Still catching up on blogging, and last week's big story was the Baltimore Museum of Art putting three major paintings up for sale and planning to "use its $65 million windfall to help advance salary increases across the board, invest in diversity and inclusion programs, offer evening hours and eliminate admission fees for special exhibitions." The New York Times story is here. Eileen Kinsella has more here.
Christopher Bedford, the Museum's director, says "this is done specifically in recognition of the protest being led by museum staff to be paid an equitable living wage to perform core work for an institution with a social justice mission — that symmetry between who we say we are and what we actually are behind our doors."
As the Times points out, the Museum is "taking advantage of the Association of Art Museum Directors’ temporary pandemic-era loosening of its deaccessing guidelines. ... The B.M.A.’s game plan is ... in line with how the museum association defined its new resolution active until April 2022, said Christine Anagnos, its director. The first $10 million of proceeds from the ... sale will go into the museum’s endowment fund for acquisitions, with an emphasis on artists of color of the postwar era. The rest of the proceeds, approximately $55 million, will be used to create a new endowment for direct care of the collection. This fund should generate approximately $2.5 million annually in income, to cover the salaries of curators, registrars, conservators, preparators, art handlers, administrative staff and fellows, and other collection-related expenses."
I discussed that temporary pandemic-era loosening of the AAMD's deaccessioning guidelines here.
