AFA 18th Anniversary

2017 in Review TOP MUSEUM ACQUISITIONS 1 i i BY DANIEL GRANT A year’s worth of museum news is inevitably a mixed bag of good and bad. For instance, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City reported its largest ever number of visitors—seven million—but still found itself dealing with a $40 million deficit and causing the institution to delay the building of a new $600 million wing. On the other hand, in September, the struggling Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, Massachusetts, and its 3,000-object collection was taken over by the nearby Framingham State University and renamed the Danforth Art Center at Framingham State University. Those who had donated money and objects to the former museum might be upset at the change of direction and ownership, but presumably an art space is better than no art space. Something or nothing was the argument made by the director and trustees of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which decided to sell a group of its most prominent artworks—including prized pieces by Norman Rockwell, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Alexander Calder—to augment the institution’s endowment and refocus the museum’s basic mission from an art museum exclusively to a museum of science, history and the arts. Public outcry has resulted in an injunction through January 29th, 2018. Fig. 1: Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins , 2016 Wood, mirror, plastic, acrylic, LED. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore and Victoria Miro, London. © Yayoi Kusama, pending joint acquisition of the Rachofsky Collection and the Dallas Museum of Art through TWOxTWO for AIDS and Art Fund. 2018 Antiques & Fine Art 97