MUSEUMS Winter 2021
1. NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- One of the headliners of the New York Philharmonic’s fall gala last month was Leonard Bernstein, leading his old orchestra in the overture to “Candide.”
Yes, Bernstein died three decades ago. But since the gala, like so much else, was forced to go remote, the Philharmonic had some fun with the format, filming its current players performing to historical footage of Bernstein wielding his baton. The virtual gala had some advantages: it cost less to produce, with no catering, linen rentals and flower arrangements for a black-tie audience, and it reached some 90,000 people, while the concert hall holds around 2,700.
But when it came to the bottom line, the picture was less rosy. The virtual event raised less than a third of what the gala concert took in last year: $1.1 million, down from $3.6 million, a vivid illustration of the steep challenge of raising money for the arts during a global pandemic.
With little or no earned income coming in amid canceled performances and proscribed public gatherings, nonprofit cultural institutions across the nation are scrambling to attract a source of revenue that is often even more important to their bottom lines: philanthropy. Now, as they anxiously await the results of their year-end appeals for donations, they are facing competition from pressing causes including hunger, health care and social justice.
“I am pedaling quickly to try to make sure that we can try to figure out how to make it through,” said Deborah F. Rutter, the president of the Kennedy Center in Washington, which ended its fiscal year on Sept. 30 with a $500,000 deficit compared to last year’s balanced budget. “We are heavily dependent on contributed revenues to survive.”
The going has, indeed, been rough. Box office revenues for many institutions have fallen off a cliff: ticket sales for performing arts groups in the United States were down 96.3% in November compared to that month last year, according to a report released last month by the analytics group TRG Arts. And donations do not appear to be making up the difference.
Despite an outpouring of contributions when the virus first struck, individual giving to arts organizations fell by 14% in North America during the first nine months of the year, the group found in another report. The average size of gifts from the most active, loyal patrons fell by 38%, the survey found.
A survey of performing arts administrators by the publication Inside Philanthropy found 45% reporting “reduced funder interest and resources as a result of the current shifting of funds for COVID and racial justice.”
The outbreak has forced institutions to find creative ways to interact with donors: virtual cocktail parties, music quizzes, meet-the-musician online events.
“It’s a long way to make up for the gap, and I think we should all be realistic about the fact that this is nowhere near a substitute,” said Henry Timms, the president of Lincoln Center, who helped develop #GivingTuesday in 2012, a day to encourage philanthropy on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. But he added that “when the traditional fundraising vehicles return, a lot of us will have also learned some new digital tricks.”
Among those tricks: New York City Center has invited audiences to “Make Someone Happy” this holiday season by sending as a gift (for $35) digital access to its Evening With Audra McDonald, available on demand through Jan. 3. And earlier this month, Ars Nova, an artists incubator in New York, raised more than $400,000 during its 24-hour livestream telethon, which featured more than 200 artists.
Museums are struggling to raise funds in the absence of events, and because they were forced to close during the first few months of the pandemic. “We count on the front door for about 30% of the budget, so to lose that in one fell swoop is perilous,” said Richard Armstrong, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which is projecting a $13 million deficit and had to cancel a potentially high-traffic Joan Mitchell touring retrospective because the timing no longer worked.
Rather than pivot to a virtual gala, the Guggenheim decided to scrap that event altogether — instead inviting donations to a “Gala Fund” — in part because of Zoom fatigue and because online programming had not been a strong point.
“We were a little far behind on virtual previously, so we had to catch up and we’re still figuring that out,” Armstrong said. “We certainly put out a lot of content in the seven months. We’ve learned, I think better, how to make the online museum more comparable to the physical space.”
New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet typically hold a benefit each year after a Saturday matinee of “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” followed by a backstage tour and party on the promenade of the David H. Koch Theater. This year they went online.
Principal dancer Tiler Peck gave a backstage tour, told the story of the ballet and performed an excerpt. People who purchased benefit tickets received treats delivered to their homes, and were able to interact with dancers on Zoom. Dancers, in costume, were streamed live from their theater dressing rooms, where they did makeup demonstrations, talked about their characters and answered questions. And attendees received a free link to watch the company performing the full ballet on marquee.tv through Jan. 3.
But many arts institutions must navigate a sensitive fundraising climate — making the case for culture as a worthy cause, while remaining mindful of the international health crisis, rising hunger, and a national reckoning around racial and social justice.
“We were careful not to be overreaching, allowing partner organizations to do what they had to do, like United Way or other community service organizations that were literally dealing with life-and-death situations,” Mark A. Davidoff, the chairman of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, said. “How much is enough, and how much might be too much?”
This month’s annual summit of the Arts Funders Forum, which aims to increase private funding for arts and culture in the United States, emphasized how arts institutions need to demonstrate to donors what they are doing to drive social change.
“Of the causes that Americans of all generations do support,” said Melissa Cowley Wolf, director of the forum, during her opening remarks, “arts and culture do not make the top seven.”
Many nonprofit institutions are hoping to apply for aid available in the stimulus bill that President Donald Trump signed Sunday night.
Amid the crisis, some foundations are stepping in to try to help keep institutions afloat, and large organizations are seeking emergency support from their boards.
Virtual fundraising has benefited a bit from the fact that people are stuck at home, making them eager for engagement as well as less heavily scheduled.
“People have the bandwidth for those kinds of conversations,” Rutter, of the Kennedy Center, said. “In the past, it would be like, ‘Let’s get together for lunch,’ and it would take six months to get it on the calendar. Now it’s like, ‘I’m free tomorrow.’”
Still, fundraising challenges remain formidable. What is typically a subtle dance — we’ll give you this perk, if you give us your dollars — has now become a more brazen cry for help.
This month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art placed donation boxes in the lobby of its Fifth Avenue entrance: “Please give to The Met to help us connect others to the power of art.” The Detroit Symphony launched what it is calling a Resilience Fund “to ensure that our world-class orchestra keeps the music playing for our community during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.”
The New York Philharmonic has established the “It Takes an Orchestra Challenge,” trying to raise $1.5 million by Dec. 31. David M. Ratzan, a New Yorker who typically takes his son to several concerts a year, contributed $100. “If people don’t pitch in,” he said, “these places won’t exist.”
The orchestra was forced to cancel its entire current season, and this month its musicians agreed to substantial salary cuts as its administration was reorganized to allow Deborah Borda, its president and chief executive, to focus on two priorities: renovating David Geffen Hall, its Lincoln Center home, and fundraising.
“It’s an incredibly serious situation,” Borda said. “Our last concert was March 10 and we can’t play this entire year and then the next question is, looking forward, what will happen in the fall of 2021? What is going to happen with the vaccine? How comfortable will people feel about coming back?”
Given this uncertainty, cultural executives still find themselves far outside the bounds of the traditional arts management playbook.
“I’m not talking about whether Yo-Yo is available,” said Mark Volpe, the chief executive of the Boston Symphony, referring to cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and noting that the symphony would typically have started selling tickets for its summer Tanglewood season in November. “I’m talking about what the future is going to be.”
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© 2020 The New York Times Company
2. SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | Dec. 31, 2020, 10:48 a.m.
In recent years, curators and educators have increasingly started exploring the many possibilities offered by virtual exhibitions. Hundreds of institutions have made 3-D tours of their galleries available online through Google Arts & Culture and similar platforms, allowing visitors from around the world to virtually “wander” through the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico City, the Tokyo National Museum and other significant sites.
But when the Covid-19 pandemic forced museums to shutter for most of 2020, public interest in virtual art experiences skyrocketed like never before. Closed to the public and financially strained, many museums nevertheless managed to create thought-provoking alternatives to in-person viewing.
Digital offerings in the United States ranged from the Morgan Library & Museum’s interactive retrospective of Al Taylor’s drawings to the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “Virtual Views” of Surrealist women. Abroad, exhibitions such as the Rijksmuseum’s interactive version of a Rembrandt masterpiece offered viewers a chance to literally “zoom in” on a single piece of art—and perhaps notice new details that would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed. In London, meanwhile, Tate Modern adapted its “Andy Warhol” show by creating a curator-led tour that takes users through the exhibition room by room.
The Smithsonian Institution also made impressive forays into the world of online exhibitions. A beautifully illustrated portal created by the National Museum of American History and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative examined how girls have shaped history, while a landmark show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum spotlighted Chicano activists’ pioneering printmaking. At the National Museum of Natural History, curators catered to science enthusiasts with narrated virtual tours of various exhibits and halls; at the National Air and Space Museum, aviation experts produced panoramic views of famed aircraft’s interiors. Other highlights included the National Museum of Asian Art’s virtual reality tour of six iconic monuments from across the Arab world, the Cooper Hewitt’s walkthrough of “Contemporary Muslim Fashions,” and the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s exploration of black soldiers’ experiences during World War I. (For a more complete list of offerings, visit the Smithsonian’s online exhibitions portal.)
To mark the end of an unprecedented year, Smithsonian magazine is highlighting some of the most innovative ways in which museums helped craft meaningful virtual encounters with history and art. From first ladies to women writers and Mexican muralists, these were ten of our favorite online exhibitions of 2020.
“Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States”
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.)
First ladies illustration for online exhibitions
Click this image to view the online exhibition. Depicted clockwise from top left: Mamie Eisenhower, Lady Bird Johnson, Grace Coolidge, Nancy Reagan, Dolley Madison, Abigail Fillmore, Frances Cleveland and Sarah Polk. (Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photographs via NPG)
Visitors to the National Portrait Gallery’s presidential wing have long called for an exhibition devoted to the U.S.’ first ladies. But as Alicia Ault points out for Smithsonian, these women haven’t always been recognized as important individuals in their own right—a fact reflected in the relative dearth of portraiture depicting them. The gallery itself only began commissioning official portraits of the first ladies in 2006.
“Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States” seeks to redress this imbalance by presenting 60 portraits—including photographs, drawings, silhouettes, paintings and sculptures—of American presidents’ wives. Though the physical exhibition is currently closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, would-be visitors can explore a virtual version featuring high-resolution images of first ladies from Martha Washington to Melania Trump, as well as brief biographies, podcasts and blog posts. The portraits are as “varied as the women themselves,” who all responded to the unique challenges and pressures of their office in different ways, writes Ault.
Inspiration for the exhibition’s title comes from Julia Gardiner, who was the first woman to marry a president in office. Born into a wealthy Long Island slaveholding family, Gardiner was just 24 years old when she wed John Tyler in 1844. As Gardiner prepared to take on the high-profile role, she wrote in a letter to her mother that she knew she would be scrutinized: “I very well know every eye is upon me, my dear mother, and I will behave accordingly.”
“Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle”
Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts)
One of black history’s preeminent visual storytellers, Jacob Lawrence employed Modernist forms and bright colors to narrate the American experience through the eyes of the country’s most marginalized citizens. This year, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, reunited one of Lawrence’s most groundbreaking series—Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954–56)—for the first time in 60 years.
In 30 hardboard panels, each measuring 12 by 16 inches, Lawrence traces American history from the Revolutionary War to 1817, covering such events as the Boston Tea Party and the nation’s bloody, prolonged campaigns against Native Americans, as Amy Crawford wrote for Smithsonian in June. Virtual visitors can stroll through the exhibition, aptly titled “Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle,” or zoom in on images of each panel. Entries are accompanied by related artworks and reflections from scholars.
When the show traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it sparked an exciting reunion. A museum visitor recognized the panels’ distinct Modernist style and realized that her neighbors, a couple living on the Upper West Side, had a similar painting hanging in their living room. Curators determined that the panel, which depicts Shay’s Rebellion, was one of five missing works from the Struggle series. No photographs of the panel had survived, and it had been presumed lost for decades—but as curator Randall Griffey told the New York Times, it turned out to be “just across the park” from the museum.
“Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945”
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City)
When the Mexican Revolution drew to a close in 1920 after ten years of armed struggle, the country was left profoundly changed. But among artists of the post-revolutionary period, a new cultural revolution was just beginning. Over the next several decades, artists like the famed Tres Grandes, or Big Three—José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros—started crafting radical, large-scale works that embraced Mexico’s Indigenous cultures and told epic narratives about the nation’s history.
As “Vida Americana,” an ongoing exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, argues, these sweeping, dynamic murals also had a major impact on Mexico’s neighbors to the north. As Mexican artists traveled to the U.S. (and vice versa), they taught their peers how to break free of European conventions and create public art that celebrated American history and everyday life. On the show’s well-organized online hub, art lovers can explore short documentaries, audio guides, essays and other resources in both Spanish and English. Click through some of the selected artworks from the show to encounter Rivera’s Detroit Institute of Art masterpiece, a massive 27-mural cycle that offered Americans reeling from the Great Depression a visionary outlook of their country’s future industrial potential, and Siqueiros’ experimental workshop, which directly inspired Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism.
“Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures”
The Museum of Modern Art (New York City)
Recognized today as one of America’s foremost photographers, Dorothea Lange is known for her arresting portraits of the human condition and keen social awareness—qualities perhaps best exemplified by her 1936 image Migrant Mother, which became a de facto symbol of the Great Depression.
But few people know that Lange was also enamored with the written word. As she once said, “All photographs—not only those that are so called ‘documentary’... can be fortified by words.” Lange believed that words could clarify and add context to photographs, thereby strengthening their social impact. In her landmark photobook An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, she became one of the first photographers to incorporate her subject’s own words into her captions, as Smithsonian reported in August.
Through this MoMA exhibition’s online hub, viewers can read selections of Lange’s writing, watch a series of short videos on her work, listen to interviews with curator Sarah Meister, and—of course—take their time studying close-up versions of the artist’s iconic photographs.
“Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation”
Museum of Fine Art, Boston (Boston, Massachusetts)
Jean-Michel Basquiat is often touted as a singular genius. His large-scale works, which riff on color, phrases and iconography to probe issues of colonialism, racism and celebrity, regularly fetch enormous sums at auction.
But the graffiti artist–turned–painter, who died of a heroin overdose at age 27, didn’t develop his artistic vision in a vacuum: Instead, he was profoundly influenced by a network of peers and close collaborators. “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” which opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in October, is the first show to consider the influence of Basquiat’s large circle of mainly black and Latino collaborators, all of whom shaped the painter’s artistic vision in 1980s New York City.
The museum complemented its in-person show with a multimedia-heavy online exhibition, which includes detailed essays, images of works in the show and clips of interviews with the artist. Viewers are encouraged to scour lesser-known artworks from Basquiat’s peers, such as the “Gothic futurist” paintings of Rammellzee and the rebellious murals of Lady Pink, in search of themes and styles that Basquiat echoed in his own work.
“Making the Met, 1870–2020”
Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City)
A group of businessmen and civic leaders purchased the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first work—a marble sarcophagus from ancient Rome—in 1870. Since then, the museum’s collections have become some of the greatest troves of cultural heritage in the world, constituting an encyclopedic range of artifacts that attracts millions of visitors each year.
This year, the Manhattan museum celebrated its 150th birthday by hosting a celebratory exhibition and slate of virtual offerings: Among others, the list of digital resources includes an hour-long audio tour of some of the exhibition’s highlights, as narrated by actor Steve Martin; an interactive online version of the show; and a virtual walkthrough courtesy of Google Arts and Culture. Met officials also made a rare gem available for public viewing: Behind the Scenes: The Working Side of the Museum, a silent 1928 documentary that depicts curators and janitors at work in the iconic New York building.
An innovative example of the possibilities of online exhibitions, the British Museum’s “Museum of the World” debuted in February 2020—and it couldn’t have been better timed. Though the museum remained closed to in-person visitors for much of the year, desktop computer users were able to use this interactive timeline to visualize connections between different items in the museum’s vast collections.
On the website, which the museum developed in partnership with Google Arts & Culture, viewers can trace links through time and space, jumping from a handscroll describing courtly behavior of ladies in the Eastern Jin Dynasty of China to the jade plaque of a Maya king. With a slick interface and audio elements, the timeline encourages viewers to take an interactive, self-directed trip through the material culture of human history.
Notably absent from the project is an acknowledgement of the London museum’s colonialist history, which came under renewed scrutiny this summer amid global protests against systemic racism. In August, the cultural institution moved a bust of its founder, who profited from the enslavement of people in Jamaica, to a new display featuring added contextualization. As Aditya Iyer writes for Hyperallergic, the museum recently made a “promising but flawed start [at] grappling with” this legacy by curating a self-guided tour titled “Empire and Collecting.” Available online in an abbreviated format, the tour traces the “different, complex and sometimes controversial journeys of objects” that entered the collections, according to the museum's website.
“The Night Watch”
The Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Screenshot of The Night Watch
Click this image to access the interactive portal. (Screenshot via the Rijksmuseum)
In this new hyper-resolution view of Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Night Watch, art lovers can pore over every detail of the Dutch master’s most famous painting—down to every crack and stray paint splatter, as Theresa Machemer wrote for Smithsonian in May. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam debuted the interactive version of its prized painting as part of a lengthy restoration process dubbed Operation Night Watch. Last year, experts began restoring the 11- by 15-foot painting in a glass chamber installed in the middle of the museum, offering visitors a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse at the conservation process.
Officially titled Night Watch, Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, the 1642 painting depicts a captain instructing a cadre of soldiers. In the online guided tour (which comes with options for children and adults), users can zoom in on different aspects of the painting while a soundscape—the swish of a cloak, a horse’s hooves, an eerie melody, a far-off bell—sets the mood. Look for Rembrandt’s signature, his presumed self-portrait lurking in the painting’s background, the striking young girl with a chicken dangling from her belt and other mysterious elements embedded in the action-packed scene.
According to a statement, the image combines 528 exposures into one composite, making it the most detailed rendering of Rembrandt’s masterpiece ever created. The project is a prime example of how online galleries can encourage viewers to engage in repeated, close study of the same piece of art—and proof that they can always discover something new.
“Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution”
Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (Ghent, Belgium)
Jan van Eyck interactive experience
Click this image to access the virtual experience. (Screenshot via Museum of Fine Arts Ghent)
Curators and art enthusiasts were crushed when the pandemic forced a blockbuster Jan van Eyck exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent to close less than two months after opening. The once-in-a-generation show—titled “Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution”—represented the largest-ever display of van Eyck’s paintings and was “so unlikely to be repeated that the museum might as well use ’now or never,’” as J.S. Marcus wrote for the Wall Street Journal in January.
In response to the unexpected closure, the museum pivoted, partnering with Belgian virtual reality company Poppr to create a 360-degree tour of the gallery with accompanying audio guides for adults and children. Star items featured in the show included Portrait of a Man (Léal Souvenir) and panels from the spectacular Ghent Altarpiece, whose center panel depicts Jesus as a sacrificial lamb on an altar, alive but bleeding from a wound. Prior to the exhibition, the panels had not left their home in St. Bavo’s Cathedral since 1945, as Sophie Haigney reported for the New York Times earlier this year.
Born in 1390 in what is now Belgium, van Eyck created spectacularly detailed oil paintings of religious scenes. As the show’s website notes, only about 20 of the Flemish master’s paintings survive today.
“Wise and Valiant: Women and Writing in the Golden Age of Spain”
Instituto Cervantes (Madrid, Spain)
Screenshot of digital listings for women writers exhibition Click this image to browse the exhibition's essays and artworks online. (Screenshot via Instituto Cervantes)
Spain’s Golden Age is perhaps best known for producing Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote, El Greco’s eerily elongated portraits and Lope de Vega’s prolific plays. But as the now-closed exhibition “Wise and Valiant” showed, these individuals and their male peers weren’t the only creative geniuses at work during the 16th and 17th centuries. Though women’s opportunities at the time were largely limited to the domestic and religious spheres, a select few took advantage of the relative intellectual freedom offered by life in a convent to pursue writing professionally.
From Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to playwright Ana Caro and nun-turned-soldier Catalina de Erauso, hundreds of women across the Spanish Empire published poetry, diaries, novels, dramatic works and travelogues. Though many of these works have since been lost or forgotten, scholars are increasingly taking steps to recover their authors’ hidden stories—a trend reflected in the Madrid show, which explored women writers’ lives through a display of more than 40 documents. As Lauren Moya Ford observed in Hyperallergic’s review of the show, the online version of the exhibition (available in both Spanish and English) presents their stories in a “format well-suited to this dense, delicate material.” Users can delve into digitized historical documents, browse curator commentary and watch a video montage of relevant clips.
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3. NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- For art collectors interested in donating a work, one worry has long been that their gift, a valuable, possibly beloved, painting would end up in a museum basement, where many items from permanent collections reside, unseen.
For museums, who depend on the generosity of donors, the concern has been that it’s difficult to compete for works against the most prestigious and popular of their kind.
“People know about major museums like the Whitney, the Met and the Guggenheim,” said Carter E. Foster, a curator at Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. “But they don’t know us.”
So curators like Foster and collectors, like Michael Straus, are cautiously optimistic about the potential of a new venture, the Museum Exchange, a subscription online catalog of works up for donation that aims to put collectors looking to find homes for their possessions in touch with museums looking for items that support their mission.
“It’s really most valuable for me to donate a work of art where it’s perceived to fulfill a need,” said Straus, who is using the exchange to offer a single series comprising 60 individual art pieces from the first decade of the current century.
The exchange, still a fledgling business, has drawn interest from about a dozen institutions and published its first quarterly catalog last fall. It features 32 works by artists like Jonathan Lasker, Richard Hunt, Wangechi Mutu and Diana Thater that have been put up as potential gifts by 15 donors. Donors pay a variable processing fee that the exchange would not disclose.
There is a $1,000 a year subscription charge for museums and so far museums as small as the Blanton and as large as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, have signed up. For the time being, the catalog focuses on modern and contemporary artworks, according to David Moos, a private art adviser who is one of the co-founders of the exchange
The business plan involves ultimately charging collectors for other services like appraisals and shipping fees, but at the outset it relies on museum subscriptions. There would seem to be a need for a significant number of subscribers to fund operations, and the operators declined to say how many of the 12 museums signed up so far have paid the subscription fee.
The exchange will be led by Michael Darling, who announced his departure this week as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
“Museums are going through a period of change that’s really only just beginning,” Darling said. “We want to help museums develop a broader picture of what contemporary art looks like by having access to different parts of the country.”
Museum acquisition budgets have rarely been large enough to allow institutions to compete on the open market against wealthy collectors. This disparity has only grown in recent years with escalating prices for high profile contemporary art and has even been made worse by the pandemic. So relationships with donors are particularly important. Yet donors, though often motivated by the tax deductions that come with museum gifts, have been upset to see their gifts sometimes shunted aside — so upset, in fact, that some owners of the most prized collections have been able to get museums to sign agreements committing to exhibit the donated art.
Foster said he had identified a contemporary drawing in the catalog that he hopes will be heading to his museum in Austin.
Under the exchange process, curators interested in a work have to write a pitch describing the nature of their institution and how the work fits. Collectors get to see who is interested in their works before deciding where it will go.
Cathleen Chaffee, chief curator at the Albright-Knox, said the site could help build relationships with potential patrons beyond their local region. “We hope this is an opportunity to meet like-minded collectors,” she said. “Collectors not only can bring philanthropy. They are bringing their own community and expertise.”
The site faces a number of hurdles, one of which is that many donors develop long-standing relationships with particular museums, which court them and provide them special access and other perks.
“Those sort of people will not want their work to end up just anywhere,” said Karen Boyer, a private art adviser in Miami who has helped collectors place works with museums. “They want it to end up on the wall of an institution that they like and where their friends will see their name.”
However, Tim Schrager, a collector based in Atlanta where he is a board member of the High Museum of Art, said he would try using the exchange. Recently, he said, he wanted to donate three works, but the High could only take two, and he had to look for another home for the third, by Dutch artist Folkert de Jong. After much calling around, he placed it with a museum in Birmingham, Alabama.
In the future, the exchange could make that process easier, he said. “Museums will be able to see it,” he said, “and determine whether it fits.”
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