Maria Ann Conelli, director of the American Folk Art Museum, has quit her post, and that suggests one of two things: either the troubles at the museum go deeper than previously acknowledged, or she can not figure out a way to solve them. Or both.

Conelli (right) posted her resignation, effective in July, on the museum’s website. She said she was leaving the museum “in the good hands of our Deputy Director, Linda Dunne, and our Board leadership, who will continue to uphold our mission of educating with our world-class collection of art.”

The folk art museum has been in trouble for ages. As Bloomberg points out in its recap of the situation, it has defaulted on interest payments due on $31.9 million in bonds, having missed a $3.7 million payment in January. At the time, it said it did not expect to make required payments “in the foreseeable future.”

The folk art museum recently had a huge success overseeing the exhibition of red-and-white quilts owned by Joanna S. Rose at the Park Avenue Armory. It attracted 5,000 visitors in the course of six days. But the Rose family paid for that exhibition, which was free to the public. The museum’s other exhibitions — also celebrating quilts — have apparently not been big draws. Nor has the museum been able to attract new donors.

In February, the museum told Bloomberg News that it would not sell works from its collection to pay down its debt, and said it expected to have a balanced budget for the fiscal year ending June 30. According to that article, the museum’s forebearance agreement with ACA Financial Guarantee Corp., which had provided a $853,425 cash injection for the museum, allowing bondholders to be paid interest due them, expires June 30.

Which probably means another cash crunch — for payments due in July.

It remains to be seen whether any members of the board of trustees will come to the rescue.

On a related front, the folk art museum was also recently forced to drop out of a planned exhibition at the Venice Biennale. According to Art in America magazine, Benetton, the exhibition sponsor, pulled out as the benefactor of Vision and Vernacular: Eight African American Artists in Venice, which was to have been held at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a property owned by the Benetton Group near the Rialto Bridge. The show was curated by Carlo McCormick and Martha V. Henry, and “would have featured works by Outsider artists Lonnie Holley, Mr. Imagination (Gregory Warmack), Charles Lucas and Kevin Sampson, and site-specific murals by street artists Blade (Steven Ogburn), Daze (Chris Ellis), Quik (Lin Felton) and Sharp (Aaron Goodstone).”

A in A quoted McCormick as saying that Benetton and the museum “bickered every step of the way.” He added that he thought the disagreement was over who would pay for what.

I haven’t dug deeply, with my own reporting, into this museum’s troubles, but what I have heard from credible sources is that all the troubles began with a poorly planned, over-optimistic expansion into its new building several years ago. Might the museum save itself by selling that, and returning to its original location near Lincoln Center — which is now a satellite museum? It’s worth considering. If, of course, it can sell the new building near the Museum of Modern Art.

UPDATED, 5/11: The museum has reached an agreement to sell that new building to the Museum of Modern Art. Here’s the open letter from board president Laura Parsons announcing the sale. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum

 

Another museum is starting an intiative to mount single-picture museum exhibitions: The Speed Art Museum in Louisville has arranged to bring one of Caravaggio’s early masterpieces, The Fortune Teller, into its galleries later this month, borrowed from the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

This is only the second time the painting has been shown in the U.S., the Speed says.

Also tucked into the press release sent to me was this statement from Charles Venable, the Speed’s director: “The presentation of The Fortune Teller is part of our new Masterpiece Series and an outgrowth of our commitment to enhancing the art experiences we bring the public…”

I’ve been advocating these show for a while (see here, here and here, for examples at the Prado, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Portland Art Museum, for instance). I realize that they are not “new” — and that there are other examples, but the Speed Museum hadn’t announced a Masterpiece Series, so I asked about it. Here’s what Venable wrote back:

Officially our upcoming Caravaggio project is the first in the Series. However, the idea has been bouncing around in my head for a while. As it is increasingly difficult to afford huge loan shows, I have been thinking that we need to begin “retraining” our audience to appreciate the permanent collection more and small-scale exhibition projects. Given that we museums trained visitors in the 1970s and ’80s to expect bigger and bigger projects with huge budgets and catalogues, it seems to me we might be able to get the public to appreciate more focused projects as well.

With that in mind I pulled [Leonardo’s] Forster Codex out of the show Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the Victoria & Albert Museum that we did in 2008, and presented it alone in our Renaissance period room with separate signage and a computer interactive that let one page though the book and translate the text.

Then in 2009 we borrowed from the St. Louis Art Museum a spectacular, early painting by Max Beckmann. The Speed does not own a major German Expressionist oil painting, so my philosophy is simply to try to borrow things we do not or cannot own. Beckmann’s Titanic from 1912 proved a great hit when hung on axis in the permanent collection galleries.

With these two successes behind us, I decided to formally start the new “Masterpiece Series” with Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller …

That line about “retraining” just about sums up what I think museums will be doing; another way to say it is “changing their expectations,” or giving them new reasons to come for a visit.

Venable says they he, and I know that he is not alone in this — is in negotiations to borrow other great works that can hold their own as a single-painting show, or are shown with a few other ancillary pictures. Stayed tuned for more.

The Caravaggio will be on view at the Speed from May 18 – June 5, 2011, but before it opens there, the painting (dated 1594), which portrays a Gypsy girl stealthily stealing a gold ring from the finger of the young man whose palm she is reading, will spend a few days in New York, at the Italian Cultural Institute from May 11 through May 15. A symposium on the painting will take place on May 13 at Hunter College.

Venable also mentioned another initiative, an interactive the Speed recently created on its website for a French Book of Hours. “That will give you an idea of how I hope to entice the public to interact with singular works of art in the galleries,” he said.

Well, I’ve only explored a small part of it, but it looks good. If you have time, explore it.

It’s not too early to think about summer reading; I’ve come across two new books about American artists that seem noteworthy.

The first, Romare Bearden, American Modernist, was reviewed in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal by Jonathan Lopez, an editor-at-large at Art and Antiques. The book is a collection of essays, not really a biography; it brings together 14 papers originally given at a symposium at the National Gallery of Art in Washington during the 2003 Bearden retrospective, and was edited by Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis. But as Lopez wrote:

Employing a variety of methodological approaches–biographical, sociological, formalist, iconographic–they produce a composite portrait of a complex man who forged an unconventional path to artistic success. The book provides a useful introduction to Bearden’s work, although his own writings, which are extensive and insightful, remain an indispensable resource.

The second book is a traditional biography — Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter by Patricia Albers (who also wrote a biography of Tina Modotti). An amusing choice of title, actually, because although Mitchell did make her way in the tough, masculine art world of the 1950s (As a New York art dealer once reputedly said to her, “Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead”) to become a painter, she is just as well known for her unladylike carousing with the hard-drinking guys like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

The book arrives in stores May 3, and I have not yet seen a review. But Publisher’s Weekly describes it this way:

In this first biography of renowned abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Albers …vividly chronicles the artist’s tortuous journey from her wealthy upbringing in Chicago to her defiant student days at Smith College, and as a young painter at the Art Institute of Chicago when “the wisdom of the day held that women couldn’t really paint.” … Albers deftly balances Mitchell’s often difficult temperament (some found her “cranky and contentious”; she was an insomniac and alcoholic) with her artistic vision. … Vibrantly written and carefully researched, including numerous interviews with Mitchell’s former husband, Barney Rosset (former owner of Grove Press), friends, lovers, and colleagues, Albers constructs a fluid, energetic narrative of Mitchell’s complicated life and work.

Both Bearden and Mitchell are well-regarded nowadays but, on a comparable basis with their peers, prices for their works have not soared as high as the work seems to warrant. The book on Mitchell may help, as it’s written for a wider audience than the Bearden book. Then again, the latter has been reviewed in the WSJ, which art-buyers read. We’ll just have to see.

 

More turnover at the top of a yet another Texas museum: Earlier this week, Ned Rifkin resigned as director of the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin, less than two years after he arrived. The university’s provost, Steven W. Leslie, immediately promoted the deputy director for external affairs and operations, Simone Wicha, to the top slot.

Rifkin stays on at the university to do research and teach, but his quick replacement probably reflects unhappiness with within the Blanton/university. The exact nature of Rifkin’s difficulties — or disagreements with the powers that be — are unclear, but his departure has been rumored for weeks. 

Rifkin came to the Blanton from the post of Undersecretary for Art at the Smithsonian. Before that, at the job he held until 2001, he was director of the Menil Collection in Houston, where he faced a board divided by his leadership and performance, a situation recounted here on 29-95.com. Rifkin also once headed both the High Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum.

In the press release announcing Rifkin’s resignation from the Blanton, Leslie said the university appreciated his knowledge, and noted that Rifkin had improved student involvement with the museum, but not much else.

It was Rifkin, who reorganized the Blanton’s staff last April, who had promoted Wicha from director of development to deputy director.

Like the Blanton — Austin’s largest art museum — both Houston’s biggest, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Dallas’s, the Dallas Museum of Art, are experiencing leadership change. The MFA’s beloved director, Peter C. Marzio, died last December, and Bonnie Pittman, the DMA’s much-loved director, recently announced that she would step down because of health reasons. 

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Austin360.com

 

The National Endowment for the Arts is out with another statistical study, an attempt to state the value Americans place on the arts by looking at the time and money they spend consuming the arts and based on numerous federal studies by the U.S. Economic Census, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

While the information about the perforrming arts is more plentiful, there is some data about “museums” — though since there is no definition for “museums,” we have to assume that all museums, not just art museums, are in these numbers.

With those caveats, here are a few interesting numbers:

• In 2009, the most recent year for which estimates were available, U.S. consumers spent $6 billion on admissions to museums and libraries. That compares to $14.5 billion on tickets to performing arts events, $10.5 billion on tickets to movie theaters, and $20.5 billion on sports admissions. 
• On an average day, museums draw more than 500,000 people. On an average weekend day or holiday, this figure climbs to 885,000 people. By comparison, 1.5 million (age 15 and older) attend the performing arts, 3.4 million go to movie theaters, and 2.7 million attend sporting events. 
• The survey shows that on average visitors spend 2 hours and 24 minutes at museums.
• Not surprisingly, while peak attendance for performing arts activities and sports events occurs in the evenings – between 8 and 9 p.m. for performing arts and 7 p.m. for sports events – for museums, peak attendance occurs between noon and 1 p.m.: lunch hour.

How to interpret this, aside from the fact that museums seem to be a good value — which is an obvious selling point nowadays.

Two, versus the alternatives here, museums are punching below their weight in attendance.

Three, intuitively, given these attendance patterns, museums would do better if they were open in the evenings. People are going during lunch hour because that’s the only time they can on a weekday.

On that score (see my earlier pleadings on the subject, starting here), I am pleased to record here that the Museum of Modern Art recently initiated summer evening hours: between July 1 and Sept. 3, MoMA will be open until 8:30 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Currrently, MoMA is open until 8 p.m. on Fridays, and 5:30 p.m. on other days.

And the Frick Collection will stay open, with free admission, from 6 to 9 p.m. on May 13 — and promises  to have these special evening hours (with music, sketching, curator talks) once for each special exhibition it mounts (this one is connected to the current Rembrandt show). It’s a start (though the Frick said it tried staying open one evening a week, at full price, back around 2002 — but charged full price and had no special offerings).

Here’s a link to the NEA report and another to the NEA press release.