Russian billionaire Vladimir Potanin has stepped down from his role as trustee at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The news comes as cultural institutions worldwide face pressure to sever ties with Russian oligarchs and Kremlin associates amid mounting indignation over the invasion of Ukraine. In a statement shared with Hyperallergic, the Guggenheim did not cite the reason for Potanin’s departure but expressed its opposition to the war.

“Vladimir Potanin has advised the Board of Trustees of his decision to step down as Trustee effective immediately,” the museum said. “The Guggenheim accepts this decision and thanks Mr. Potanin for his service to the Museum and his support of exhibition, conservation and educational programs. The Guggenheim strongly condemns the Russian invasion and unprovoked war against the government and people of Ukraine.”
​
Potanin, who served as Russia’s first deputy prime minister under former President Boris Yeltsin, maintains ties with current President Vladimir Putin and was among 13 billionaires summoned to a meeting at the Kremlin last week, according to Forbes. During Yeltsin’s administration, Potanin was one of the principal authors of the infamous “loans for shares” scheme, in which the government traded ownership in state-owned companies for bank loans — a policy Russian voters bitterly dubbed prikhvatizatsiya, or “grabification.” Potanin, then president of Oneksim Bank, was one of the program’s beneficiaries, securing a stake in Norilsk Nickel, the largest producer of refined nickel in the world.

For the last two decades, he has lent financial support to numerous initiatives at the Guggenheim through his foundation, including an 800-year survey of Russian art in 2005 and a conservation fellowship in 2019. Among the most recent projects sponsored by Potanin’s foundation is an exhibition of approximately 80 works by the Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky currently on view at the museum. Since the oligarch’s departure from the board, the Guggenheim has removed his name from the list of funders of the show on its website.
In the last week, a number of arts organizations have willingly cut ties with Russian moguls or come under scrutiny for those relationships. On Tuesday, March 1, Russian banking magnate Petr Aven stepped down as a trustee of the Royal Academy in London, which also returned a donation he made to a forthcoming Francis Bacon exhibition. Aven was included in the European Union’s recent list of sanctions, described as “one of Vladimir Putin’s closest oligarchs.”

London’s Tate Foundation, which supports acquisitions funding and other projects for the Tate’s museums, has been asked to divest from Viktor Vekselberg, a Ukrainian-born aluminum baron and Putin associate. Before he was sanctioned by the United States in 2018, Vekselberg also made donations to New York’s Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

​The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced Thursday, January 27 that it will distribute a total of $57,750,000 to 567 arts organizations across all 50 states and American territories in the third installment of grants from the 2021 American Rescue Plan (ARP).

Passed by Senate Democrats last March, the Joe Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus bill included a total of $470 million in relief to arts and cultural organizations. Of those funds, $270 million were divided equally between the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In 2021, the NEA distributed $72.2 million (more than 50% of the funds) over two phases to more than 120 arts organizations across the country. But the demand has been much higher, the agency said, reporting that it has received more than 7,500 eligible applications requesting a total of $695 million.

Grants in this latest installment range from $50,000 to $150,000. Recipient organizations may use them to pay for staff salaries, cover operational costs, or fund marketing and promotional efforts to encourage attendance and participation.

In New York, arts organizations slated for a $100,000 grant include the Bronx Children’s Museum, the Asian American Arts Alliance, Brooklyn Arts Council, and UnionDocs. The Queens Museum of Art, New Museum, Museum Hue, and Seneca Nation of Indians will each receive $150,000. Across the country, other recommended grantees include the Baltimore Museum of Art ($150,000); The New Orleans Museum of Art ($50,000); and the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio ($150,000). The full list of recommended grants in all states and locales can be found here.
​
“Our nation’s arts sector has been among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The National Endowment for the Arts’ American Rescue Plan funding will help arts organizations rebuild and reopen,” Maria Rosario Jackson, chair of the NEA, said in a statement. “The arts are crucial to helping America’s communities heal, unite, and inspire as well as essential to our nation’s economic recovery.”

The Portland Museum of Art has received a collection of more than 600 photographs, including works by world-famous 20th-century photographers, that the museum believes will transform it into a destination for the art form.

The gift from photographer, philanthropist and collector Judy Glickman Lauder includes photographs by Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks.
​
“This collection puts us at another level,” said Mark Bessire, museum director. “We’ve always done (photography), but this just leverages the work we are doing and lets us take off. This (collection) could have gone anywhere, but it’s coming here.”

Glickman Lauder, who could not be reached for an interview, has homes in Cape Elizabeth and on Great Diamond Island and a longstanding affiliation with Rockport’s Maine Media Workshops. She serves on the museum’s board of trustees and is a well-known photographer in her own right, with work hanging in prominent museums around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

She is giving the PMA the collection, which includes some of her own work, as a “promised gift,” which means a pledged donation at some specified future date, although the museum already has the collection on site. The museum declined to say how much it is worth.

A “living history museum” based on the life of Dred Scott, digitization of books and manuscripts dispersed from the Philippines in the 18th century, a Cherokee translation effort, and an exhibit on the history of jazz and hip-hop in Queens, N.Y., are among 208 projects across the country that are receiving new grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The grants, which total $24.7 million, support individual scholarly projects and collaborative efforts, including initiatives and exhibitions at cultural institutions ranging from local history sites to behemoths like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The awards are part of the agency’s regular cycle of grants. Last year, the agency also distributed more than $140 million of additional grants supported by funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.

Some of the new awards are dedicated to infrastructure. One grant, of $500,000, is going to the Esperanza Peace and Justice Institute in San Antonio to support the refurbishment of seven historic buildings to be used as a cultural center focused on the immigrant communities of the city’s Westside neighborhood. A grant of $20,000 will support digital upgrades at the Chapman Center for Rural Studies at Kansas State University, which aims to highlight the history of Great Plains communities at risk of being forgotten.

There are also a number of grants to historically Black colleges and universities, including roughly $130,000 to Oakwood University in Huntsville, Ala., to create the living museum dedicated to Dred Scott, the enslaved man whose lawsuit seeking freedom resulted in the infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision stating that African Americans could never be citizens.

Other awards include nearly $45,000 to the University of Virginia, toward the creation of a database of 18th- and 19th-century North American weather records, including the detailed daily reports made by Thomas Jefferson between July 1776 and the week before his death in July 1826. There is also a $100,000 grant to Northeastern University in Boston, to support the translation of its Digital Archive of American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance, which gathers handwritten materials in the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system created in the early 19th century.

In New York City, the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens will receive $30,000 to support a digital mapping project exploring the history of jazz and hiphop in the borough. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will receive $350,000, to support biochemical analysis of the chia oil found in Mexican lacquerware and paintings by New Spanish artists in Mexico from the 16th to 19th centuries, to help with conservation and provenance research for works held in museums around the world. (The museum will collaborate with Grupo Artesanal Tecomaque, an Indigenous collective in Mexico that teaches sustainable lacquerware practices.)

​At a time when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is working to address charges from within its own ranks that it is “an inequitable work environment that enables racism,” the museum on Monday appointed a new chairman, the billionaire collector J. Tomilson Hill, and elected its second ever Black female trustee, the poet, playwright and essayist Claudia Rankine.

“He’s a prescient collector and a very gifted convener,” Richard Armstrong, the museum’s director, said in a telephone interview. “I think he feels strongly about the role of art inside contemporary civilizations.”

Hill joined the board in 2019, the same year he opened the Hill Art Foundation, a public exhibition and education space in Chelsea. He will become the Guggenheim’s chairman as of Nov. 1, succeeding William L. Mack, who served for 16 years and has been elected chairman emeritus.

“You have to go where your passion lies,” Hill said in an interview, adding that his was in modern and contemporary art. He and his wife, Janine — the director of fellowship affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations — collect several artists in depth, including Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin and Christopher Wool.
​
They also collect Renaissance and Baroque bronzes as well as old master paintings — Hill was the mysterious buyer of an early-17th-century canvas billed as a rediscovered masterpiece by Caravaggio. (He also serves on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he said he plans to remain.)

Hill, who from 2007 to 2018 served as the vice chairman of the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, said he was firmly committed to the Guggenheim's efforts at “broadening the definition of how we think about showing works.”

 This article is part of our latest Design special report, about homes for multiple generations and new definitions of family.
​
The word “mingei,” meaning “folk craft,” was coined in 1925 by the Japanese philosopher and art historian Soetsu Yanagi to celebrate the beauty of everyday objects made by anonymous craftspeople. Yanagi was a founder and the first director of the Japan Folk Crafts Museum, which opened in Tokyo in 1936. Forty-two years later, his philosophy inspired the creation of the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, which contains objects from 140 countries and many eras (as well as works by known artists and designers) and defines mingei as “art of the people.” It reopened on Sept. 3 after a three-year renovation.

Located since 1996 in a Spanish Colonial building in Balboa Park that was constructed for the 1915-17 Panama-California Exposition, the revitalized museum recommits itself to the idea of community — of shared space, culture and creativity. “We are making an effort to offer radical hospitality — every visitor counts equally, so they discover that art is for them or about them,” said its executive director, Rob Sidner. As redesigned by the architect Jennifer Luce of Luce et Studio in La Jolla, the interior spaces are now more open and welcoming. Materials and craft are celebrated in every component of the renovation, including commissions from renowned female designers and artists.

Noting a lack of natural flow between the museum and the park, Ms. Luce offered new pathways and attractions. “We wanted to show that Mingei connects to everyone’s cultural backgrounds by bringing them in to explore and become curious,” she said. The admission-free first floor, or commons level, has a public gallery, stepped “amphitheater” seating, a cafe, a coffee bar, a shop and an education center; Ms. Luce calls it “the living room of the park.”

The Smithsonian kicks off its new initiative on race and racism with a virtual forum Thursday that brings together curators, researchers and activists to discuss topics including the disparities between races in health care, how biological racism lingers in sports culture and the history of the emotional stress of racism.
​
The hour-long event launches “Our Shared Future: Reckoning with our Racial Past,” an ambitious multiyear program that is fully funded by a $25 million grant from Bank of America that will tap into the vast expertise of the Smithsonian to examine the history and legacy of race through conversations, community events and digital content. The Smithsonian created the program last summer, in the wake of social justice protests held in communities across the country. Many museums and cultural organizations responded to the calls for racial justice and equity by presenting more diverse artists, and are revising their collection policies to be more inclusive. The Smithsonian decided to harness its diverse network of museums and experts to foster a national conversation.

The goal, said Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, is nothing short of creating a better America.
​
“We want to contribute to making the county better,” Bunch said about the project. “The goal is to find that shared future. The only way to do that is to engage and to debate.

“I really believe that part of the role of the Smithsonian is to define reality and give hope,” he continued. “Giving people the reality — here’s the information, here’s a way to contextualize the moment we are in — you can’t build optimism unless you face the reality of the past, the reality of today. But once you do that you can find ways to find common ground.”

Thursday’s inaugural event, beginning at 7 p.m., will feature three discussions of race, wealth and wellness. Among those expected to participate are Bunch; Damion L. Thomas, curator of sports at the National Museum of African American History and Culture; Louise Seamster, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Iowa who studies race and economic inequality; Sean Sweat, a medical student who rewrote the Hippocratic oath to reflect racial injustice; and Diana Chao, who was in high school when she founded Letters to Strangers, a nonprofit focused on increased access to mental health services and treatment for young people.

When Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, announced last year that the organization had received a $25 million gift from Bank of America, he envisioned an initiative that would create safe spaces in communities across the nation where Americans could gather to discuss the country’s racial past.

The result, “Our Shared Future: Reckoning With Our Racial Past,” a two-year series of online and in-person events, will kick off Thursday in Los Angeles with a virtual summit meeting that will focus on income and health care inequality and include subjects ranging from early race science to vaccine distribution. The initial event will be livestreamed at oursharedfuture.si.edu, starting at 7 p.m. Eastern.

“We can’t solve the problems of race in America ourselves,” Bunch said in a phone conversation on Monday. “But we can give the public the tools to stimulate those conversations to help people understand race beyond Black and white.”

The organization is planning conferences, town halls and immersive pop-up experiences in communities across the country to allow people to share their experiences and increase their understanding of the legacy of race and racism. Bunch said the goal is to encourage conversations among people who might not otherwise cross paths.

“We hope the Smithsonian can be a trusted place where people with a diversity of political opinions can engage with each other,” he said.

Museums nationwide are reckoning with race in their collections, including how to diversify their historically white holdings and how to display artifacts of traumatic periods in the country’s history, such as Ku Klux Klan robes, with proper context. But the Smithsonian wanted to take the conversation beyond museum walls, Bunch said.

“In many ways, it’s an initiative about race,” he said. “But it’s also an initiative about the different ways the Smithsonian can do our work moving forward.”

Though arrangements are in flux because of the pandemic, the Smithsonian does plan to dispatch a video team to events including the annual Farm Aid Festival, to be held this year in Hartford, Conn., on Sept. 25, in the hope of gathering oral histories from people about their experiences of race in America.
​
“We want to make sure, as we talk about the grand issues of race and wellness, we reduce it to a human scale,” Bunch said.