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Museums

By Zoë Lescaze 4/17 3:44pm

Museums

LA MOCA. (Courtesy Wikipedia Commons)

L.A. MOCA Endowment Soars to $75 M., Museum Names Donors

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, perennially beset with reports on its failing finances, is enjoying some good news. Trustees announced today that they have raised more than $50 million for the museum’s endowment in the past month, bringing it to $75 million. Prior to the campaign, the endowment hovered at a mere $22 million.

The museum also released a list of donors who have committed $1 million to $10 million, which includes Wallis Annenberg, Maria and Bill Bell, Eli and Edythe Broad, Blake Byrne, Steven and Alexandra Cohen, Cliff and Mandy Einstein, Lenore and Bernard Greenberg, David and Suzanne Johnson, Bruce Karatz and Lilly Tartikoff Karatz, Daniel S. Loeb and Margaret Munzer Loeb, Eugenio Lopez, Lillian Lovelace, Maurice Marciano, Edward J. and Julie Minskoff, Dallas Price-Van Breda, Fred and Carla Sands, Jeffrey and Catharine Soros, Darren Star and Sutton Stracke, Paul and Herta Amir and Marc and Eva Stern.  Read More

By Zoë Lescaze 4/15 3:44pm

Museums

QMA west

Warhol’s ‘13 Most Wanted Men’ to Visit Expanded Queens Museum

The Queens Museum, currently in the process of an ambitious expansion project, has announced more than a year’s worth of exhibitions that will fill its airy new galleries. Though the roster of shows ranges from a performance piece by Pedro Reyes to Peter Schumann’s enormous, politically charged puppets, perhaps none is more tantalizing than “Andy Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men and the 1964 World’s Fair.” Before groaning—does the world need another Warhol show?—consider why this one, slated for April 2014, will be worth attending. Far from merely a crowd-drawing ploy, the exhibition wouldn’t be quite as juicy were it to happen happen anywhere else. Read More

By Sarah Douglas 3/28 10:42am

Museums

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art saw a drop in attendance in 2012.

Museum Attendance Figures Show Slump for Troubled MoCA Los Angeles

The Art Newspaper has released its closely read annual worldwide museum attendance figures for 2012 and while there is good news for New York, there is some rather bad news for Los Angeles’s embattled Museum of Contemporary Art.

The most popular exhibition globally in 2012 was one of Dutch Old Masters that opened in Japan, something the paper points to as evidence that while new art may steal the spotlight, old art still draws crowds. In the major cities, however, modern and contemporary art stayed on top. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 3/27 5:21pm

Museums

(ladybugbkt/Flickr)

Marguerite Steed Hoffman Gives Dallas Museum of Art $17 M. to Support Old Masters Collection

Though the Dallas Museum of Art’s offer last year to buy Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (circa 1499–1512) was declined, plenty of other Old Master works will soon be on their way to the institution. The museum announced today a $17 million gift from Marguerite Steed Hoffman, a trustee and former chairman of the museum, specifically aimed at European art from before 1700. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 3/26 4:28pm

Museums

Laurel Roth, 'Hominoid: Chimpanzee,' 2011

Ceci N’est Pas un Arbre: As Museum of Arts and Design Hones in on Wood, Judith Belzer Zooms Out

About five years ago, Lowery Stokes Sims, whom the Museum of Arts and Design had recently hired as curator, was mulling ideas for exhibitions. At the time, the artist Martin Puryear, who is known for large, delicate sculptures made of wood, had a retrospective at MoMA, and one day Ms. Sims went to go see him in conversation with John Elderfield, then a curator at the museum.

“I was struck that he emphasized the fact that, as opposed to sending work out to be fabricated, he really wanted to engage the material and see where the material led him,” Ms. Sims told Gallerist on the phone last week. “Our mantra here [at MAD] is materials and process. A light bulb went off in my head, and I said, ‘I’ll work on wood!’” Read More