The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced today that it was officially buying Dale Chihuly’s Lime Green Icicle Tower. We knew that was coming — it had launched a well-publicized campaign for public donations, more about which in a minute.
I know acquisitions happen every day, but sometimes the art world totally misses, or ignores, developments that happen in much of the U.S. So here are two recent announcements worth noting:
For the past five years, in the runup to its 100th anniversary, the New Orleans Museum of Art has been on an acquisition campaign, and next month, we’ll all see the results. They’ll be shown in NOMA 100: Gifts for the Second Century, which goes onview November 13 through January 22, 2012 and celebrates 110 new gifts to its “wide-ranging” collection of more than 35,000 works.
Here are some highlights:
- an untitled reflective, stainless steel 78-inchtall cube sculpture by Anish Kapoor, dated 1997, left.
- American artist Keith Sonnier’s Fluorescent Room, an interactive, site-specific installation made from Styrofoam, phosphorescent pigment, and ultraviolet light that “explores the effects of light and audience participation-themes central to Sonnier’s creative output.”
- Figure 8 from Black and White Numerals, 1968, a lithograph by Jasper Johns.
A charcoal drawing by Käthe Kollwitz, with a hungry child and woman carrying laundry, and also her bronze sculpture Great Lovers II, 1913- An outdoor gilt bronze statue of Diana, modeled 1886, cast 1985, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
- 18 color photographs by Robert Polidori including 5979 West End Boulevard, 2005, taken in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, at right.
- Gabrielle Münter’s Main Street in Murnau, 1905, below
- Inverted Spiraling Tower, 1987, by Sol LeWitt
Much further afield, in Brooklings, S.D., the South Dakota Art Museum has received a gift of more than 400 prints by more than 100 artists, including Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse and Robert Indiana. That’s according to The Brookings Register. They’re a gift of Neil C. Cockerline, preservation services director and senior conservator with the Midwest Art Conservation Center in Minneapolis, Minn. and they’ve been valued at about $1 million.
Judging from the website, the SDAM’s collection includes mostly prairie and Native American artists, so this is a welcome addition.
Now, back in Boston: Chilhuly’s tower has been sitting in the MFA courtyard since last March, the start of the museum’s Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass exhibit. As I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in July, visitors wanted it to stay, and the MFA launch a public appeal on July 18.
The MFA has now raised more than $1 million for it, and it says that “over $760,000 was contributed [by] donors who are not Trustees or Overseers of the MFA,” including nearly $50,000 given via online, cell phone (texting) and in the collection box·at the museum. “Thousands” individuals made gifts “by first-time visitors and long-time friends, ranging from piggy-bank savings brought in by children, to checks written by adults.”
Here’s a link to the MFA press release, which contains a little glitz: the largest gift came from the Donald Saunders and Liv Ullman Family — he’s a Boston real estate developer and she’s the actress/director.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of NOMA