This may sound harsh, and I don’t mean it to be, but one has to wonder what the city fathers and mothers of Claremont, Ca. were thinking when they decided to open the Claremont Museum of Art a few years ago.

That museum, we now know, is about to close for lack of funding.

Claremont has a population of about 38,000 and is 13.4 square miles in area. It describes itself, on its own website, as 30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles — which has a number of museums, as we know. Did Claremont really think it needed its own?

If so, it actually has its own: Claremont is home to the seven Claremont colleges, which happen to include the Pomona College Museum of Art, the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery and the Clark Humanities Museum.

In mid-November, the Los Angeles Times reported that “the museum recently laid off its full-time staff after three expected donations failed to materialize, but the galleries have remained open,” and that the city had given the Claremont Museum of Art a grant of $18,879 to stay open through this month.

Here’s another account of the museum’s status.

Recently, at a lecture in Las Vegas, Cincinnati Art Museum director Aaron Betsky was reported to have said “It is ridiculous that a city as large as this does not have a public art institution…”

In Claremont’s case, I would turn that around: It was foolhardy for Claremont, so close to major museums, with college museums within its boundaries, to spend money on a new museum.

It’s no secret that the museum infrastructure in the U.S. is overbuilt — though some of the museums are in the wrong place, given population shifts. But building museums because we can — see a 2007 article of mine in Art & Auction — isn’t the solution.

 

Like artists, poets send Christmas cards, too. Witness Robert Frost, who sent illustrated chapbooks of his poetry to friends as Christmas cards from 1934 through 1962.

Poets House* in lower Manhattan has put its collection of these Frost chapbooks on display in an exhibition that runs through Jan. 16

This intimate exhibition features beautiful, illustrated chapbooks of Frost’s poetry published by Spiral Press and sent out as holiday greetings by the revered poet as well as by his publishers, collectors and friends. Master printer Joseph Blumenthal of Spiral Press printed 275 of the first Robert Frost Christmas cards in 1929 as a holiday greeting for himself, Henry Holt and Company (one of Frost’s publishers) and two Holt executives. Blumenthal forgot to print any for the poet, who subsequently charged Blumenthal with the task of retrieving a half a dozen cards for him to use. The next holiday chapbook was published in collaboration with Frost in 1934 with a print run of 775 and became an annual publication until 1962.

In this case, Poets House is just one institution with these wonderful holdings. The University of Maryland, it turns out, owns a comprehensive collection of books by and about Robert Frost, including “boxed sets of custom Christmas cards and pamphlets designed and annotated by Frost.”

Maryland’s treasures are not on view, but you can learn more about the collection here.  

Earlier this month (when I learned of the show at Poets House), I actually found a 1935 Christmas chapbook from Frost for sale at eBay. When I checked this morning, though, the listing had closed, but there was another one from 1961, available for $49.99 as a “buy it now” offering. So it does seem that Frost’s card/chapbooks become available from time to time.

If you’d like to read more about Frost’s Christmas offerings, you can go to this entry written last year at a blog called Poetry & Popular Culture by Mike Chasar (here). And the Paper Cuts blog (new to me) of The New York Times published an item on the Poets House exhibition earlier this month (here) with a slide show. 

Photos: Courtesy Poets House and the University of Maryland

* I consult to a foundation that supports Poets House

 

Artists send Christmas cards, too. Maybe some readers of Real Clear Arts have been lucky enough to receive them.

For the rest of us, there’s an exhibition of examples, drawn from the Archives of American Art*; it’s been on view since Nov. 20 at the Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture — aka the home of the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum — and continues through Jan. 10, 2010.

Called Season’s Greetings: Holiday Cards From the Archives of American Art, it includes examples by Philip Guston, Alexander Calder, Dan Flavin, Kay Sage, Ernest Blumenschein, Arnold Newman and others.

The Archives, smartly, lets online visitors send one of the nine cards (click on title link, above), three of which I’ve pasted here. From top to bottom, they are by Demi and Arturo Rodriguez made sometime in the 1980s-90s; by Edward F. Dickerson, sent in 1959 (to printmaker Prentiss Taylor); and by Noche Crist, c. 1962 (also to Prentiss Taylor).

The show is located in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery of the Archives of American Art at the Reynolds Center.

Simultaneously, and also until Jan. 10, the Archives has mounted an exhibit called Winter Wonderland at its New York City research center. It shows holiday cards made by artists and received by painters Kathleen Blackshear (1897-1988) and Ethel Spears (1902-1974). For images in that show, go here.

Photos: Courtesy Archives of American Art

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Archives

Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities announced new rounds of grants in recent days, and both are worth a closer look.

The NEH is sending $20 million to 319 projects in 45 states. Lots of the awards, as usual, are small — $5,000 here, $6,000 there — made to smaller institutions.

But there were big ones, too. Among those winners:

• The Peabody Essex Museum (right), which received $750,000 to endow a curator of photography position and for “enhanced humanitites programming.”
• Brandeis University received $600,000 to support various functions at the Mandel Center for the Humanities.
• Midwest Art Conservation Center received $467,401, plus $32,599 in matching funds, for an expansion in the regional preservation field service program.
• Nebraska Educational Telecommunications won $500,000 for a digital humanities endowment fund.
• Museum of the Moving Image received $700,000 to help build and equip an education center with humanities program.
• Museum for African Art recieved $500,000 to help finish its new building at the top of Central Park.

The entire lists are posted online, organized by states: from Alabama to Kentucky here; Maine to New York here; North Carolina to Wyoming here.

The NEA, meanwhile, is spreading more than $26 million among 1,207 recipients for Access to Artistic Excellence, Creative Writing Fellowships in Prose, Challenge America: Reaching Every Community Fast Track and the New Play Development Project.

Arena Stage received $280,000 for the new play development program, but the rest of the grants are much smaller, as many go to individuals and commnunity groups. Literature fellowships are $25,000; Challenge Ameria grants are $10,000 each. The largest Access to Artistic Excellence Award that I noticed, eyeballing the list, was $35,000 to MacDowell Colony (above, left).* Access grants “support the creation and presentation of work in the disciplines of dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, media arts, museums, music, musical theater, opera, presenting, theater, and visual arts.”

No surprise here, but the NEA says applications for Access grants are up by 22%. In March 2009, the NEA received 1,697 eligible applications (requesting more than $88 million) vs. 1,394 applications in March 2008.  

Read the entire NEA list here.

The two agencies have different models, of course, and deal with different but sometimes overlapping institutions. I wish the NEA had more room to invest a lot of money on one thing from time to time — the way the NEH has done with director’s grants for traveling exhibitions, which amount to about $1 million each.  

Photo: Courtesy Peabody Essex Museum (top); Photo by Judith Dupre, Courtesy MacDowell (bottom). 

* I consult to a foundation that supports MacDowell.   

What was the first thing Thomas P. Campbell did last January when he assumed his new job as head of the Metropolitan Museum*? 

That was one of the questions Campbell encountered on Wednesday night, when he addessed a forum sponsored by the Alliance for the Arts and the New York Times. Campbell spoke — and showed slides — for 25 minutes, give or take, and then opened the floor. I was eager to see what the public wanted to know, but truth is this public seemed to consist mainly of people from arts institutions or already deeply involved in the arts.

And Campbell is a diplomat, as we’ve already learned. Asked, for example, what three art works he’d take with him if stranded on a desert island, he responded that there were representatives from more than three Met departments in the audience and therefore couldn’t say. Then he added that he’d “slit my wrists” if there were only three.

To me, the most interesting comment he made was that he already had his eye on what the museum should be in 2020, its 150th anniversary — when he will be just 58 and presumably still at the helm. “I challenge myself to see the Met then,” he said.

Here are the bits of information, some new, he disclosed:

• The Met website gets 34 million visitors a year.
• More than 40% of visitors visit the website before going to the museum.
• 31% of its visitors are international.
• The issue is “not that visitors know less about art history” than they used to, but that they have learned no art history.
• He’s committed to remaining a leading publisher of scholarly art books, though the museum has to look hard at the balance between online publication and traditional publication.  
• He “rather” likes the unfinished facade, though discussions about completing it continue.

[Read more…] about Tom Campbell, After Almost One Year On the Met Job