VAST COLLECTION GIVEN TO UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA; ANTIQUITIES PULLED FROM AUCTION
After more than two years of courtship, Paul R. Jones donated seventeen hundred pieces from his vast collection of African-American art to the University of Alabama, reports the Tuscaloosa News. The donated works, by more than six hundred artists, are appraised in total at $4.8 million. The new stewards of the collection plan to display pieces on campus and loan works to other universities and museums. Robert Olin, dean of the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, said at a news conference Tuesday, “We’ve only begun the possibilities this gift brings.” After buying three pieces from a street vendor in the 1960s, Jones was hooked on art. He went to free lectures and talked to artists to learn, and decided his collection would be African-American art. He said museums would rarely display works by black Americans, and when they did put on an exhibition, it was usually in February, which is also Black History Month. “My goal had been to incorporate African-American art into American art,” he said. By 2001, he had more than fifteen hundred pieces, and he decided to donate nine hundred of them to the University of Delaware, where those works are still on permanent display. Delaware had an connection to Jones: Amalia Amaki, an art professor and curator of the collection, who met Jones in 1982 when, as a volunteer for an Atlanta museum, she catalogued his collection in exchange for the museum displaying some pieces. Olin hired her in January 2007 to fill a faculty vacancy at the University of Alabama. Though Amaki’s presence in Tuscaloosa helped, Jones says he ultimately donated to the university because he’s from Alabama.
In other news, Elisabetta Povoledo reports in the New York Times_ that the Bonhams auction house in London withdrew ten objects Tuesday from an antiquities sale scheduled for Wednesday, after a last-minute request from the Italian government, which raised questions about the provenance of some vases and sculptures. Giovanni Nistri, who leads the art-theft squad of the Italian military police, said the unit was reviewing whether the items, valued at roughly $350,000, had been “stolen or illegally excavated.” Bonhams’s chairman, Robert Brooks, said in a statement that the auction house was “always happy to cooperate with any action that limits the chance of items being sold that should not be sold.” But he chided the Italian government for not giving “more advance warning and information about concerns they have.”
