March 19, 2009

Museum news: cutbacks, acquisitions, missing art

The New York Times today has a nationally focused Museums special section that has a few local mentions:

- New York’s local museums have also made cuts: Flushing Town Hall has idled its jazz trolley tours, the Queens County Farm Museum has “switched its animal feed to spent grains donated by the Brooklyn Brewery,” and there have been layoofs at the Queens Museum, where one of the main donors lost money in Bernard Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme.

- In tough financial times, museums are looking at more ways to get people in the doors, including yoga classes at MoMA and an additional late-night at the Met Museum (to 8:45 p.m. on one Monday a month.)

Elsewhere, New York magazine reports the Met purchased a Pierre Subleyras painting of Pope Benedict XIV for just under $1 million - relative “pocket change for a great Old Master.”

The Sports Museum of America, which closed its doors in February only nine months after opening, last week officially filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, Reuters reported. Before opening, the Sports Museum got $52 million of tax-exempt and $5 million of taxable Liberty bonds as part of the $20 billion package Congress gave New York City to help recover after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The immense art collection at the United Nations headquarters is missing some pieces, the Financial Times reports. As the U.N. is packing up for a move that will allow for the renovation of its East River buildings, an audit has found “no single individual or department in the organisation was responsible for ensuring artifacts were catalogued and conserved.”

Many NY museums operate on a suggested admission system. Earlier this week, the Post reported that visitors at the met are starting to pay less, but the American Museum of Natural History hasn’t yet seen a decline.

The Ground Zero Museum Workshop on 14th Street is now an IRS tax-exempt organization, the gallery’s founder, Gary Marlon Suson, said in an e-mail to NewYorkology.

Image source: Flushing Town Hall’s Queens Jazz Trail page, which states: “As of February 4, 2009, Queens Jazz Trail Tour has been temporarily cancelled due to budgt cuts. We are sorry for any inconvenience and hope to have the trolley on the track as soon as we can.”

March 19, 2009 8:10 AM in Downtown, Midtown, Museums, Out of Manhattan, Sightsology, Upper East Side, Upper West Side

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