Art Museums Receive $10 Million in Gifts

"It's been a great first half of the year," said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the University Art Museums, as he announced gifts to the Art Museums totaling $10 million since December. "Three individuals have stepped forward with major gifts to our Capital Campaign just when we needed them most. Their gifts put us at the halfway point in our quest for $37 million and give us tremendous momentum to raise the rest over the next two years."

The Art Museums are in the midst of their "Campaign for a New Century" as part of Harvard's $2.1 billion University Campaign, intending to raise funds to renovate and climate control the Fogg Art Museum, renovate and endow the operating of their conservation laboratories, and endow curatorial positions in Asian art, Islamic and later Indian art, ancient art, and contemporary art.

"Our campaign will permit us to enter our second century with vigor and a strengthened commitment to teaching and research," Cuno said. "That is the legacy of our first hundred years, and it is one we take seriously. At a time when support of curatorial research in art museums is less and less available, academic museums like ours need to take the lead and promote original research." The Art Museums celebrated their one-hundredth anniversary this past November with events marking the Centenary of the Fogg Art Museum's opening in 1895.

"Campaigns have a way of directing themselves," Cuno said. "We started off quickly two years ago with Philip and Lynn Straus's gift of $7.5 million in support of our conservation center. Then last year an anonymous donor gave $2.5 million for a curatorship in photography and a photography acquisitions fund. And then we inched along slowly for more than a year until the last six months when anonymous donors lifted our spirits with gifts of $5 million, $4 million, and $1 million."

The $5 million gift will go toward the renovation and construction of galleries for contemporary art in the Fogg Art Museum. "This is a major part of our efforts and may cost as much as $20 million," Cuno explained. "The Fogg has never had climate control and its galleries have not been renovated since they were built in 1927. As great as they are, and people love them -- the quality of their light, their intimacy -- they are not suited to showing large-scale contemporary works. We need bigger spaces if we are going to show recent work as it should be shown. And we need to show and collect ever more recent works of art if we are to grow with the interests of Harvard students. Our mission is to engage and challenge students. We can't do that without showing contemporary art at its best."

The gift, which is the second largest of the Art Museums' Capital Campaign to date, also stands as a challenge to raise an additional $15 million to create new climate-controlled galleries of sufficient scale for showing contemporary art, and $2 million to endow a curatorship in contemporary art. "This generous gift is wonderful news," stated Christopher Killip, director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and professor of visual and environmental studies. "It will enable a complete reorganization of the lower ground floor of the Fogg, allow the museum to focus on contemporary work and give additional classroom space in the most exciting environment imaginable!"

The history of the Art Museums includes recent exhibitions or installations by Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Gary Hill, and David Ward. In 1993 the Art Museums joined with Harvard's Office for the Arts, the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and the Graduate School of Design in sponsoring David Ward's artistic residency at Harvard, which culminated in the site-specific installation, "Canopy," in the trees of the University's Tercentenary Theatre. In addition, in 1991 the Art Museums received a gift of $3.5 million from the estate of Margaret Fisher to establish an endowment for the purchase of contemporary drawings and prints. This has allowed the departments of Prints and Drawings, known throughout the world for their collections of Old Master works, to extend these collections by acquiring prints and drawings by such artists as Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Susan Rothenberg, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Ryman, Joel Shapiro, and Eva Hesse, among many others.

"This $5 million gift and its challenge to raise $15 million more represents the first consequential investment in the lasting acquisition, exhibition, and curatorship of contemporary art at Harvard," said Cuno.

"The $4 million gift is equally important," he added. "It will provide $1 million toward the $15 million challenge, $500,000 toward the completion of the campaign to renovate and endow our Straus Center for Conservation, $1 million for an endowed fund for the acquisition of Old Master prints, and $1.5 million for the endowment of a special research position in our conservation center. Each of these areas is absolutely crucial to our teaching and research activities. After all, just as we mean to move ahead with the acquisition and presentation of contemporary art, we mean to enrich our holdings in earlier art. We have fewer acquisition funds for Old Master prints than for almost any other part of our collections, and the best examples of the early printed media are crucial to teaching not only in the Fine Arts Department, but in all departments concerned with cultural history.

Finally, the Art Museums received a $1 million gift for the support of an associate curator in the department of Islamic and Later Indian Art. With the recent retirement of Stuart Cary Welch, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum's longtime and much-admired curator of Islamic and later Indian art, the Art Museums have been without a curator in that department. "And that has been most unfortunate," Cuno said. "Harvard has had a proud tradition in training students in that area and currently has three specialists in the Fine Arts Department teaching Islamic and Indian art. Having recently acquired seventy-seven important Indian paintings, which gives the Sackler the most important representation of Rajput painting anywhere in the world, we had to address the need for curatorial leadership in this area. The $1 million gift will allow us to do just that."