​In April, the Baltimore Museum of Art announced a controversial decision to deaccession works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline in hopes of using the proceeds to add pieces by women and persons of color to its collection. Those works hit the auction block at Sotheby’s auction house in New York in May, and today the museum named seven new acquisitions made with money gained from those sales.
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Among the new holdings are an abstracted vision of September 11, 2001, by Jack Whitten, who witnessed that fateful day from his studio and painted it using his chipped acrylic tile method, and a painting by Amy Sherald, of two people on a plain watching a rocket launch into space. (Sherald, who is a board member at the BMA, recused herself from the decision to acquire her work, according to a museum spokesperson.) The other purchases include a video work by Isaac Julien, a painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a sculpture by Wangechi Mutu, and two film pieces by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley.

​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.

​Did you ever wonder where museums came from? Who enabled such vast collections of treasures – artistic, historic, and scientific – to be gathered together and presented to the public? While there are a few examples of ancient museums, up until modern times most collections were private, held by wealthy patrons and institutions. During the late middle ages the Vatican donated some of its collection for a public museum, and a little later opened its permanent collection for public view. The European Museums Network has a great post about the history of public museums.

But in the modern era of museums, following the Enlightenment, and blossoming in the 19th century, public museums were established through the bequest of wealthy patrons, or groups of patrons. These museum trusts were often accompanied with endowments to ensure their upkeep, operation, and continued operation. Up to this very day, a large part of a museum’s support comes from groups of wealthy donors who make annual gifts and contribute to the endowment.