to support the new School and Community Partnership Program, which will unite the academy’s existing resources for schools, families, and community outreach into a single initiative.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has been awarded a $165,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to help fund the exhibition Paul Strand: Photography and Film for the Twentieth Century.

The Princeton University Art Museum in Princeton, New Jersey, has accepted a $99,493 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to help complete the cataloguing and digitization of the Minor White Archive.

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois has received a $2.5 million gift from the Mohn Family Foundation to advance the school’s leadership in the history of contemporary art. The funds will support a professorship and graduate-student fellowship within the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism.

Stanford University in California has accepted a $30,780 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to help the Department of Art and Art History fund a two-day conference called “The Ends of American Art.”

The University of California, Santa Barbara, has accepted a $136,479 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support an academic exchange symposium and a publication associated with “Modernism in the United States and China,” a project organized by the university and the China Art Academy in Hangzhou.

The University of Texas at Dallas has partnered with the Dallas Museum of Art to create the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, which will offer master’s and doctoral degrees. The institute is funded by a $17 million gift from Edith O’Donnell.

The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has received a $25,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support the borrowing of Hiram Power’s statue The Greek Slave (1844), along with an attendant two-day colloquium, in conjunction with the exhibition Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901.

Yale University Press in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted an $80,000 grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to support a translation prize for a book-length publication by a non-US author that contributes to scholarship on historical American art.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has been awarded a grant of $118,737 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency, in the Museums in America program. The Clark will use the funds to digitize significant volumes from the Julius S. Held Collection of Rare Books.

The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh has accepted a $1.9 million grant from the State Employees’ Credit Union Foundation to help fund research in art education.

The University of Texas at Dallas has received a $17 million contribution from the arts patron Edith O’Donnell to create the school’s new Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, which opened this fall.

The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland has received a $69,556 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to build on previous efforts to catalogue the museum’s archive—which includes correspondence with artists, exhibition research, photography, and audio recordings of lectures and events—and to create finding aids for it.

The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has announced that its publication series Studies in the History of Art is now accessible on JSTOR.

The Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, has been awarded a $140,000 grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund, facilitated by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, to update and modernize parts of the museum.

The Frick Collection in New York has announced plans to enhance and renovate its museum and library, which includes the construction of a new addition and the renovation and expansion of existing interior spaces.

The Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has received a $240,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to support an exhibition called Strange Currencies.

The Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, has received a $10 million gift to support the expansion of gallery and teaching spaces, as well as a new entrance.

Gathered in the Art Institute of Chicago’s Conservation Examination Room, art-history graduate students Hannah Klemm from the University of Chicago, Ashley Dunn and Grace Deveney (seated) from Northwestern University, and Max Koss (University of Chicago), watch closely as the Art Institute’s assistant paintings conservator Kelly Keegan and Andrew W. Mellon Senior Conservation Scientist Francesca Casadio reveal fascinating learnings from Francescuccio Ghissi’s The Crucifixion (ca. 1370)

Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to enhance the study of art history through a focus on working with objects. The four-year effort, a collaboration among three Chicago-area institutions, is called the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chicago Objects Study Initiative.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has received a $300,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to support the reinstallation of its eight galleries of South Asian art, titled South Asian Art: Experimentation, Interpretation, and Evaluation.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, has accepted a $5.4 million gift from David M. Rubenstein for the renovation of its Renwick Gallery. The donation completes the private fundraising goal for the museum’s capital renovation project.

St. Johns University in Jamaica, New York, will soon launch a master of arts degree program in museum administration, housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, in fall 2014.

The Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has received a $360,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to support an installation called reFORM by the artist Pepón Osorio.

Ashley Dunn, Francesca Casadio, and Max Koss discuss Edouard Manet’s Portrait of a Woman with a Black Fichu (ca. 1878)

The University of Chicago in Illinois has received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to enhance the study of art history through a focus on working with objects. The four-year effort, a collaboration among three Chicago-area institutions, is called the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Chicago Objects Study Initiative.

The University of South Carolina in Columbia has replaced the Department of Art with the School of Visual Art and Design. In addition, the school received a $32,790 grant from the Windgate Charitable Foundation to support ceramics and small metals.

The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has accepted a $71,880 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to help fund an exhibition called Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-Garde.

The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland has received a $2,500 award from the International Fine Print Dealers Association to fund a curatorial internship in museum print collections.

The Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington has launched a collections website, created with the web-based platform eMuseum. Visitors to the online resource can browse the museum’s collections, search for specific objects, view images, and create their own saved collections of work. To date, over 1,000 works of art have been photographed, catalogued, and added to the website. The museum’s entire 12,500-work collection, including the largest collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art outside the United Kingdom, will be available online by 2018.

The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California, has acquired the archive documenting the first three decades of the Kitchen, a leading alternative space devoted to performance art, dance, music, and video. The large, well-preserved archive includes thousands of videotapes, audiotapes, photographs, posters, and other archival materials documenting the exhibitions, performances, and events presented by the Kitchen between 1971 and 1999.

The Harvard Art Museums—composed of the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum—will open their new Renzo Piano–designed facility to the public on November 16, 2014. The renovation and expansion of the museums’ landmark building at 32 Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will bring the three museums and their collections together under one roof for the first time, inviting students, faculty, scholars, and the public into one of the world’s great institutions for arts scholarship and research.

Don Tuski, president of the Maine College of Art (left) with Dan Crewe, brother of Bob Crewe and a college trustee since 2011

The Maine College of Art in Portland has accepted a $3 million gift from the Bob Crewe Foundation to develop a new program that focuses on the study of contemporary music and its relation to visual art. This transformational gift will support an innovative field of study in honor of the internationally known musician, artist, and entrepreneur, Bob Crewe, while supporting students from a wide range of backgrounds wishing to pursue a career in music, art, or both.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has launched MetCollects, a new series on the museum’s website that offers first looks at recently acquired works of art. MetCollects will feature one work each month, selected from the hundreds that the Metropolitan Museum acquires through gifts and purchases annually. The series will also pair spectacular photography with curatorial commentary, often including video for further contextualization of the works.

Michigan State University in East Lansing has received a $5 million gift from the art collectors Eli and Edythe Broad to increase the endowment for and to help fund exhibitions at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum for the next five years.

The Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program have formed a unique partnership to provide innovative, collaborative-style teaching across two new graduate programs at the college: an MA in art and social engagement and an MFA in community practice. The new graduate programs are expected to launch in 2015 and will help Moore establish itself as the region’s educational center for community arts practice.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in Texas has received a $2,500 award from the International Fine Print Dealers Association to fund a curatorial internship in museum print collections.

The RISD Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence has accepted a $2,500 award from the International Fine Print Dealers Association to fund a curatorial internship in museum print collections.

The University of Iowa Museum of Art in Iowa City has been given a $2,500 award from the International Fine Print Dealers Association to fund a curatorial internship in museum print collections.

Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond has announced that it will break ground on a new Institute of Contemporary Art, an exhibition and performance space, laboratory, and incubator for the presentation of visual art, theater, music, dance, and film by nationally and internationally recognized artists, in June 2014.

Yale University Press, based in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted the thirty-fifth George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award from the Art Librarians Society of North America for Interaction of Color by Josef Albers (App for iPad), published in 2013.

The Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock has received a spectacular gift of 290 watercolors and drawings by the American artist John Marin (1870–1953) from Norma B. Marin, the widow of the artist’s son.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art and Corcoran College of Art and Design (photograph by William Atkins/George Washington University and © George Washington University Photography)

The Corcoran Gallery of Art and Corcoran College of Art and Design, both in Washington, DC, have announced a merger with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University, also located in the nation’s capital.

The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, England, and the Iran Heritage Foundation have announced funding for a postgraduate and research-assistant post with a focus on Persian arts.

The Frick Art Reference Library and the William Randolph Hearst Archive at Long Island University (LIU) Post have completed a collaborative digitization project, Gilding the Gilded Age: Interior Decoration Tastes and Trends in New York City. With funding from the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program, this project brings together a group of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century auction catalogues held by the library and the archive.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California is one of five major American museums to have received funding for the Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program, which provides specialized training in the curatorial field for students across the United States with diverse backgrounds.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has received a gift from Daniel Brodsky, the museum’s chairman, and his wife Estrellita B. Brodsky, an art historian, to endow two new curatorial positions in the museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. The two positions will be called the Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art and the Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is one of five major American museums to have received funding for the Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program, which provides specialized training in the curatorial field for students across the United States with diverse backgrounds.

Ann Hamilton

Ohio State University in Columbus has initiated the Ann Hamilton Project Archive, which contains more than one thousand downloadable, high-resolution images from thirty-five installation by Hamilton, an internationally acclaimed artist and Distinguished University Professor in the university’s Department of Art.

The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has reopened its Study Room after completing the first phase of a major building-conservation project.

The Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted a $5 million contribution from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation to create a permanent, unrestricted endowment to support the core priorities of the school, while naming in perpetuity the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean. A second gift of $900,000 will supplement three existing endowments, created by the foundation in 2010, to establish an artist’s residency, scholarships for international students, and a dean’s resource fund.

Yale University Press in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted the 2013 Design Book of the Year Award by the editors of Designers & Books for Phyllis Lambert’s volume Building Seagram (2013). The press also received an honorable mention for another book, The Houses of Louis Kahn (2013) by George H. Marcus and William Whitaker.

The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Frick Collection, whose institutional libraries formed the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), have been awarded a $340,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to initiate a program of web archiving for specialist art-historical resources. The two-year program will follow a 2012 pilot study, Reframing Collections for the Digital Age, also funded by the Mellon Foundation.

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has accepted a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an upcoming exhibition, Joseph Cornell and Surrealism, organized by the museum and the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France.

The J. Paul Getty Trust, based in Los Angeles, California, and the British Museum in London, England, have announce a three-year collaboration with the National Cultural Fund and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), under the aegis of the Indian government’s Ministry of Culture, to build the capacities of ASI’s site-museum and site-management professionals. Nearly one hundred ASI professionals—among them archaeologists, site-museum professionals, site managers, directors, and caretakers—will participate in workshops, trainings, conferences, and working-group meetings in India, Los Angeles, London, and other Asian sites to help reimagine Indian site-museums with enhanced narratives, better collection management, and conservation.

The Herron School of Art and Design, part of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, has received a $2 million gift from Cindy Simon Skjodt, a philanthropist and advocate for mental health, to endow a chair for the school’s program in art therapy.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has met the goal of a major five-year initiative, the Lenfest Challenge, having raised a total of $54 million to endow twenty-nine staff positions in its curatorial, conservation, library, archive, education, publishing, and digital-technology departments. H. F. (Gerry) Lenfest, chairman emeritus of the museum’s board of trustees, and his wife, Marguerite, offered a $27 million grant in September 2008, challenging donors to match this gift on a one-to-one basis to endow and name these positions.

The University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles and the Pacific Asia Museum of Pasadena, one of the few American museums dedicated to the arts and culture of Asia and the Pacific Islands, have announced a new partnership that will preserve the museum’s 1924 Chinese Qing Dynasty–inspired mansion in downtown Pasadena as an art museum. The partnership will also enhance the scholarship of the creative faculty and students at USC’s six arts schools and those in the departments of art history, East Asian language and cultures, religion, and archaeology. In addition, the alliance will provide a foundation for a renewed museum-studies and curatorial-training program at USC.

The University of Texas at Dallas has announced the new home for the Arts and Technology (ATEC) program: the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building. This new 155,000-square-foot facility will host programs and promote advancements in visual art, emerging media technology, and multimedia communications.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has received a $9.6 million bequest from the estate of Charles H. Schwartz to establish an endowment to expand and enhance the museum’s collection of English and European works of art from the eighteenth century.