​The Baltimore Museum of Art has received a $3.5 million donation to support the position of chief curator, one of the largest endowment gifts the museum has seen since its founding in 1914.

The role will be renamed after the donors, the Baltimore-based philanthropists Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown. It is held by Asma Naeem, a specialist in American art and contemporary Islamic art who was appointed last August.
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“We see this endowment for chief curator as being a very significant statement, especially naming a person of color,” Mr. Brown, the founder and chief executive of Brown Capital Management, said. “That really appealed to us.”

The last museum-board leadership survey conducted by the American Alliance of Museums uncovered a staggering statistic: About 46 percent of American museums have all-white boards of directors.

But the alliance hopes that figure will change for the better soon. Over the next three years, the alliance will receive $4 million to bolster board diversity in a push to make museums more accessible and inclusive. The Ford, Andrew W. Mellon, and Alice L. Walton foundations joined forces to award the grant.

In the more than 20 years that museums talked about the importance of diversity and inclusion, the number of people of color serving on boards has barely budged, says Laura Lott, the alliance’s chief executive. She says that’s a real problem.

Making good on its mission to “create transformative experiences through art, for the benefit of all the people forever,” CMA has opened its digital archives to the public through a partnership with Creative Commons Zero (CC0), a global nonprofit dedicated to the free distribution of otherwise copyrighted images.

30,000 artwork images — nearly half of the museum’s entire collection — are now available for digital users to remix, research, merchandise, print, and explore. Better yet, released metadata for more than 61,000 works will allow scholars to more easily investigate conduct research into provenance and object histories. 

The controlling shareholders of Bonhams recently sold their stake in the auction house to Epiris, a British private equity firm, which quickly brought on additional management. As a former director, I am encouraged by this new infusion of financial support and executive leadership. However, I believe the challenges in expanding market share for any auction house are structurally endemic to the industry and are not easily overturned by a fresh infusion of capital and personnel alone.
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In the New York Times (“The Art World’s Elephant in the Room” 9/21/2018), Scott Reyburn recently suggests that Bonhams is an auction house “whose business model has (so far) relied on traditional lower and middle range art and antiques.”  In Reyburn’s view, this market is languishing as an effect of growing income inequality, as the wealthy seek ever more expensive prizes, leaving the sub-$50,000 marketplace bereft of buyers and liquidity.

After 5 years at the helm of the Museum Trustee Association (MTA) Mary Baily Wieler has announced her intention to step down as the organization's President in Spring 2019 and will assist in this transition of leadership. MTA's Board of Directors has retained Management Consultants for the Arts, Inc. (MCA) to initiate a national search for Wieler's replacement. 

MTA's mission of enhancing museum trustee effectiveness and its programmatic offerings have expanded under Wieler's leadership. Since 2013 membership has tripled and industry partnerships have increased. Semi-annual Forums where trustees gather to exchange information and best practices have achieved record attendance and MTA’s website is a recognized source of free content for trustees everywhere. The Association is well-positioned to build on its momentum. 

Wieler states, "For the last decade I've lived MTA's good governance mission as a board member, chair, and more recently as President. I am truly proud of our accomplishments working together as a team, including the Association's growth across the Americas, our commitment to building engaged, informed, and responsible museum boards, as well as the launch of MTA's template series utilizing cloud-based software making best practices accessible and affordable to the museum field." 

MTA Board Chairman Lee Peterson comments, "I am confident in expressing our Board's collective appreciation for the leadership Mary has provided internally to MTA, as well as representing our trustee leadership in regional and national organizations. Thanks to Mary's passionate guidance, MTA is positioned for continued growth in membership and trustee influence nationally. The Board will celebrate Mary at our Spring Forum in Phoenix.” 

​Please direct all inquiries to Bill Appleton (MCA) at mcaappleton@gmail.com. 

A corkscrewing creation in the Arizona desert, the David and Gladys Wright House boasts an impressive pedigree. Built in 1952, this three-bedroom nautilus of a home, designed by architecture icon Frank Lloyd Wright for his son, is one of a handful of rounded designs that foreshadows the contours of the Guggenheim Museum.

It seemed like a shoo-in for preservation, especially after local lawyer Zach Rawling purchased the home for $2.4 million in 2012, saving it from the wrecking ball. Rawling had grand plans to create a museum and wedding venue, and despite neighborhood resistance to having a new cultural institution down the block, he seemed on the verge of success.

There were even plans announced last summer to donate the home to the School of Architecture at Taliesin, which Wright founded, turning the residence into a “living laboratory” and reconnecting it with the architect’s legacy.

That plan fell through last month. Rawling and Taliesin struggled with fundraising—Rawling needed to raise $7 million by 2020 for the agreement to work—and without financial support, the home again returned to the open market, asking $12.9 million.
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“I think it’s highly emblematic of the challenges any historic house faces,” says Liz Waytkus, executive director of Docomomo, a preservation organization focused on modern architecture. “The suggestion that a nonprofit would be able to come up with $7 million dollars ... it’s incredibly difficult, especially in the U.S., where nonprofits receive very little, if any government support.”

Earlier this month, presiding over his first press conference as the newly installed director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Max Hollein stood at the spotlit entrance to tenebrous galleries and spoke about the artist being surveyed within. “Delacroix is a defining figure in European art in the 19th century,” he said. “He is one of the great colorists in art history. But his work is always about human nature in all its complexities.”
Such a trajectory of thinking—to begin with the wide-angle historical view, take in the surface allure, and then drill down into the more philosophical implications—is a hallmark of the Austrian-born museum prodigy’s approach to art, and one of the reasons why his arrival at the institution widely viewed as the greatest encyclopedic museum in the world has been cause for such excitement among those in the field.

Last Friday, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it was planning to vacate the so-called Met Breuer three years early, handing the Brutalist building over the the Frick in 2020, it was clear that a decision was finally taking shape around one of the most vexing quandaries facing the Met: How can the venerable encyclopedic institution, with works stretching back to the earliest recorded human creations, meaningfully embrace contemporary art without giving off the vibe of a graying relative desperately trying to act cool?
The answer to that question comes in the shape of the museum’s 49-years-young new director, Max Hollein, whose vision for the Met’s embrace of the recent and the now ranges far beyond headline-grabbing shows of evening-sale artists, or even the more sensitive hybrid exhibitions that have been piloted at the Met Breuer since the experiment began in 2016. “Holistic” is a word for his path forward for the museum, and it’s one Hollein uses frequently.