Archives for November 2010

Here’s some good museum news — very good. The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has just announced that the gift it received from the estate of Frances Lasker Brody is expected to yield in excess of $100 million. Maybe much more.

Brody died in November 2009, and was a longtime member of the Huntington’s board of overseers. The Huntington received $15 million from her estate in October and another $80 million last week. Her house, a landmark midcentury modern 11,500 sq. ft. structure designed in 1949 by A. Quincy Jones, is on the market for more than $24 million, and the Huntington will also receive proceeds from that.

The bulk of the money was directed by Brody to the gardens, but Huntington president Stephen Koblik says that that will free up other funds and allow them to be directed toward the Huntington’s infrastructure and other programs. Says Koblik:

Our primary responsibility is to make certain the funds will have maximum impact, focusing on the donor’s intent and institutional need over time. By leveraging these funds and investing them as though they were an endowment we will make the gift work for the whole of the institution, supporting our strategic priorities.

The Huntington’s current endowment is worth about $240 million. Koblik plans to invest the Brody gift and thereby “stretch into perpetuity, providing a measure of stability The Huntington has never had.” Among his top priority is raising staff compensation to competitive levels, he says.

I have no idea if that’s wise, as I am not privy to compensation levels, but I will take him at his word, since the rest of his comments do seem wise.

The art collected by Brody and her husband was world-class art; it included important works by Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti, Renoir, Calder, and Braque, and was auctioned last May.  Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves, and a Bust alone sold for a record $106.5 million.

More details of the gift are here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Huntington Library (top), Kate Carr Photography via New York Times (bottom)

The Taubman Museum of Art saga continues, with implications for art museums beyond big cities. The other day, at a meeting of about 300 museum supporters, director David Mickenberg presented a survival plan for the Roanoke, Va. facility, which opened in late 2008, and hit troubles almost immediately. Big ambitions — too big — were part of the problem.

You can catch up on the background from my earlier post.

According to the Roanoke Times, artist John Wiercioch, “whose resume includes working for art museums,” said after the meeting that Mickenberg’s plan laid the groundwork for the community to embrace the Taubman as it adapts to the region it’s a part of. “This isn’t a New England-Eastern Seaboard population that’s used to going to museums.” The Taubman is making the right move by working out how to connect to a Southwest Virginia audience, he said.

Emphasis mine.

So, it seems, the Taubman (above) is redefining itself. On its website, the museum outlines the new direction: It will become an “arts center” — which “encompasses the functions of an art museum but is broader in scope and more of a hybrid non-profit, permanent cultural institution.” At the meeting, Mickenberg talked about commmunity support and fundraising, and the Times reported that Mickenberg said that the museum will “live or die” by its community support.

When the Taubman opened, it wasn’t thinking much about community support, and its “consultants” — whom Mickenberg declined to identify — overestimated its potential. In 2004, they predicted annual revenues of $745,000 in admissions, $230,000 in space rentals and $650,000 in retail sales.

The museum has lowered expectations, and for 2010-11, the budget projects admissions of $119,455, space rentals of $81,415 and retail sales of $134,000. 

That’s $1.6 million versus $334,879 — quite a comedown. 

The rest of the museum’s $2.6 million budget has to come from somewhere, or — as the Times reported, from “Building membership from 2,800 to 7,000. Enlisting more than 100 corporate sponsors. Starting a grass-roots fundraising campaign and asking donors who gave to the building fund to open their wallets again.”

And these are lowered expectations. Just last summer, Mickenberg was talking about a $3 million annual budget.

On the upside, he has hired several adjunct curators — local artists — to make up for the staff cuts made, in four rounds, since the museum opened.

By changing the museum’s mission, and talking about it in different terms, Mickenberg — and presumably the board — are trying to return to reality. And that’s a good thing. I don’t know Roanoke, but I tend to believe Wiercioch. As I’ve said before, not every community can support a high-faluting art museum. But that doesn’t mean everyone shouldn’t have access to art — quite the contrary. Is this the answer? It may be one answer, and I’m not sure that the Taubman can pull this one off.

Here’s the link to the Times article.

This one is just for fun. A couple of weeks ago, I paid a visit to the studio of Lucas Samaras, which sits on the 62nd floor of a midtown New York building. I went to talk with him about Poses/Born Actors, his new exhibition at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea. A sampling of the works:

I was there to write a piece for The Daily Beast, and Samaras (a “74-year-old multi-media wizard”) knew what that meant — names and stories, rather than the more esoteric aspects of his art. He wasn’t the least bit uncooperative, and we had a blast. “VIP Portrait Show” was published on Friday, and it began this way:

Jasper Johns is there. So are artists Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz, Chuck Close and Lisa Yuskavage. Glenn Lowry, the head of the Museum of Modern Art, and Lisa Phillips, of the New Museum, are side-by-side with collectors Leonard Lauder, Marie-Josee Kravis, Agnes Gund and dozens of similar luminaries….

Why Leonard Lauder, chairman emeritus of the Whitney Museum, but not his brother Ronald, former chairman of MoMA? Where are hot-shot artists Richard Prince and John Currin? Why isn’t Henry Kravis there with his wife? How about alpha collectors Aby Rosen, the real estate tycoon, and Beth Rudin DeWoody, an heir to the Rudin real estate fortune? Sandra Brant is in, but not her ex-husband, newsprint magnate Peter, or his off-again, on-again second wife, supermodel Stephanie Seymour….

And so on. (The things you sometimes have to do to get the general public interested in art…)

But as I also say, it’s not clear whether you’d want to be in this group or not. Samaras made the images from digital headshots, lit from below. Starting with those shadowy images, he used Photoshop to create “unpretty” images that exaggerate and reveal — not conceal, Photoshop’s usual task.

It’s a fun show, made more so by the fact that most of Samaras’s subjects didn’t know what he was up to. Their invitation to the opening last Monday night came with a mini-bottle of booze and the suggestion that they drink it before coming.

Read more here and see a gallery of 14 of the photos here.

Above, left to right: Ingrid Sischy, Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman (details).

Photo Credit: Courtesy Lucas Samaras and the Pace Gallery.

 

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston opens its new Art of the Americas wing to the press today, the start of the runup to its public opening on Nov. 20.

So there will likely be many articles and blogs and other news reports in the next week. I’ve already tried to get ahead of them (here and here), and here’s one more. This morning, Andrea Shea of WBUR, the public radio station in Boston, weighed in. She interviewed me, among others, and I got to make a few more points about the campaign.

One, as I put it conversationally:

You know the MFA was very ambitious here, but at the same time a bit conservative by going for a building fund and an endowment fund at the same time. I shouldn’t say conservative. I should say responsible here.

And another point:

You’ve hit on a very important question for most museum expansions, which is sustainability. Usually the first year and sometimes the first year-and-a-half, two years, people come to see the new building, it’s exciting, the question is whether they keep coming back year after year.

Here’s the link to Shea’s full report.

That’s Copley’s Paul Revere above; it has a place of honor in the new wing.

Photo Credit: Courtesy, MFA

Today’s New York Times contains its annual special section on philanthropy — called “Giving” — and the most relevant article for Arts Journal readers happens to be by me. Headlined “Boston Museum Grows By Casting A Wide Net,” it’s about the fundraising activities of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — and, of course, Malcolm Rogers.

If you had said, nine years ago, that the MFA would raise as much in money and art for a new wing and endowment and other purposes as it has — more than $750 all-told — many people would have said “uh, uh. Not likely.” But the museum did it, and I do believe that Rogers is correct when he told me that the pitch he makes is never need, it’s vision:

I always say don’t go to people and say, “We really need your money because we have a leaky roof.” Go and say, “We want the very best roof in America because this is a very great institution.”

Rogers’s vision wasn’t just the new Art of the Americas wing that is officially opening on Nov. 20, but which will be showcased at a gala benefit on Saturday night. It included that, of course, but as Rogers told me:

My vision is to open the museum to as many people as possible, to give to as many opportunities for close encounters with art to as many people as possible.

That was the vision, broadly speaking, which led to a strategy and tactics, some of which are outlined in my article.

Rogers even built a special “great room” at his home for entertaining prospects.

A couple of other points:

• A vision doesn’t have to be a new building. It can be the best acquistion, the best education program, a new what-not. As long as it inspires belief in the institution — that’s the key.
• Rogers didn’t do it alone, of course — the development staff, led by Pat Jacoby, received high praise as well, and they did many things in this campaign that were new to the MFA.
• One key was approaching people with ties to Boston, or the MFA, who had moved away. A college town like Boston has many more such prospects than some other cities.

Even so, again (as I wrote here), I have to hand it to the MFA — it has made quite a turnaround in the last 15 years.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The New York Times