MTA Board of Trustees member Margaret Benjamin and her husband Bill Benjamin are lifelong advocates for the essential role of museums in communities. This year, they are making an impact through their Light the Way: The Campaign for Earned Achievement gift to the Weatherspoon Art Museum.
 
The Benjamins’ gift will endow a faculty fellowship grant and support a discretionary fund that allows the Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Endowed Director of the Weatherspoon Art Museum to tackle projects that make the museum more accessible to its patrons.
 
“The Margaret and Bill Benjamin Endowed Faculty Fellowship is the first to enable UNC Greensboro faculty to plan a course or exhibition based on the museum’s renowned collection of modern and contemporary art,” said Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Endowed Director Juliette Bianco.
 
The Margaret and Bill Benjamin Auditorium at the Weatherspoon Art Museum was formally dedicated in recognition of the couple’s support of UNCG on September 16, during the All That Glitters: Weatherspoon Open House. 

The Warhol Foundation has announced the recipients of its latest round of grants, which total $3.9 million and will be distributed to 50 arts organizations across 18 states and the District of Columbia. Among the grantees, 19 are first-time recipients of a grant from the foundation. In recognition of the pandemic’s enduring, destabilizing effects on the arts sector, the Warhol Foundation will allow grantees to use up to 50% of the grant on administrative costs.
​
A few common themes emerged from the organizations and projects that received funding in this cycle. Some initiatives are social justice-oriented, highlighting issues surrounding Indigenous land rights, climate change and sustainability, and racial inequity. Others hope to train an eye on forgotten figures who have been buried in the historical archive as a result of structural forces that worked against them in their lifetimes: Several grants will support major museums and institutions that are putting on an underrepresented artist’s first solo exhibition or retrospective. A number of organizations celebrate film, multimedia, and performative arts through restoration, programming, and commissioning experimental work, and $356,000 in curatorial fellowships were also announced for curators working on projects about disability, alternative spiritual practices, bio-art, and art created by immigrants.

Black Cube, based in Englewood, Colorado, is a distinctive nonprofit “nomadic art museum” that operates as a traveling institution of contemporary art. The name is a play on the conventional “white cube” museum experience. Black Cube, which received a $60,000 grant from the foundation for program support over two years, hosts 18-month artist fellowships and has showcased site-specific installations in Colorado, New York City, Pittsburgh, and the US-Mexico border.
​
“As an artist-centric nomadic nonprofit, it means the world to us to have the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation,” Cortney Stell, Black Cube’s chief curator and executive director, told Hyperallergic. “Not only does the Warhol Foundation bring with it recognizable cache that is delightful to share with our community, but they are a foundation known for supporting artists above all else, a vision that we are deeply aligned with.”

The National Museum of the American Indian, located in Manhattan’s Financial District, received a $100,000 grant to stage a retrospective of Shelley Niro, a multidisciplinary Mohawk artist from New York and Ontario known for her portraiture and filmmaking. Titled Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch, the subtitle of the exhibition is derived from a self-portrait of the artist donning a white dress and blonde wig in the guise of Marilyn Monroe.
“Through her art, Niro brings attention to the stories of Native women and the challenges posed by colonialist patriarchies,” David Penney, the exhibition’s curator, said in an email. “This grant will help us create an exhibition that explores these themes through Niro’s remarkable body of work.”

It’s no secret that museums face increased scrutiny for both the company they keep and the promises they make.

In recent years, eye-catching demonstrations by artists have thrown major gifts from “tainted” sources into sharp relief, suggesting museums themselves should be mindful of how they make their money. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, museums made strong public commitments to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion—but two years later museum workers have questioned whether actions reflect words.

One way that museums can strengthen their reputations and follow through on their public declarations is by aligning the billions of dollars in their endowments with their values and missions.

Other investors are already doing this: One-third of assets under professional management in the US, approximately $17.1 trillion, is invested following sustainable and impact investing strategies. This includes endowed institutions like universities and foundations, which have already made commitments to hire BIPOC and women fund managers, and to steer clear of industries like fossil fuels and companies that don’t treat their workers and communities well. Museums, however, currently lag behind the rest of this pack.

A recent survey of independent museums of art and design in the US—published this week by Upstart Co-Lab, the Association of Art Museum Directors and the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums—sheds light on this disparity, finding that just 13 percent of museums are engaged in impact investing, compared to 47 percent of colleges and universities and 51 percent of foundations.

What’s more, the study revealed that issues often cited as barriers to museums getting involved with impact investing have already been solved: the capacity to measure impact, the availability of quality impact investing products across all asset classes and the ability to achieve market-rate financial returns. In fact, a Morningstar report found that sustainable funds outperformed peers in 2021.

As also evidenced by the survey results, investment committees and leadership teams tend to drive the conversation around impact investing at the museums leading their peers. But everyone committed to the future of America’s art museums can play a part in shifting museums’ endowments to impact investing.

Museum board members can gather the facts on the financial performance of impact investments and gain practical insights by speaking to trustees of universities, foundations and other cultural institutions that are already involved with impact investing. An appetite for impact investing knowledge can inform future appointments to the board and the investment committee, along with the selection of investment advisors, to ensure that individuals with relevant expertise hold key roles.

​Newfields has announced its new president and CEO.
Colette Pierce Burnette will assume the position Aug. 1. Chief Financial Officer Jerry Wise has been serving as interim president. Pierce Burnette will be the first Black woman to lead Newfields, according to the museum. Last year, Darrianne Christian became the first Black woman to be the chair of the Board of Trustees

“I’ve seen the nurturing and transformative power of cherished institutions like Newfields. I am thrilled to become part of a team driven to meet Newfields’ mission of enriching lives purposefully and intentionally through exceptional experiences with art and nature,” Pierce Burnette said in a written statement.

“I believe strongly in service, and I am excited to lead Newfields at this unique moment to make it a place every person in Indianapolis and beyond is excited to visit, and every team member is proud to work.” To select its next leader, Newfields reported it examined a pool of more than 230 applicants, and it posted the position in partnership with consulting firm Korn Ferry.

Pierce Burnette, who is originally from Cleveland, is the president of Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas. She was selected as 2021 Austinite of the Year by the city's Chamber of Commerce to honor her work in education and as co-chair for the Mayor's Task Force on Institutional Racism and Systemic Inequities. 
​
At Huston-Tillotson, her achievements include growing the university's endowment, starting new academic programs and partnering with companies including Apple and Indeed, according to a news release. She serves on boards including Leadership Austin, Waterloo Greenway Conservancy and the Austin Community Foundation.

“Dr. Burnette was a clear standout amongst an impressive slate," Christian stated in the release. "Her extensive professional achievements reflect her ability to deliver on her passion to innovate and advance the arts, education and green spaces. She is lauded by her staff, peers and the communities she served for being a humble leader with an immense amount of respect and empathy for everyone she encounters."

Visiting a museum can have measurable mental health benefits, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania.

Penn’s Positive Psychology Center has been analyzing a wide swath of psychological research associated with arts and culture, showing museums – in particular art museums – are good at reducing anxiety and depression.

“We’re seeing that going to an art museum is really effective at reducing your stress,” said postdoctoral fellow Katherine Cotter, who recently published her results in The Journal of Positive Psychology. “If we think about the stress hormone cortisol, there’s been a few studies examining if you just go for half an hour to an art museum and measure people’s cortisol levels before they go in, after half an hour it shows the kind of recovery time [normally] equivalent to a few hours.”

Cotter reviewed about 100 published reports from various disciplines related to arts and psychology to find research consensus that attending art museums – as opposed to experiencing art in the street, in a classroom, or online – can have mental health benefits.

“When we enter a museum, we’re entering it with an intention. We’re entering this particular space that has unique art, architecture, and has unique things that we’re going to be seeing whether it’s an art museum or another form of museum or cultural institution,” she said. “We engage different mindsets and different cognitive processes. Once we get into the meat and potatoes of the museum visit, we see ourselves more concerned communally, thinking about how things are interrelated in the world more broadly.”

Positive Psychology is a relatively young field of science, largely spearheaded at Penn by Dr. Martin Seligman, that focuses on accentuating the positive over reducing the negative. Cotter was brought in to work on a particular initiative, Art Museums for Well-Being, but was temporarily thwarted by the widespread museum shutdowns caused by the pandemic.
​
Instead, she plowed into the existing research to analyze what was already known. Cotter found that research tended to fall into particular categories: stress and anxiety reduction, alleviating pain, measuring emotional well-being, and – what she found most interesting – loneliness.

“It wasn’t just, ‘I look at this artwork and it makes me happy,’ it’s thinking about broader things that facilitate other well-being and flourishing outcomes,” she said. “We know that loneliness and social isolation is a precedent to a host of negative health consequences and outcomes.”
​
Cotter hopes to use the research analysis to lay a foundation for further work. She said much of the existing research on the benefits of engaging with culture tends to focus on repairing damage to a person’s mental health, i.e. fixing a negative, whereas more work could be done to investigate how arts and culture can cause people to flourish.

​The other day, I drove over to Cal State Long Beach and saw an exhibition of Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld’s paintings and drawings from the last 30 years, which are on view inside the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Gallery at the newly expanded and renamed Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum.

If you think this nesting doll of names is odd, even in our era of bloated naming opportunities at cultural institutions, you would be right. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. In Los Angeles, every third arts building seems to be named Geffen or Broad, while in San Diego it’s the Jacobs moniker that’s over many a front door. Fine. Rarely, however, do big, raised letters of a naming opportunity inside a museum room identify the same donor whose name is also in big, raised letters on the edifice outside. Virtually never is the art on view made by the same-named patron.

Welcome to Long Beach. Here at Cal State University, Kleefelds in the Kleefeld at the Kleefeld are the new norm. Disturbingly so. It’s a train wreck, and a serious disservice is being done to students. The show, which features 10 canvases and 13 works on paper, is a small selection from a gift that the artist made to the museum, including 74 of her
paintings and 104 of her drawings. Kleefeld art is now about 6% of the museum’s permanent collection. (I’m unaware of its presence in any other museum’s collection.) Her own art will rotate in her dedicated gallery. Also donated were her library, a personal archive and copies of more than 20 inspirational books she has written.

Did I mention the $10-million check? That came too. Cal State Long Beach raised $24 million to expand and refurbish the former University Art Museum, in operation since 1973, by 4,000 square feet. (It reopened in February.) There are now three exhibition galleries rather than two, a works on paper archive, a classroom, expanded collection storage and a
capacious entry hall. A vestibule features one painting and a large, inspirational
wall text printed on plexiglass — both by Kleefeld.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — As a child, Cheech Marin loved collecting objects — baseball
cards, stamps, marbles — and then organizing them obsessively.

“I had a mania for codifying them and putting them in some kind of collection or
whole set,” said Marin, 75, who is best known as the mustachioed, Chicano half of
the classic stoner-comedy duo, Cheech & Chong.

In the 1980s, buoyed by steady film and TV work, Marin’s natural inclination toward
collecting found its fullest expression when he fell in love with the works of Los
Angeles-based Chicano artists like John Valadez, George Yepes and Patssi Valdez.
Their works, which synthesized Mexican and American influences and “delivered
news from the front,” felt revelatory, like “listening to the Beatles for the first time,”
said Marin, who grew up in a third-generation Mexican American family in South
Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.

Since then, Marin has amassed a collection of more than 700 paintings, drawings,
sculptures and mixed-media works by Chicano artists, including major works by
Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero and Judithe Hernández. In art-world circles, Marin’s
trove of Chicano art is believed to be the largest such collection in the world.

Now, Marin’s collection has taken permanent residence at the Cheech Marin Center
for Chicano Art and Culture (known as “the Cheech”) in Riverside, Calif., a majority-
Latino city of roughly 330,000 people, about 55 miles east of Los Angeles in Southern California’s vast Inland Empire region.

The center, housed in the former Riverside public library, is possibly the first
museum in the United States entirely devoted to showcasing Chicano art and
culture. Marin hopes the project, a public-private partnership girded by significant
municipal investment, will inspire a sort of Chicano art renaissance in the Inland
Empire, once the cradle of California’s citrus production, and one of the nation’s
fastest-growing and racially diverse regions.

On a recent walk-through of the Cheech ahead of opening day, June 18, Marin was in
high spirits. He stopped to admire the masterful brushwork in Romero’s “The
Arrest of the Paleteros” and the “cannonball” of color in Almaraz’s unnervingly
sublime “Sunset Crash.”

“The story of the Cheech is one of serendipity,” said Todd Wingate, curator of
exhibitions and collections at the Riverside Art Museum. In 2017, Wingate and the former Riverside city manager John Russo pitched Marin the idea of founding a museum based on his collection. At the time, the city was looking for a new tenant for its landmark public library building, a two-story, buffcolored modernist edifice in the city’s historical core. Marin’s traveling exhibition of works on paper, “Papel Chicano Dos,” had recently drawn record crowds to the Riverside Art Museum. In exchange for Marin’s donation of his collection to the Riverside Art Museum, the city would cover the costs of housing it in the old library building.

“It didn’t take convincing,” Wingate said. “I think Cheech was just starting to think
about where his collection belongs.”

The basketballs are deflated, doused in spray paint or covered in 24-karat gold leaf. They’re sculpted from porcelain, plopped in cement or layered into enormous pyramids. They’re splashed onto canvases, carved into cheeky jack-o’-lanterns, flattened out like flower petals.
​
Stroll through galleries, museums and studios, flick through auction catalogs and social media feeds, and it starts to become obvious: The art world is increasingly strewn with basketballs. “It’s like the best sport ever,” said Jonas Wood, who has become one of the world’s most sought-after painters while making basketball a recurring theme in his work.

Titans of art who contemplated the sport in years past are having their work revisited in basketball-specific shows. Younger artists are engaging with the game as avid fans, wary skeptics or nostalgic adults. And the market is responding.

Consider a cross section of recent exhibitions: Last summer, drawings by the influential artist David Hammons, made by bouncing dirt-covered basketballs on paper, appeared at Nahmad Contemporary on the Upper East Side in a show called “Basketball and Kool-Aid.” This spring, Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea presented basketball-themed paintings from Barkley L. Hendricks, who died in 2017, at an exhibition called “In the Paint.”

That was not to be confused with a hoops-oriented group show called “In the Paint” that opened this year at the Local Gallery in Toronto or another exhibition, also called “In the Paint,” a few years back at the William Benton Museum of Art in Connecticut. The Weatherspoon Art Museum, in Greensboro, N.C., had its own basketball-inspired group show, “To the Hoop,” in 2020.

“We filled a nearly 5,000-square-foot gallery, and really I could do a Part 2 and Part 3 because there is that much work out there that is strong work,” said Emily Stamey, the curator of exhibitions at the Weatherspoon, which experienced record-breaking attendance numbers in the opening weeks of the show.

The proliferation of basketball as both a subject and medium in art is the result of a convergence of multiple cultural currents and creative impulses, artists and others in the industry say.

The generation of artists currently reaching the height of their powers came of age alongside the exploding popularity of the N.B.A. over the past few decades, following the rise of players like Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. Even artists who are not outright fans of the game said they observed how deeply it penetrated society.

Two years after publicly confronting sexual harassment allegations, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has selected its new leader: Sasha Suda, the current director and chief executive of the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, Ontario. Praising her educational and work experience, Leslie Anne Miller, the museum’s chairwoman, said in an interview on Tuesday that Suda was “the right person for the institution at this time in its history.”
​
“We hope that her gender will be seen through our lens, which is emblematic of the institution’s ongoing commitment of furthering D.E.I. in everything we do,” Miller continued, referring to the museum’s attention to diversity, equity and inclusion. “Sasha understands the critical importance of building on our efforts to date to reach out to the community, to engage through the exhibitions.”

​Suda, 41, who starts in September as the 14th director and chief executive, will take over a 
145-year-old institution still healing from controversy. In 2020, a New York Times report revealed that a young male manager had been accused of mistreating several women on the staff. Government officials criticized the museum; employees unionized, citing gender and equity issues; and the museum’s former director, Timothy Rub, apologized to his staff. Rub ultimately announced his resignation last summer, having served for 13 years.

At the National Gallery, where she was appointed in February 2019, Suda focused on justice and equity with a commitment to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

“I am passionate about human-centered leadership and really interested in building that strength, so people can see the value of the work they do and the value of their own lived experience — where managers and leaders are holding space for discomfort and very necessary conversations,” Suda said in a telephone interview.

“That’s really what this moment is about for me as a leader,” she continued, “coming into those conversations with a willingness to make space and be there for them and have eyes wide open.”

A man smashed his way into the Dallas Museum of Art and damaged three ancient Greek artifacts dating to the 5th and 6th centuries B.C., museum officials said on Thursday.

The man, identified by the Dallas police as Brian Hernandez, 21, “seriously damaged” four pieces of art, Agustin Arteaga, the museum’s director, said in an interview. He had broken into the museum by repeatedly striking a glass door with a steel chair around 10 p.m. Wednesday, Mr. Arteaga said.

Mr. Arteaga estimated that the items, which were insured, have a value of $1 million or more, but the true cost of the destruction will not be known until officials and insurers conduct a damage assessment. “There was no intention, from what we can see, of stealing anything, of damaging any work of art in a deliberate way,” Mr. Arteaga said. “It was just someone who was going through a moment of anger and found this as a way to express it.”

The Greek objects include a black-figure kylix, a bowl from the sixth century B.C. featuring vignettes of Herakles grappling with the Nemean lion; a red-figure pyxis, a cylindrical container with a lid from the fifth century B.C.; and a ceramic amphora — a tall jar with two handles — from the sixth century B.C. The other artwork that was seriously damaged was a ceramic container by a contemporary Native American artist, Mr. Arteaga said.

Museum officials called the vandalism “isolated” and the product of a single person acting alone. They said that the Dallas police arrested the suspect at the scene, no one was injured and the man was not carrying weapons.

“While we are devastated by this incident, we are grateful that no one was harmed,” museum officials said in a statement.