The Walters Art Museum has received a $2.5 million gift from Baltimore art collectors Deborah and Philip English to endow and hire a new curator to specialize in the areas of decorative arts, design, and material culture. In addition, the Englishes committed to donating more than 500 objects in their collection of Majolica to the museum.

The Walters will conduct a national search for this position, known as the Deborah and Philip English Curator of Decorative Arts, Design, and Material Culture.
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“This new position funded by the Englishes gives us the ability to further the study of ceramics like Majolica and other examples of material culture, which expands the types of stories we are able to tell and restores this art to its rightful place in history,” said Julia Marciari-Alexander, Andrea B. and John H. Laporte Director. “We are simply thrilled to have this opportunity to integrate the visionary collection the Englishes have created into the Walters, which stewards one of the most significant collections of ceramics from across the globe and across time in the United States.”

​The English Majolica Collection is one of the largest, most comprehensive, and most significant collections of English and Continental-European Majolica given to any U.S. institution. Majolica, a type of molded earthenware known for its brightly colored lead-based glazes, was widely used throughout Victorian society in the form of tableware, decorative objects, and garden ornaments. After debuting at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, Majolica quickly became ubiquitous in England and America, with works appearing in museum displays, royal palaces, and in the homes of average citizens. The English Majolica Collection contains both monumental pieces created specifically for exhibitions as well as daily ware.

There’s a major new arts philanthropist on the scene.

​MacKenzie Scott, a novelist who also happens to be the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced today that she has donated a staggering $2.7 billion to 286 organizations across the country—including many affiliated with the arts, such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and United States Artists. 

This marks the third time in 12 months that Scott, whose fortune Forbes recently estimated at $60 billion, has issued a wave of donations worth a combined ten figures. It’s also the first time she has funded arts organizations at scale. (The latest round of recipients also includes racial justice groups, universities, and other organizations.) 

Absent from the list of arts recipients are big names that wealthy donors often favor, such as the Museum of Modern Art or Lincoln Center. Instead, Scott opted to fund smaller, largely BIPOC-led groups including Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas; the Laundromat Project and Recess in Brooklyn, New York; the East Bay Fund For Artists in Oakland, California; El Museo de Arte Puerto Rico in San Juan; and the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Illinois. 

​In another departure from traditional high-dollar cultural philanthropy, Scott provides the funds up front and without restrictions, to be used however the organizations see fit.

“Arts and cultural institutions can strengthen communities by transforming spaces, fostering empathy, reflecting community identity, advancing economic mobility, improving academic outcomes, lowering crime rates, and improving mental health,” Scott wrote in blog post announcing the news, “so we evaluated smaller arts organizations creating these benefits with artists and audiences from culturally rich regions and identity groups that donors often overlook.”

A coalition of philanthropic foundations will devote $125 million over three years to New York State’s arts economy as part of Creatives Rebuild New York, an initiative connected to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s plan to remedy the devastating financial impact of the pandemic. Funded mainly by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with the support of the Ford and Stavros Niarchos Foundations, the program will provide as many as 2,400 artists with guaranteed monthly income and will endow 300 full-time salaried positions across small-to-midsize art organizations statewide.

“The artists whose work helps to sustain us have faced particularly devastating circumstances resulting from unemployment, underemployment, and a lack of predictable paid incomes,” said Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation. “It’s critical for the vibrancy of our cities that we recognize that making art is work, and artists are among our nation’s most dedicated and necessary drivers of our economy.”

The coronavirus has derailed New York’s cultural sector, which before 2020 had accounted for nearly half a million jobs and generated around $120 billion for the state. While many art institutions around the state have reopened in some form, many are working with decimated workforces and budgets. The performing arts industry has taken the hardest blow, with 50 percent of those jobs being lost statewide, 72 percent in New York City, whose arts and recreation sector suffered a 60 percent drop in employment between February and April of last year.

Following the May 6 formation of the City Artist Corps—a $25 million federally backed effort to put artists in New York City back to work—CRNY’s announcement is the latest of several initiatives in the country to experiment with universal basic income, increasingly considered as a viable solution to the virus’s uneven costs; San Francisco implemented a general income pilot program for artists last October.

“These funds will address the financial hardship and combat systemic inequities that have long plagued the sector,” said Emil J. Kang, the program director for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation. “This is particularly the case for those artists serving small-to-midsized organizations, often led by and serving BIPOC communities.” 
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Helmed by arts administrator Sarah Calderon, most recently the managing director of ArtPlace America, CRNY will on July 1 name its advisory board, to include artists, policymakers, researchers, and nonprofit leaders. Additional funding details will be announced on August 31.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has added a bronze plaque recognizing Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Indigenous Lenape diaspora, on the facade of its Fifth Avenue building. The institution is also working on a land acknowledgement for the Met Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan.

The bronze plaque installed at the Met reads: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art is situated in Lenapehoking, homeland of the Lenape diaspora and historically a gathering and trading place for many diverse Native peoples, who continue to live and work on this island. We respectfully acknowledge and honor all Indigenous communities—past, present, and future—for their ongoing and fundamental relationships to the region.” 

Land acknowledgements are common at institutions in New Zealand and Australia, where presentations of Indigenous art form a key component of certain museums’ programming. But they are less frequent at institutions in the United States.

Few other New York museums have undertaken such a measure. On its website, the New Museum has posted a text that it is situated on “unceded Indigenous land, specifically the homeland of the Lenape peoples,” and in 2018, as part of a posting for a New Red Order performance, the Whitney Museum wrote a similar acknowledgement.

There are signs that the Met is working to alter how it presents Indigenous art. The Met recently unveiled the first major reinstallation of works in “Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection,” an ongoing presentation overseen by the museum’s first full-time curator of Native American art, Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha).

Norby and Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American wing, wrote in an article on the Met’s website, “It’s critical for the Met to reckon thoughtfully with our institutional legacy and its ongoing impact on local lands and waters, as well as the lives of the original communities, to evolve into the cultural institution that we aspire and need to be for the region, the nation, and the world.”
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Daniel H. Weiss, president and CEO of the Met, said in a statement, “This acknowledgement is an important part of the Met’s commitment to build and maintain respectful relationships with Indigenous communities. It is also a meaningful reminder to all who walk through the museum’s front doors of the history and legacy of the land on which the Met now sits and the ties to this area that Indigenous communities sustain.”

The longtime art collector and marketing executive Denise Gardner will become the
chairwoman of the Art Institute of Chicago in November, perhaps the country’s first
Black woman to hold that position on a major museum board.
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“It’s hard to avoid the historical significance,” Gardner said in a telephone interview
on Monday. “That does add a sense of responsibility and pressure to succeed, and
that’s fine with me. I like to exceed expectations.”

Gardner, 66, will succeed Robert M. Levy — whose term ends in November — at the
helm of the Institute’s school as well as the museum.

Having served for 15 years as a trustee and for five in her current role as vice chair,
Gardner has championed Black artists as well as art accessibility and education for
underrepresented audiences. “The work is still unfinished,” Gardner said. “In this
role, I can help the museum accelerate its progress.”

The appointment comes at a time when cultural institutions are seeking to diversify
their staffs, boards and programming. Gardner is also on the steering committee of
the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, established last fall to help museums
bring on more Black trustees, artists and curators.

“A leader with her credentials is exactly what we need right now to take us into the
future,” James Rondeau, the museum’s director, said in a phone interview on
Monday. Given the Art Institute’s ongoing commitment to diversity, he added, “The experiences and the perspectives that she brings as a Black woman who is so
connected to the city of Chicago will only be an asset.”

Gardner — together with her husband, Gary — was the lead individual sponsor of
the museum’s 2018 exhibition, “Charles White: A Retrospective,” which traveled to
the Museum of Modern of Art. (The Gardners own three White works on paper.)

​Her collection focuses on Black and female artists, including Frank Bowling, Nick
Cave and Carrie Mae Weems. She was an early buyer of Amy Sherald, whose
popularity has surged since her official portrait of Michelle Obama, which hangs in
the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

The New York Botanical Garden, the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and the
Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas, are among 225 beneficiaries of new grants from
the National Endowment for the Humanities that were announced on Wednesday.

The grants, which total $24 million, will support projects at museums, libraries,
universities and historic sites in 45 states, as well as in Washington and Puerto Rico.
They will enable the excavation of a newly discovered ancient Egyptian brewery by
researchers from New York University, the implementation of a traveling exhibition
honoring Emmett Till’s legacy at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, and
research for a biography of the congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis by
David Greenberg, a professor at Rutgers University.

Adam Wolfson, the endowment’s acting chairman, said in a statement that the new
projects “embody excellence, intellectual rigor and a dedication to the pursuit of
knowledge, even as our nation and the humanities community continue to face the
challenges of the pandemic.”

As part of a new grant program in archaeology and ethnography, seven of the
awards will support empirical field research, including the excavation of the ancient
city of Teotihuacan in central Mexico and the investigation of settlement and
migration patterns on the Micronesian islands of Pohnpei and Kosrae.

​In New York, 40 projects at the state’s cultural organizations will receive $6.6
million in grants. Funding will support the creation of a digital, open-access
database of the endangered Uto-Aztecan language Wixárika, from west-central
Mexico, at the New York Botanical Garden; the expansion of the Freedom of
Information Archive, a digital resource of 4.6 million declassified documents, at
Columbia University; and the production of a 15-episode “Radio Diaries”
documentary podcast series, which uses archival audio recordings to tell forgotten
stories of 20th century America, like that of the last surviving Watergate burglar.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — People talk a lot about getting back to pre-Covid normal. But our traditional art museums can forget about that. After a year of intense racial justice reckoning, a paralyzing pandemic and crippling economic shortfalls, aging hidebound institutions are scrambling just to stay afloat. And the only way for them to do so is to change. Strategies for forward motion are needed. One is in play here at the Speed Art Museum, in the form of a quietly passionate show called "Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” which might, with profit, be studied by other institutions in survivalist mode.

Conventional encyclopedic museums like the Speed, the largest and oldest art museum in Kentucky, are glacial machines. Their major exhibitions are usually years in the planning. Borrowing objects from other museums can be a red tape tangle. “Historical” shows, by definition, are usually confined to events and cultures of the past. “Promise, Witness, Remembrance” revises all of that. It speeds up exhibition production, focuses on the present, and in doing so reaches out to new audiences vital to the institutional future.

Combining works from the Speed’s permanent collection with loans in several cases directly from artists and galleries, the show was assembled and installed (beautifully) in a mere four months. And it was conceived as a direct response to a contemporary news event: the killing, by Louisville police, of Breonna Taylor, a Black 26-year-old medical worker, in March 2020. A posthumous painting of Taylor by the artist Amy Sherald
is the exhibition’s centerpiece, accompanied by photographs of local street protests sparked by her death and by the lenient treatment of the white officers involved.

The availability of the painting by Sherald, who is widely known for her earlier portrait of Michelle Obama, was the impetus for the show. Originally commissioned by Vanity Fair, it appeared on the cover of the magazine’s September 2020 issue. Sherald herself expressed interest in having the painting shown at the Speed, and in November the museum hired
Allison Glenn, an associate curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., who, with astonishing speed and acuity, built an exhibition around it in Louisville, comprised entirely of Black artists, with funding found to keep the admission free.
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Accessibility, cultural and financial, are crucial features of the show. Until now, museums have generally ignored the country’s changing population demographics. The history that our big, general-interest art museums promote, through their preservation and display of objects, is primarily white history, with views of all other histories filtered through it. But that slanted perspective is no longer representative of audiences that museums will — speaking purely pragmatically — need to attract to survive.

​The Getty has partnered with the City of Los Angeles to rethink how the metropolis identifies and preserves local Black heritage landmarks.

The Los Angeles African American Historic Places Project, as the three-year initiative is called, will see the Getty’s Conservation Institute and the city’s Office of Historic Resources (OHR) work with communities and cultural institutions to celebrate sites that best represent Black life. 

The project is “ultimately about equity,” Conservation Institute director Tim Whalen said in a statement.

Currently, just over three percent of the city’s roughly 1,200 historic landmarks are tied to African American heritage, and part of the plan, Whalen said, is to examine preservation methods “for systemic bias.” 

“Historic preservation is about the acknowledgment and elevation of places and stories,” Whalen said, adding that the goal is to make sure “the stories and places of African Americans in Los Angeles are more present and complete.”

In addition to the designation of new landmark sites, the project will offer paid internships to young preservation professions and include a series of community programs.

While specific details about these and other projects are yet to be made public, the Conservation Institute and OHR have identified a handful of priorities for phase one, including developing plans to “manage, preserve, interpret, and celebrate the tangible and intangible heritage of historically Black neighborhoods.”