The Center for Curatorial Leadership is conducting a research project that seeks basic information on the educational and career choices made by art historians working in the United States who enter the museum and academic professions.
While sometimes regarded as “the two art histories,” museum and academic careers share a common starting point in college and graduate studies. In order to understand how the Center for Curatorial Leadership might mentor young art historians and form bonds between disciplines more effectively, it has assembled a brief survey. Comments and any suggestions are welcome as well.
The survey should take approximately ten minutes to complete. Deadline: Monday, April 19, 2010.
In response to Museums Advocacy Day, held on March 22–23, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is circulating a “Dear Colleague” letter to encourage her fellow senators to ask the Senate Appropriations Committee for $50 million in funding for the Office of Museum Services, a branch of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The amount requested for fiscal year 2011 is a $14.8 million increase over the current fiscal year. Gillibrand’s letter is similar to a separate effort in the House of Representatives, supported by Representatives Paul Tonko (D-NY), Louise Slaughter (D-NY), and Leonard Lance (R-NJ).
The American Association of Museums (AAM) has prepared a form letter that you may use to send an urgent message to your senators. Use the online fields to enter your contact information, which will then select your senator’s name and address. You can then download (as an .rtf) and print the letter to mail or fax, or choose the email option to send your letter right away. You can edit and personalize your missive before sending.
The American Association of Museums (AAM) is organizing Museums Advocacy Day 2010, taking place March 22–23 in Washington, DC, and CAA invites your participation. This event is your chance to receive advocacy and policy training and then take the case to Capitol Hill alongside fellow advocates from your state and congressional district.
AAM is working with sponsoring organizations, which include CAA, to develop the legislative agenda for this year’s event. Likely issues will include federal funding for museums, museums and federal education policy, and charitable giving issues affecting museums.
The entire museum field is welcome to participate: staff, volunteers, trustees, students, or even museum enthusiasts. Museums Advocacy Day is the ideal chance for new and seasoned advocates to network with museum professionals from their state and meet with congressional offices.
Registration
Individual museum professionals, supporters, and trustees may register online. National, regional, and state organizations that would like to register as partnering organizations and individuals who prefer to complete a paper registration may use the Museums Advocacy Day 2010 Registration Form.
Participants are asked to cover the cost of their meals and materials: $75. This amount includes: two breakfasts, one lunch, one evening reception, and all training materials and supplies. Deadline: February 17, 2010.
The event hotel is the Doubletree Hotel Crystal City, 300 Army Navy Drive, Arlington, VA 22202. The Museums Advocacy Day rate is $209, available until February 15 or until sold out. Call 800-222-TREE and reference Museums Advocacy Day or the three-letter reservation code AVD, or reserve a room online and used the group code AVD.
Tentative Schedule
March 22 will be a critical day of advocacy and policy training, to be held at the National Building Museum, featuring:
A briefing on the museum field’s legislative agenda
Tips on meeting with elected officials and the stats you need to make your case
Instruction on how to participate in year-round advocacy and engage your elected officials in the ongoing work of your museum
Networking with advocates from your state on the following day’s Capitol Hill visits
An evening reception, with members of Congress and staff invited
On March 23, we will take our message to Capitol Hill. Advocates will gather in groups by state and congressional districts to make coordinated visits to House and Senate offices to make the case for increased federal support for museums.
Today in Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik reports on recent work of a task force, comprising representatives from seven national and international organizations, that is raising awareness of the value of university and college art museums and galleries in light of recent events involving attempts by schools to sell work from their collections.
In “Avoiding the Next Brandeis,” Jaschik talks to the task-force cochair David Alan Robertson, director of Northwestern University’s Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, who is “trying to impress upon [regional higher-education accrediting agencies] that museums shouldn’t be viewed as extras, but as ‘teaching institutions and research institutions.’” Jaschik continues, “Another strategy being discussed is encouraging colleges to define the financial exigency plans—or what they would do in a severe financial crisis—and to make the case that museums should not be the first institutions to be closed.”
Lyndel King, task-force cochair and director and chief curator of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, tells the reporter that “we need to educate college administrators and governing boards that disposing of their collections can’t be a way to fill the coffers or seen as an easy way to bring in money.”
The task force comprises representatives from CAA, the American Association of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, the International Council of Museums, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Association of Art Museum Curators. The next meeting of the task force will take place on January 9, 2010, in Sarasota, Florida, in conjunction with the midwinter gathering of the Association of Art Museum Directors.
You may read the petition, published by the task force in July 2009, and include your name and affiliation in the growing list of signatories. A prominent advertisement will appear in the Chronicle for Higher Education later this month; you can download a PDF of it or click and save the above image for use in blogs, press, and more. The task force had planned to include all signatories in the ad, but the list has exceeded 2,200 names and institutional affiliations—too many to include in print.
A report issued by a Brandeis University committee recommends that the school’s Rose Art Museum remain open, but the future of the collection of modern and contemporary art is still in doubt.
In the Boston Globe, Tracy Jan writes that the committee, comprising teachers, students, and university trustees and officials, also suggests better integration between the museum and academic departments, which include not just visual art but also math and science. In addition, a full-time director, who would also teach, and an education director should be hired.
This past summer several members of the Rose Art Museum’s board of overseers filed a lawsuit in Massachusetts in an attempt to prevent Brandeis from selling the art collection. Last week the university filed to dismiss that lawsuit, according to Greg Cook of the New England Journal of Aesthetic Research. An October 13 hearing date has been set.
In response to troubling trends in university museums and galleries—including the sale of Maier Art Museum paintings by Randolph College, the closure of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, and the threat of sale of important modernist works at Fisk University—a task force was formed that includes CAA, the American Association of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries, and the Kress Foundation to address ways to educate university trustees about the educational value of university museums and to explore protective avenues. A petition was circulated to various associations and also set up online, which received several thousand signatures—including many from CAA members. The petition will be published in the Chronicle of Higher Education later this fall. Quiet conversations are continuing with Brandeis trustees, and several university accreditation commissions have been apprised of the concerns of the task force and the visual-arts field.
On the same topic, caa.reviews recently published an essay entitled “Curricular Connections: The College/University Art Museum as Site for Teaching and Learning.” The author, Laurel Bradley, who is director of exhibitions and curator of the College Art Collection at Carleton College, provides a brief history of university museums and galleries since the mid-twentieth century before exploring several recent initiatives—some funded by the Mellon Foundation’s College and University Art Museum Program—that combine academic and curatorial teaching and education in novel, and often successful, ways.
An untitled bill introduced last week in the US Senate may loosen recent government restrictions on fractional gifts of works of art to museums, reports Shelly Banjo of the Wall Street Journal. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), whose state contains many important art museums, patrons, and philanthropists, is sponsoring S 1605, which would reform the rules regulating fractional charitable donations of tangible personal property.
Fractional gifts—which allow Americans to give partial ownership rights of an artwork to a museum or charitable organization and take an income-tax deduction for the donated portion of its value—were common practice in the museum world until 2006, when provisions put into the Pension Protection Act of 2006 by Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) made partial gifts less attractive for donors. (Namely, that work must be fully donated within ten years of the initial fractional gift, and that the value of the artwork is capped when the first gift is made.) Since then, museums noticed that the practice of fractional gifts has nearly disappeared.
Here’s more background information on fractional gifts in the New York Times in 2006 and 2008.
Today the Musée du Louvre in Paris has launched an English-language version of its online collection database, Atlas. This interactive research tool will allow visitors to access information on 22,000 artworks from the Louvre, view high-resolution images of masterpieces, and locate exhibited works and galleries throughout the museum. Previously available only in French, Atlas is accessible free-of-charge.
Users can enter via the main Louvre website, choose English at upper right, and then go to Collections –> Databases and select Atlas.
The launch of the English version of Atlas was initiated by and funded with a €300,000 ($380,000) grant in 2004 from the American Friends of the Louvre, which was founded in 2002 to strengthen ties between the museum and its American public. The new version of the site will provide in-depth information on the Louvre’s extensive collection to the museum’s two million English-speaking visitors as well as to educators, students, researchers, and scholars.
Launched in 2003, Atlas provides quick and easy access to an exceptionally rich database of 26,000 of the 35,000 works on permanent display at the Louvre. Currently, 5,500 artists in a variety of media are represented on the site. In addition to gallery views, Atlas also provides online visitors with a virtual “Album” through which they can gather a selection of artworks and create and navigate their own personalized tour of the Louvre.
The English-language version of Atlas will include entries on 22,000 works of art, or approximately 80 percent of the original Atlas database, showcasing works most representative of the depth and scope of the Louvre’s collection.
“Guess what? The art is not yours to sell.” So says Jonathan Lee of the board of overseers of the maligned Rose Art Museum about a lawsuit filed yesterday that aims to stop Brandeis University from closing the institution and selling the art collection. Lee has joined fellow overseers Lois Foster and Meryl Rose—who is a member of the family that founded the museum—to ask the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to issue a preliminary injunction to halt the university’s plans.
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has posted free audio recordings from eight 2009 Annual Conference sessions that took place at the Getty Center and Getty Villa. The audio can be streamed online or downloaded for playback on a computer or MP3 player. File sizes range from 41 to 142 MB.
Here are the sessions:
“That Captured Instant of Time: Realism and Drama in Baroque Sculpture,” chaired by Catherine Hess
“Luxury Devotional Books and Their Female Owners,” chaired by Thomas Kren and Richard Leson
“What We Talk about When We Talk about Artist’s Books,” chaired by Marcia Reed
“European Drawings, 1400–1900,” chaired by Lee Hendrix and Stephanie Schrader
“Networks and Boundaries,” chaired by Thomas Gaehtgens
“Cabinet Pictures in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” chaired by Andreas Henning
“The Medieval Manuscript Transformed,” chaired by Kristen Collins and Christine Sciacca
“The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria,” chaired by Karol Wight
The sessions are among several Highlights of Past Programs, which also include videos of interviews with the artists Jim Dine and Robert Irwin. The Getty’s Museum Symposia section makes available papers from a 2006 symposium, “Looking at the Landscapes: Courbet and Modernism.”
CAA offers audio recordings from many other 2009 conference sessions, as well as from other recent conferences. Please visit CAA’s Conference Audio Recordings for more information.
