GETTY FUNDS NEW ORLEANS; FISK UNIVERSITY FILES APPEAL; CHAGALL WINDOW SMASHED
The Getty Foundation has announced a third and final round of grants to support the recovery of visual-arts organizations in New Orleans, reports the New York Times’ Julie Bloom. Some twenty-one grants totaling $2.8 million have been awarded to museums and arts organizations so far. The latest total more than one million dollars and are timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Recipients include the Cathedral of Saint Louis, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation, the Contemporary Arts Center, the Louisiana State Museums, the New Orleans Cultural Coalition, and Prospect.1 New Orleans.
In other news, Fisk University still wants to sell a share of an art collection that painter Georgia O’Keeffe donated to the school almost sixty years ago. The Associated Press reports via the International Herald Tribune that the school is appealing a decision by a Nashville chancellor that banned any sale of the 101-piece collection that includes works by O’Keeffe, Picasso, and Renoir. Fisk wants to sell half a share of the collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville for thirty million dollars. Under the proposal, Fisk and Crystal Bridges would each display the collection half the time. In March, Nashville chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle set an October deadline for Fisk to retrieve the artwork from storage and display it. Lyle ruled that Fisk broke the terms of the donation but shouldn’t lose the collection. School attorneys argue in a state appellate court filing dated Friday that the proposed sale does not violate O’Keeffe’s original intent in making the donation.
On an unrelated note, vandals have smashed part of a stained-glass window created by the artist Marc Chagall in a church in eastern France, according to The Telegraph. The window, in the Metz Cathedral, was designed and made by Chagall in 1963 and depicts Adam and Eve. Over the weekend, intruders broke into the church, stole a few objects, and broke the window, leaving a small hole. Officials at the Metz-based culture ministry said the perpetrators had not yet been caught—and they appeared not to have been professional thieves. “They didn’t take anything important, just souvenir medallions and brass crowns from statues,” said Emmanuel Etienne, a member of the ministry. “What’s more serious is the hole in the stained-glass window.” If the vandals are caught, they face a stiff penalty; a new law allows for prison terms of up to seven years and fines of $139,000 for damaging cultural treasures.
