Kansas University Art Museum’s Former Director to Appeal Rulings
Andrea Norris, the former director of Kansas University’s Spencer Museum of Art is appealing the recent dismissal of her lawsuit against the university, according to the
Lawrence Journal-World & News. Last month, District Judge Sally Pokorny ruled in favor of the university and former provost David Shulenburger and dismissed the suit Norris filed in 2006.
In 2004, Shulenburger fired Norris, who had led the museum for nearly sixteen years. The two parties argued in court whether he had authority and grounds to do so. Norris claimed the firing was improper, but Pokorny in her dismissal ruled that Norris failed to show a third party interfered with her employment contract.
Brown has also filed notice Norris will appeal earlier rulings in the case by district judge Jack Murphy, Pokorny’s predecessor. Murphy, who is now retired, dismissed portions of the lawsuit against the university in 2006.
June 29, 2009
Clif Olds to Step Down from Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Clifton C. Olds, Edith Cleaves Barry professor of history and criticism of art emeritus, will retire for a third time when he steps down from his position as interim director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art at the end of June 2009.
During his time at Bowdoin, he has chaired the art department, curated an exhibition of Rodin sculptures, acted as faculty liaison to the Bowdoin Track Team, and celebrated two—soon to be three—retirements.
After retiring initially in 2003, Olds was persuaded to return to teaching for the 2007-2008 academic year, and again in October 2008 to serve as interim director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
In 1999 he was honored by the College Art Association with the Award for Distinguished Teaching of Art History, an honor that came with testimonials from generations of students and faculty. Letters poured in from Bowdoin College, the University of Michigan, where he taught for eighteen years, and the University of Michigan/Sarah Lawrence Summer Program in Florence, Italy, where he served as director in 1979.
More information on Olds’s departure can be found
on Bowdoin's website. June 29, 2009
Ellen D’Oench (1930–2009)
Ellen “Puffin” D’Oench, curator emerita of the Davison Art Center, adjunct professor of art history emerita, and former trustee of Wesleyan University died May 22 in Middletown, Connecticut. She was seventy-eight years old.
D’Oench completed her undergraduate education at Wesleyan in 1973, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1979. She was curator of the Davison Art Center from 1979 until 1998. She served as a board-elected member of Wesleyan’s board of trustees from 1977 through 1979.
Her doctoral dissertation resulted in the exhibition and catalog “The Conversation Piece: Devis and his Contemporaries” at the Yale Center for British Art. She coauthored catalogues raisonnés on Jim Dine and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and curated numerous exhibitions on topics ranging from the color photography of Robert Sheehan to prodigal son narratives. After retiring, she published
Copper into Gold: Prints by John Raphael Smith, 1751-1812.
At Wesleyan, she taught courses on museum studies, the history of prints, and the history of photographs, and advised many tutorials and student-organized exhibitions at the Davison Art Center.
With the aid of gifts and funds raised by the Friends of the Davison Art Center, she expanded the renowned collection of the Davison Art Center by more than five thousand objects, including significant photographs and contemporary prints. More on D'Oench can be found on
Wesleyan’s newsletter.
June 14, 2009
University of Washington Art Professor Settles Lawsuit After Being Detained
A University of Washington art professor who was frisked, handcuffed, and detained by city of Snohomish police after she snapped photographs of power lines has settled a lawsuit she filed against the city for eight thousand dollars, according to the
Seattle Times.
The settlement, announced Monday, was reached a year after US District Court judge John Coughenour found that the three officers who detained fifty-five-year-old Shirley Scheier "lacked a reasonable justification for their aggressive tactics in completely restraining Scheier's personal liberty."
City manager Larry Bauman and chief of police John Turner said they stand behind the conduct of the officers, who receive federal money to protect Bonneville Power Administration facilities from potential terrorist attacks. They said the decision to settle was an effort to save taxpayer money. "The decision to settle was made by our insurance pool," Bauman said. "They determined that going to trial would have cost thirty thousand dollars, and that an eight-thousand-dollar settlement was a good business decision."
According to court documents, Scheier had driven to Snohomish to take photographs of power lines near a Bonneville Power Administration substation on October 17, 2005. The photos were for an academic project.
Scheier, who uses photographs of public land and structures in her artwork, claimed she was on public property when she snapped the photographs and there were no signs indicating that photography was not allowed.
June 11, 2009
Professor Roland Recht Receives Reimar Lüst Award
Roland Recht, professor of medieval and modern European art history at the Collège de France in Paris, has received one of the two 2009 Reimar Lüst Awards, which honors scholars who have promoted cultural and academic relations between their own countries and Germany. Recht has done comparative research on the writing of art history in France and Germany, and spent many years as head of Strasbourg’s museums. His research focuses on Gothic architecture, the art monuments of the Upper Rhine region, and the history of art history. In the context of the Reimar Lüst Award he will continue to extend his collaboration with Raphael Rosenberg and Thomas Maissen of Heidelberg University.
Valued at almost seventy thousand dollars, the award is granted jointly by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Winners are invited to Germany to meet specialist colleagues and exchange ideas. Two awards are granted every year; the other this year went to the American political scientist, Elinor Ostrom. The award is named after the former president of the Humboldt Foundation, Professor Dr. Reimar Lüst.
June 11, 2009
Yale University Art Gallery Acquires Hopper Drawings
The Yale University Art Gallery announced that it has purchased preparatory drawings by American artist Edward Hopper for two of his paintings,
Rooms by the Sea, 1951, and
Western Motel, 1957, both in the gallery’s collection. The drawings related to
Rooms by the Sea are rendered on two sides of a single sheet of paper, while the sheet related to
Western Motel contains a single sketch.
Preparatory studies for Hopper’s paintings are particularly important, since by the time the artist took brush to canvas he had worked through most of the compositional problems (x-rays of these canvases only rarely show any alterations). Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II director of the gallery, states, “These wonderful working drawings shed light on Hopper’s creative process, while also providing important documentary information about the paintings to which they are related.”
June 09, 2009
Yale University Sued Over Van Gogh Painting
Yale University’s acquisition of
The Night Cafe by Vincent Van Gogh that Russia once claimed as its own amounted to acceptance of stolen property and “art laundering,” a descendant of an earlier owner alleges. According to the
Associated Press, Pierre Konowaloff of France argues in recent court papers that Russian authorities in the 1917 revolution unlawfully confiscated the painting owned by Konowaloff’s ancestor and that the United States deemed the theft a violation of international law.
“Yale’s continued and wrongful detention of the unlawfully confiscated
The Night Café is prohibited by customary and international treaty law,” Konowaloff’s attorneys wrote in the filings. “Yale should be held accountable for financially benefiting and being complicit in the pillage and plunder and unlawful confiscation of cultural property.”
The Ivy League university sued in March in federal court to assert its ownership rights over the painting and to block Konowaloff from claiming it. Konowaloff is the purported great-grandson of industrialist and aristocrat Ivan Morozov, who bought the painting in 1908. Russia nationalized Morozov’s property during the Communist revolution. The painting, which the Soviet government later sold, has been hanging in the Yale University Art Gallery for almost fifty years.
Yale received the painting through a bequest from Yale alumnus Stephen Carlton Clark. The school says Clark bought the painting, which shows the inside of a nearly empty cafe, with a few customers seated at tables along the walls, from a gallery in New York City in 1933 or 1934.
Yale responded last Tuesday that the Russian nationalization of property, while sharply at odds with American values, did not violate international law. “Clark’s title to the painting was good, and so is Yale’s,” Yale said in a statement. “Clark bought the painting in good faith. When he left it to Yale, the painting had been publicly displayed for decades, and no one had ever contested Clark’s ownership of it.”
June 08, 2009
University of Pittsburgh Receives Collection of Japanese Prints
University of Pittsburgh alumnus Barry Rosensteel, a devotee of Japanese art, has donated 126 rare Japanese woodblock prints to the university's library system. The donation, valued at $115,000, will be known as the Barry Rosensteel Japanese Print Collection.
The colorful prints, produced between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, represent Japanese culture through detailed depictions of landscape, history, and theater. They range from the size of a greeting card to that of a full poster.
“We are very grateful for Barry's donation,” said Rush Miller, Hillman University librarian and director of the University Library System. “It's an extraordinary complement to our Walter and Martha Leuba Collection, which contains several twentiety-century Japanese woodblock and Chinese prints.”
June 08, 2009
John and Ruth McGee Donate $1 Million for West Virginia University Art Museum Construction
When Bernie Schultz, dean of West Virginia University's College of Creative Arts, arrived at WVU in 1977, he hoped to one day have an art museum. On Friday, Charleston residents John and Ruth McGee announced a one-million-dollar donation toward the museum's construction, according to the
Charleston Gazette. "We're going to do this," Schultz said. "It's going to happen, and people like John and Ruth help to make it happen."
The ten-million-dollar, sixteen-thousand-square-foot museum project will be completed in 2012 and will have 5,300 square feet dedicated to exhibition space. Some of that space will go toward the McGee's additional donation of a Zimbabwean sculpture collection appraised at one million dollars. In appreciation of the donations, Schultz said one of the galleries would be named after the McGees. June 08, 2009
USC School of Architecture Dean Founds Asia’s First International Architecture Prize
The
Los Angeles Times reports that Qingyun Ma, the dean of University of Southern California’s School of Architecture, is serving as the founding director of the Ordos Prize, the first international architectural award to come from Asia. Unlike other honors that recognize established architects, the Ordos is meant to spotlight emerging talent in the field of design.
The winner will receive a commission to design a structure for a site in the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia. The prize also includes a twenty-thousand-dollar award as well as exhibitions of work at venues in the United States and Asia.
Ma is working with Jiang Yuan Cultural and Creativity Development Company, which originally commissioned one hundred young architects from throughout the world to design one hundred villas in Ordos. The prize is an extension of that project. The jurors for this year's inaugural prize are Rem Koolhaas, Yun Feng, Lauren Bon, Zhiyuan Cui, and Robbi Finkel. Dean Ma will also serve on the jury. Nominations for the Ordos prize are scheduled to be announced next week, and a winner will be announced in August.
June 01, 2009
