​After sixteen years in operation, the Pasadena Museum of California Art will shutter when its current exhibition season comes to an end in October. Board chair Jim Crawford first recommended that the non-collecting museum should close in a board meeting held on Wednesday, June 13. Since not all of the thirteen members of the board were in attendance, a vote was conducted via email, and the decision was reached on June 18. The reason for the closure was not given.

“After sixteen years of presenting art and design through exhibitions that explore the unique cultural dynamic of California, the board of directors would like to thank all of the museum members, donors, contributors, lenders, and especially our hard working, dedicated staff who have made this wonderful adventure possible,” the board said in a statement.

​The Freelands Foundation, a philanthropic organisation founded by the media executive Elisabeth Murdoch, says it is “championing emerging talent” across the UK through a new funding initiative called the Freelands Artist Programme. The new scheme pairs regional non-profit arts bodies with emerging artists.

The first recipients—G39 in Cardiff, PS2 (Paragon Studios/Project Space) in Belfast, Site Gallery in Sheffield and Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh—will receive £1.5m in total over five years. Arts organisations in London were not eligible for the awards.

​Ever wander through a museum and fantasize about organizing your own exhibition, rearranging a gallery, or putting together all the artworks you love most into one room? A new tool developed by the Hyundai Project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) allows you to imagine what this might look like. With Collator, you can compile and publish your own book (or catalogue, if you will) of artworks from the museum’s permanent collection.

Currently, the website offers 1,002 artworks to choose from, though the greatest challenge may be that you must narrow your selection down to just 24 works. One image occupies each page, and perhaps the most fun to be had is in making unusual pairings and associations across LACMA’s vast, encyclopedic collection. According to LACMA Publisher Lisa Mark, Collator features artworks from all of the museum’s curatorial departments, which range from Korean Art to German Expressionism to Art of the Ancient Americas.

​Slate magazine recently launched “Slate 90,” a critical look at tax-exempt organizations as represented by the 10 largest nonprofits in nine nonprofit sectors. Museums on Slate’s target list include the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. I’m adding this to my file of “weak signals*” of changing attitudes toward the nonprofit sector in the US. And I’m bringing it to your attention because it suggests actions we as a field may collectively take to ensure that museums continue to benefit from tax-exempt status.

The Slate project is only the latest in a series of stories that document changing attitudes towards nonprofits in general and museums in particular. A few years ago, Senator Orin Hatch (R-Utah and Chair of the Senate Finance Committee), launched an extended investigation into selected private museums (broadly speaking, museums founded, funded, and to some extent controlled by wealthy art collectors). Questioning whether these organizations actually operate in the public interest, Senator Hatch flagged 502(c)3 status as an “area of our tax code ripe for exploitation.” While his inquiry concluded in 2016, the questions he raised aren’t going away. Just last month Crain’s New York drew attention to The Solow Art and Architecture Foundation, a small museum displaying the collection of billionaire real estate developer Sheldon Solow. Noting that the lack of regular public open hours, Crain’s basically accused Solow of running the museum as a tax avoidance scheme, and took a side swipe at other private museums in the process.

​The New York-based Roy Lichtenstein Foundation has made substantial gifts to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art in Washington, DC in order to fulfil its chief purpose: “to facilitate public access” to the work of the US pop artist, says the foundation’s executive director, Jack Cowart. These are the first in a series of gifts that the foundation plans to give to museums in the US and Europe.

Up until this point, Lichtenstein Foundation, which is private, has focussed on publishing and lending works to various exhibitions. “Parting with works to go to art museums who can put them on their walls more normally seems like the more progressive idea, and we felt it was time to start doing that,” Cowart says.

​Fatigued by years of a brutal civil war, divided by racial and economic strife, and fearful that immigrants were coming to take workers’ jobs, the US’s long-term prospects were far from assured in 1867. In that contentious and chaotic environment, Frederick Douglass gave an impassioned speech in Boston about “our composite nation,” arguing for the virtue of a pluralistic United States. He wisely observed: “Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society.”

We find ourselves in a similar trust crisis today, not just in the United States, but around the world. Global confidence in many institutions is at a historic low. In the US, many people have lost faith in the very pillars of American civic identity, such as the government, academia, corporations and the media. There is a sense that these institutions are inadequately responsive to the needs of many. Although 2017 showed a slight uptick in confidence in institutions, of the 14 measured in a recent Gallup poll, only three – the police, the military and small business – ranked higher than 50%.

The former director of the Queens Museum in New York, Laura Raicovich, was celebrated for her political outspokenness. “At Queens Museum, the Director Is as Political as the Art” read the headline of a New York Times profile last October. Less than four months later, Raicovich abruptly announced her resignation. “There are so many big things that art and culture have to contend with that are so wrong in the world,” she told the New York Times. “I just felt that my vision and that of the board weren’t in enough alignment to get that done.”
Raicovich presented the decision to leave as her own; the Queens Museum board later claimed that it forced her, after an independent investigation of her handling of an Israel-sponsored event found that she "knowingly misled the board". Either way, it seems clear that the board did not fully support her activism, including her closure of the museum on Donald Trump’s inauguration day, in step with calls for an “art strike” by prominent artists and critics, to hold a free protest sign-making event instead.

Working in FrameWorks’ “metaphor kitchen” on the thorny problem of how to convey the ocean’s centrality to environmental health, a team of smart, seasoned social scientists hit on a candidate metaphor: Our planet is like the Internet. Just as the Internet is composed of interdependent components, so, too, is our planet, and the ocean is one of the planet’s key components. If the ocean is unhealthy, it harms the atmosphere, the climate, and the planet more broadly—it takes them “offline.”

The metaphor of The Planet as Internet seemed promising, since the Internet is something we all experience every day, and the web-like nature of the Internet seemed to accurately illustrate the connections among planetary systems. But what looks good inside the kitchen often fails the taste test on the street.
​
When this metaphor was beta-tested as a communication tool for members of the public, it failed. In interview after interview, participants showed limited knowledge of how the Internet actually works and, as a result, they struggled to connect the idea of the Internet to the planet and the ocean in particular. From these conversations on the street, it was clear that The Planet as Internet was a no-go.

PITTSFIELD — Trustees allowed debate over the Berkshire Museum's financial challenges to snowball into an excessive art sale, two former board members tell The Eagle, as officials backed a costly shift to interactive exhibits based on thin evidence.

Carol Riordan and Nancy Edman Feldman say that while the museum's money problems were real, the Pittsfield institution could have ensured its future with far less than the $55 million it is allowed to raise through sales under terms of an agreement with Attorney General Maura Healey. 

Both fault trustees and Executive Director Van Shields for not doing enough to right the museum's finances through fund appeals and other means.

"I was not going to sell the assets of the organization before trying everything," said Riordan, a Pittsfield resident who served as treasurer of the board of trustees. "I care. I care about the community and I care about the museum."

​When the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) first opened its doors, it was considered a “people’s museum,” a place for the city of Oakland to celebrate the art, history, and natural sciences that shape California’s identity. We’ve maintained those deep ties to our community for nearly half a century and have been guided by the belief that when museums are truly welcoming and inclusive, they make a real difference in the lives of people as well as in the health and vitality of a community.

But do we have any proof to back up that belief? Not yet. How can we articulate that proof in a compelling way to our community of stakeholders? We’re not sure. So thus began our work to measure the social impact of the Oakland Museum of California — an exciting but daunting task. As Deputy Director of the OMCA, I lead the museum’s vision for community engagement and social impact. My colleague Johanna Jones is the Associate Director for Evaluation and Visitor Insights and my co-conspirator for this project. We don’t have the answers, but we are interested in sharing our process as we learn our way into measuring OMCA’s social impact in Oakland.