PARIS’S MUSéE DAPPER TO CLOSE ITS DOORS IN JUNE

The Musée Dapper in Paris, a privately funded, nonprofit museum devoted to traditional and contemporary art from Africa, will shutter on June 18 due to rising costs and a drop in attendance, Eric Bietry-Rivierre of Le Figaro reports.

Located at 35 bis rue Paul-Valéry in the sixteenth arrondissement, Musée Dapper was established in 1986 by the Amsterdam-based Olfert Dapper Foundation, named for the Dutch humanist who wrote the ethnographic book Description of Africa (1668), to bring African art to a wider audience. It has since expanded and also exhibits Caribbean, Latin American, Indian, and African American work.

There was “too much burden,” president Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau said, adding that it was “too heavy to manage.” While the foundation will sell its 19,000-square-foot venue, comprising galleries, a library, basement, performance hall, and café, it still plans on organizing programming. Falgayrettes-Leveau said that cutting the expenses of having a physical space will allow the Dapper Foundation to have “more flexibility to carry out ambitious projects and invest in other spaces,” including the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, which will stage an exhibition of works from the Dapper collection this October.