CAA News Today

The Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock has received a spectacular gift of 290 watercolors and drawings by the American artist John Marin (1870–1953) from Norma B. Marin, the widow of the artist’s son.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art and Corcoran College of Art and Design (photograph by William Atkins/George Washington University and © George Washington University Photography)

The Corcoran Gallery of Art and Corcoran College of Art and Design, both in Washington, DC, have announced a merger with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University, also located in the nation’s capital.

The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, England, and the Iran Heritage Foundation have announced funding for a postgraduate and research-assistant post with a focus on Persian arts.

The Frick Art Reference Library and the William Randolph Hearst Archive at Long Island University (LIU) Post have completed a collaborative digitization project, Gilding the Gilded Age: Interior Decoration Tastes and Trends in New York City. With funding from the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program, this project brings together a group of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century auction catalogues held by the library and the archive.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California is one of five major American museums to have received funding for the Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program, which provides specialized training in the curatorial field for students across the United States with diverse backgrounds.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has received a gift from Daniel Brodsky, the museum’s chairman, and his wife Estrellita B. Brodsky, an art historian, to endow two new curatorial positions in the museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. The two positions will be called the Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art and the Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is one of five major American museums to have received funding for the Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship Program, which provides specialized training in the curatorial field for students across the United States with diverse backgrounds.

Ann Hamilton

Ohio State University in Columbus has initiated the Ann Hamilton Project Archive, which contains more than one thousand downloadable, high-resolution images from thirty-five installation by Hamilton, an internationally acclaimed artist and Distinguished University Professor in the university’s Department of Art.

The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has reopened its Study Room after completing the first phase of a major building-conservation project.

The Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted a $5 million contribution from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation to create a permanent, unrestricted endowment to support the core priorities of the school, while naming in perpetuity the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Dean. A second gift of $900,000 will supplement three existing endowments, created by the foundation in 2010, to establish an artist’s residency, scholarships for international students, and a dean’s resource fund.

Yale University Press in New Haven, Connecticut, has accepted the 2013 Design Book of the Year Award by the editors of Designers & Books for Phyllis Lambert’s volume Building Seagram (2013). The press also received an honorable mention for another book, The Houses of Louis Kahn (2013) by George H. Marcus and William Whitaker.

The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Frick Collection, whose institutional libraries formed the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), have been awarded a $340,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to initiate a program of web archiving for specialist art-historical resources. The two-year program will follow a 2012 pilot study, Reframing Collections for the Digital Age, also funded by the Mellon Foundation.

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has accepted a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support an upcoming exhibition, Joseph Cornell and Surrealism, organized by the museum and the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France.

The J. Paul Getty Trust, based in Los Angeles, California, and the British Museum in London, England, have announce a three-year collaboration with the National Cultural Fund and the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), under the aegis of the Indian government’s Ministry of Culture, to build the capacities of ASI’s site-museum and site-management professionals. Nearly one hundred ASI professionals—among them archaeologists, site-museum professionals, site managers, directors, and caretakers—will participate in workshops, trainings, conferences, and working-group meetings in India, Los Angeles, London, and other Asian sites to help reimagine Indian site-museums with enhanced narratives, better collection management, and conservation.

The Herron School of Art and Design, part of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, has received a $2 million gift from Cindy Simon Skjodt, a philanthropist and advocate for mental health, to endow a chair for the school’s program in art therapy.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania has met the goal of a major five-year initiative, the Lenfest Challenge, having raised a total of $54 million to endow twenty-nine staff positions in its curatorial, conservation, library, archive, education, publishing, and digital-technology departments. H. F. (Gerry) Lenfest, chairman emeritus of the museum’s board of trustees, and his wife, Marguerite, offered a $27 million grant in September 2008, challenging donors to match this gift on a one-to-one basis to endow and name these positions.

The University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles and the Pacific Asia Museum of Pasadena, one of the few American museums dedicated to the arts and culture of Asia and the Pacific Islands, have announced a new partnership that will preserve the museum’s 1924 Chinese Qing Dynasty–inspired mansion in downtown Pasadena as an art museum. The partnership will also enhance the scholarship of the creative faculty and students at USC’s six arts schools and those in the departments of art history, East Asian language and cultures, religion, and archaeology. In addition, the alliance will provide a foundation for a renewed museum-studies and curatorial-training program at USC.

The University of Texas at Dallas has announced the new home for the Arts and Technology (ATEC) program: the Edith O’Donnell Arts and Technology Building. This new 155,000-square-foot facility will host programs and promote advancements in visual art, emerging media technology, and multimedia communications.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, has received a $9.6 million bequest from the estate of Charles H. Schwartz to establish an endowment to expand and enhance the museum’s collection of English and European works of art from the eighteenth century.