CAA News Today
CAA Joins Museum Associations in Letter to Obama Transition Team
posted by Christopher Howard — January 05, 2009
CAA has joined a list of twenty-six national organizations, six regional museum associations, and thirty-nine state associations in sending a letter to President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. The letter, drafted by the American Association of Museums and sent on December 22, 2008, states the case for the importance of US museums of all kinds and recommends $50 million in funding for the Office of Museum Services at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in fiscal year 2010—an increase of $19 million over this year’s budget.
CAA Joins Museum Associations in Letter to Obama Transition Team
posted by Christopher Howard — January 05, 2009
CAA has joined a list of twenty-six national organizations, six regional museum associations, and thirty-nine state associations in sending a letter to President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team. The letter, drafted by the American Association of Museums and sent on December 22, 2008, states the case for the importance of US museums of all kinds and recommends $50 million in funding for the Office of Museum Services at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in fiscal year 2010—an increase of $19 million over this year’s budget.
Unusual Art Spaces in Los Angeles
posted by Christopher Howard — December 22, 2008
Los Angeles boasts a number of unusual art spaces and museums that are definitely worth checking out during the 2009 Annual Conference, taking place February 25–28, 2009. CAA News has profiled six: Farmlab/Under Spring, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, LAXART, Ooga Booga, the Wende Museum, and the Institute for Figuring. After reading the article, check out each space’s website for details on exhibitions, special events, and directions.
Contemporary Art Galleries in Downtown Los Angeles
posted by Christopher Howard — December 18, 2008
Since the mid-1950s, Los Angeles has been a hotbed of new art and groundbreaking galleries, museums, and other art spaces and institutions. Throughout the greater Los Angeles area are many pockets of art-world panache, from Malibu to Culver City to Chinatown. With CAA’s 2009 Annual Conference headquartered at the Los Angeles Convention Center in downtown LA, CAA News features the robust gallery culture there and in its subdistricts.
Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa
posted by Christopher Howard — November 24, 2008
Curated by Mary Nooter Roberts, Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa is the 2009 CAA Annual Exhibition, to be held at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Opening on February 22, Continental Rifts will be presented in the Getty Gallery, the Fowler Museum’s largest space for temporary exhibitions. On view during the CAA Annual Conference, the show continues to June 14, 2009.
For more on the Continental Rifts, please read the article from the November 2008 CAA News.
Free Digital Images for Scholarly Publications
posted by Christopher Howard — October 16, 2008
CAA reminds you that three major museums—the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—have made digital images of works from their collections available for free for scholarly publications.
National Gallery
As part of its ongoing commitment to support scholarship and encourage research into England’s collection of old-master paintings, the National Gallery waives reproduction charges for digital images for use in academic books and journals that meet specific criteria and where orders are processed and delivered via its Picture Library website. Authors publishing academic work relating to the gallery’s collection are encouraged to use high-quality digital images available only from National Gallery Images, where charges will be waived for nonprofit, short-run publications. Discounts are also available for image use in student theses, academic presentations or lectures, and noncommercial private use.
Images are available at A4 and A5 at 300 dpi/ppi. The picture files themselves are derived from fully color-calibrated digital-image files created by the National Gallery. The color is therefore consistent across all images in the collection, meaning image users are able to make informed comparisons about color, tone, and brightness, and be assured of consistent color reproduction through to print.
Victoria and Albert Museum
Since early 2007, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has ended charging reproduction fees for its images used in scholarly publications. Publishers will be able to download images from the museum’s collection of more than 25,000 works directly from its website.
The museum keeps a broad definition of “scholarly.” The images will be available to students and teachers, as well as to publishers, for use in their research and coursework. The museum will continue to charge commercial publications, but their termination of fees for reproduction may encourage other institutions to follow suit.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
In 2007 the Metropolitan Museum of Art formed a partnership, called Images for Academic Publishing, with the nonprofit digital-image provider ARTstor to offer high-resolution digital images of artworks in its collection for scholarly publication—free of charge. This initiative is intended to make it easier and less expensive for authors and publishers license images for reproduction. Under a special agreement with ARTstor, this service will be available to users—both individual and institutional—who are not ARTstor subscribers.
With this important step in overcoming a longstanding obstacle to scholarly art publication, the museum aims to serve its scholarly mission by disentangling many of its most frequently requested works of art from the burden of permissions paperwork—and from the confusion that often accompanies image rental, artwork copyright, photographic copyright, and licensing. Included are many works whose copyrights have expired (generally, works created before 1923 or whose creators died more than seventy years ago) are in this cluster of images. In some instances, however, third-party copyright permissions may be needed (such as where the underlying work in an image is still under copyright). Other terms and conditions also apply.
More Information
For more information on CAA’s work on digital images, publishing, copyright, and more, please see the Intellectual Property and the Arts section of the website.
Richard Armstrong Succeeds Thomas Krens at Guggenheim
posted by Christopher Howard — September 24, 2008
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has named Richard Armstrong to the position of director of the foundation, beginning November 4. He had served as Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh since 1996 before announcing his resignation in June. Armstrong succeeds Thomas Krens, who stepped down earlier this year. As director of both the foundation and its flagship museum in New York, Armstrong will focus on the pivotal role of that museum and its collection while also providing leadership and management for the three other Guggenheim institutions in Venice, Bilbao, and Berlin, as well as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum, scheduled to open in early 2013.
Photograph by David M. Heald and © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Lehman Collapse to Hurt Art Museums
posted by Christopher Howard — September 18, 2008
“The collapse of Lehman Brothers is destined to pass like a cold wind through the museum world,” reports Artnet.com, “which has leaned on the investment firm for untold millions of dollars in arts patronage.” Museums nationwide, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Asia Society in New York to major institutions in Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, will all need to look elsewhere for charitable donations. In addition, arts institutions in England, France, and Germany—not to mention domestic arts-education programs for school children in the US—will also see funding evaporate from the $39 million that Lehman Brothers gave as charitable gifts in 2007.
David Segal and Jacqueline Trescott at the Washington Post write that “Lehman may never hand out another charitable dime; the immediate future of the firm’s philanthropic foundation, like everything else about it, is now a matter of bankruptcy law. But the fear isn’t limited to those groups that were getting money from corporate America’s recently deceased and badly wounded. There’s agita all around.” Segal and Trescott talk to arts-institution directors and corporate funders to scope out the current state of funding in light of recent financial events.
See also Philip Boroff’s “Life After Lehman: Nonprofits Brace Amid Bankruptcy” on Bloomberg.com.
Darsie Alexander Is Chief Curator at the Walker
posted by Christopher Howard — September 11, 2008
The Star Tribune in Minneapolis–St. Paul recently reported that Darsie Alexander has been named chief curator at the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. Alexander, senior curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland, starts her new position on November 10, replacing Philippe Vergne, who served as both the Walker’s deputy director and chief curator before he leaving last month to direct the Dia Art Foundation in New York.
Alexander’s recent exhibitions in Baltimore include SlideShow (2005) and Robert Motherwell: Meanings of Abstraction (2006). Two additional shows, Franz West, To Build a House You Start with the Roof: Work, 1972–2008, a retrospective of the Austrian sculptor’s work, and Front Room: Dieter Roth and Rachel Harrison, open next month.
Photograph by Mitro Hood and provided by the Walker Art Center.
Thomas P. Campbell to Direct the Metropolitan Museum of Art
posted by Christopher Howard — September 10, 2008
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that Thomas P. Campbell—an accomplished curator with a specialty in European tapestry who has worked at the museum since 1995—has been elected its next director and chief executive officer, succeeding Philippe de Montebello, who announced in January his intention to retire from the Metropolitan Museum at the end of this year.
Campbell organized the groundbreaking and widely acclaimed exhibitions Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (2002), whose catalogue won CAA’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award in 2003, and Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor (2007). Currently curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts as well as supervising curator of the museum’s Antonio Ratti Textile Center, Campbell was elected at yesterday’s meeting of the board of trustees and will assume the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum on January 1, 2009.
Image: Thomas P. Campbell (left) and Philippe de Montebello (photograph by Don Pollard and provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)