The Toledo Museum of Art is a museum in the vein of Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts, with an encyclopedic collection with a Western focus. Under Kennedy the museum began \u201ccollecting for the first time works of indigenous arts of Native America, Aboriginal Australia and Oceania,\u201d the museum reported.<\/p>\n
“We want to introduce the audience to other artists of the world,” Kennedy said in 2012<\/a>. “We don\u2019t have a Navajo blanket. We don\u2019t have Indonesian textiles. Those are major art forms of two groups not represented.”<\/p>\n During Kennedy\u2019s tenure, the Toledo museum featured exhibitions of Manet and Frans Hals, Japanese prints, Frank Stella, Jules Olitski, contemporary and historic Native American art, contemporary aboriginal art from Australia, and Midwestern history. The museum also made visual literacy education for the digital age a focus.<\/p>\n In 2012, the Toledo museum refurbished 6,000 square feet of gallery space. Some 14,000 square feet of new and refurbished gallery space opened to the public in 2018 in \u201cthe largest renovation project to take place at TMA since the 1980s,\u201d the museum reported. They also added a solar canopy to the museum parking lot to collect energy, continuing a commitment to solar power that had started at the museum before he arrived.<\/p>\n The Toledo museum auctioned off of more than 60 pieces of ancient Roman or Egyptian artifacts in 2016, which \u201cbrought objections from the Egyptian and Cyprus governments, who said cultural artifacts should remain accessible to the public\u201d and prompted the Egyptian government to try to \u201cimpose sanctions against the Toledo museum,\u201d the Toledo Blade reported<\/a> in 2017. That year the museum worked to sell an additional 145 pieces. The sales aimed to raise more than $1 million for the museum\u2019s new acquisitions fund.<\/p>\n Born in Dublin, Kennedy studied art history and history at University College there, earning bachelor\u2019s, master\u2019s and doctoral degrees. He was assistant director of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin from 1989 to 1997, then director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra from 1997 to 2004, and was director of Dartmouth College\u2019s Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, from 2005 to 2010. He has written six books, most recently on the artists Sean Scully and Frank Stella.<\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n Last October, Dan Monroe, the Peabody Essex Museum\u2019s executive director and CEO for the past 25 years, announced plans to retire. Monroe spearheaded the 2003 Moshe Safdie-designed glass and brick expansion, centered on a soaring atrium. Under his leadership, the museum installed the 200-year-old Chinese Yin Yu Tang house, billed as the only such example of Chinese domestic architecture on display in the United States. A new 40,000-square-foot wing set to open to the public later this year and undertake a complete reinstallation of its galleries as part of the museum\u2019s $650 million Connect Campaign. As of last fall, more than $600 million had been raised, the museum reported.<\/p>\n During Monroe\u2019s years at the top of the museum, its operating budget grew from $3.4 million to $30 million, its endowment from $23 million to more than $400 million, and direct attendance from 80,000 to more than 250,000, the museum reports. The Connect Campaign aims to build an endowment for the institution capable of providing 60 to 65 percent of operating support for an annual budget of more than $34 million\u2014\u201cmore than twice the amount of endowment income than the average art museum draws annually,\u201d the museum says. The Wall Street Journal has described it as \u201cretooling the traditional business model for museums.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1992, the year before Monroe took charge, Peabody Museum of Salem merged with the Essex Institute, absorbing the institute\u2019s Phillips Library, and becoming the Peabody Essex Museum. The museum\u2019s stewardship of the library has been controversial. It filled two historic buildings on Salem\u2019s Essex Street until 2013 and then in temporary space in Peabody until September 2017. Last summer it moved to collection center to Route 1 in Rowley, three quarters of the building devoted to museum collection preservation and storage, the rest hosting the library. The move upset locals who felt the library\u2019s historical resources\u2014including documents from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692\u2014should stay in Salem. (Monroe has been loath to have the museum have anything to do with Salem\u2019s witch history\u2014or present.)<\/p>\n Most amazingly, under Monroe, the museum has transformed from a colonial treasure house rooted in its 1799 founding as a \u201ccabinet of natural and artificial curiosities\u201d of the East India Marine Society, an organization of Salem captains and supercargoes who had sailed beyond either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. The museum has been able to turn its collection into the foundation of a multicultural institution, engaged with history as well as, for example, living Native American artists and creators from around the world.<\/p>\n A major hire was Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, brought in the museum\u2019s chief curator in 2003 from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where she had been chief curator. She was named the Salem museum\u2019s deputy director in 2016.<\/p>\n This lead to a series of marvelous modern and contemporary art exhibitions, the like of which had never before been seen on Boston\u2019s North Shore\u2014including Joseph Cornell in 2007, 20th century surrealists Man Ray and Lee Miller in 2011, a major 2012 survey of contemporary Native American art, Alexander Calder sculptures in 2014, Dutch tinkerer Theo Jansen\u2019s amazing \u201cStrandbeest\u201d contraptions in 2015, Rodin sculptures in 2016, and Sally Mann photos last summer. These were augmented by dazzling shows of traditional Chinese art, Dutch old master paintings, contemporary fashion, modern art from India, and ancient Maya art. All of which have made the Peabody Essex the most consistently intriguing museum in New England.<\/p>\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n Brian Kennedy (pictured above)\u2014director, president and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio since September 2010\u2014has been named the next director of Salem\u2019s Peabody Essex Museum. The 57-year-old is expected to begin work here on July 15, taking over from Dan Monroe, who has led the Salem institution since 1993 and very much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10630"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10637,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630\/revisions\/10637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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