At an online symposium this week, two former leaders of the Berkshire Museum â Van Shields, its executive director, and Elizabeth McGraw, its board chair â are scheduled to discuss the institution s sale of art in 2018. EAGLE FILE PHOTO
PITTSFIELD â Though Van Shields and Elizabeth McGraw no longer are with the Berkshire Museum, they will reunite this week to explain the museumâs drive to sell its most valuable art a few years back. People who opposed that sale may or may not be heard.
Shields and McGraw will appear Thursday as members of an online panel in a symposium titled âDeaccessioning after 2020,â sponsored by Syracuse Universityâs College of Law and Graduate Program in Museum Studies.
Lucas Cranach the Elder s Lucretia, which netted $4.2m when it was sold by the Brooklyn Museum at Christie s in October. The sale was intended to help finance the institution s collections care under the relaxed guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors
In an informal poll, members of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) have voted 91-88 against asking its trustees to explore a controversial change in its deaccessioning policy to permit institutions to sell art to finance direct care of their collections.
Under an unusual moratorium, such sales are currently permitted by the AAMD for two years, until April 2022, to give museums some flexibility as they struggle with financial shortfalls related to their Covid-19 shutdowns. Previously the association has imposed penalties on museums that sold off art to shore up their finances.
Peter Keller Has Led Bowers Museum for 30 Years
Photograph by Emily J. Davis
Most profiles start with an anecdote about their subject, a story that helps illuminate and illustrate who they are. But in the case of Peter Keller, who has traveled the world in his 30 years as the president of Bowers Museum, it’s impossible to narrow down the stories to one.
We could go with the time he enjoyed the view of Mexico City while atop the dome of the historic pilgrimage site Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe while working on the “Virgin of Guadalupe: Images in Colonial Mexico” exhibit. (“I’ve been on roofs in lots of places,” he says.) Or there’s his story about trying to write condition reports on artifacts for the show, “Secret World of the Forbidden City: Splendors from China’s Imperial Palace.” The former Imperial Library didn’t have power or heating, and there wasn’t enough light to see properly, so Keller took the precious objects outside to examine them on tab
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