Poland Gets Its First Contemporary Collection

05.15.08 - The Art Newspaper's Emma Beatty reports that the National Museum in Krakow is scheduled to open a new department of contemporary Western art this month—the first devoted to a collection of this kind in Poland, according to the institution. Fifty works, loaned by the Cologne-based, Polish-born art dealer Rafael Jablonka, will go on public view on May 29. Jablonka has loaned the works for eighteen months, with a view to lending them permanently to the museum. The works will remain Jablonka’s property during his lifetime and no payment has been made by the museum. He told the Art Newspaper that he intends to add to the collection over the course of the next few years. “This is just a first step,” he says. The collection includes pieces by ten post-modern artists, each of which will be housed in a separate room. They are: Nobuyoshi Araki, Miquel Barceló, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, Mike Kelley, David LaChapelle, Sherrie Levine, Andreas Slominski, Philip Taaffe, and Andy Warhol.

California College of the Arts Names Stephen Beal President

05.15.08 - Stephen Beal has been named president of California College of the Arts. As CCA's ninth president, Beal, who previously served as provost since 1997, will be responsible for all of the college's academic and financial activities, including management of a fifty-five-million-dollar annual budget, fundraising leadership, supervision of senior academic and administrative staff, and development of a thirty-four-member board of trustees. He succeeds Michael S. Roth, who served as CCA's president from 2000 to 2007 and is now president of Wesleyan University. "Steve is the clear choice to guide CCA," commented Ann Hatch, chair of the board of trustees. "A product of art schools, he possesses a true passion for the kind of education we offer, combined with the financial acumen he's gained as provost." Under Beal's leadership as provost, several academic programs have been added, including BA programs in community arts, writing and literature, visual studies, and animation, and MFA degrees in design and writing. Two other recent additions have been the MA in curatorial practice and the MBA in design strategy, both the first programs of their kind on the West Coast. Also during Beal's tenure, CCA's overall enrollment has increased by 50 percent. "I'm thrilled to become president of CCA," remarked Beal. "In the past decade, CCA has achieved an unprecedented level of national renown, becoming an important part of the cultural landscape."

Roxanna Brown, Asian Art Expert, Dies in Government Custody

05.15.08 - An internationally known expert on Asian art who was implicated in a scheme to smuggle looted antiquities from Thailand to Los Angeles–area museums died Wednesday at a federal detention center in Seattle four days after being arrested there on a visit from Bangkok, reports the Los Angeles Times's Bob Pool. Roxanna Brown, sixty-two, director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University, had traveled to Seattle for a speaking engagement at the University of Washington, authorities said. She was a focal point of a widening federal probe that was launched with highly publicized raids on four Southern California museums in January. Hours before her arrest at a Seattle hotel, she had been indicted Friday on a federal wire-fraud charge that accused her of inflating the value of the plundered antiquities. The American-born Brown, who was trained in art history at UCLA, apparently died of a heart attack at the detention center, between Seattle and Tacoma. Extradition to Los Angeles on the charge was pending, authorities said.
 
Officials said Brown was too ill to attend a court hearing Monday in Seattle but made a brief appearance Tuesday. She faced up to twenty years in prison if found guilty. Brown was the first person to be arrested in the probe. Her apprehension surprised many who knew and respected her as "the epitome of the academic expert," as one art historian put it to the Bangkok Post. But federal investigators asserted that Brown allowed her electronic signature to be placed on fake appraisal forms that inflated the value of pieces from Thailand's Ban Chiang archaeological site that were sent to Southern California museums. The phony appraisals allowed collectors to claim fraudulent tax deductions, according to authorities.

University of Maine Museum of Art Names New Director

05.15.08 - The Bangor Daily News reports that George Kinghorn, who has spent the past nine years at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida, has been named the new director of the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, according to a source at the university. Kinghorn was the deputy director and chief curator at MoCA Jacksonville. Kinghorn takes over for Wally Mason, who announced his decision to leave the UM position last September after eleven years to become director of Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee. Mason acquired more than one thousand works of art for the UM museum’s permanent collection, according to a Bangor Daily News story from September, and oversaw the museum’s move from Orono to downtown Bangor. During his time at MoCA Jacksonville, Kinghorn was instrumental in opening the six-floor, sixty-four-thousand-square-foot facility located in downtown Jacksonville. Kinghorn also oversaw the opening of a children’s interactive center, the ArtExplorium Loft; the opening of Cafe Nola, a bistro that is the source of one hundred thousand dollars in annual earned income; building the permanent collection; and creating a multiyear strategic plan and collections-management manual. He oversaw more than forty modern and contemporary art exhibitions while at the Jacksonville museum.

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