Trade News
from around the World
A tablet dating back to 1300 B.C. has become the second artifact
to be returned to Egypt in eight days, reports Sarah El
Deeb of the Associated Press. Nearly six decades after it was
smuggled out of the country, the Pharaonic limestone
tablet, which had been on display at New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art, was brought back to Cairo by
Mahmoud Allam, Egypt's consul-general in New York, on August 4.
The tablet portrays the wife of King Seti I breast-feeding her
newborn child. Engraved under the carved drawing is the word
"milk" and the name of the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Seti I in
hieroglyphic. The Metropolitan Museum acquired the tablet,
measuring 18.5 inches high and 12.5 inches wide, from the private
collection of a man who said he inherited it from his father,
according to Allam.
Plans to expand an existing black museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, and
preparations to open the National Underground Railroad Freedom
Center in 2004 are part of a nationwide surge in
museums focusing on black culture and history, AP
reports. Experts say the growth is primarily the result of
grass-roots efforts and a rise in consciousness among blacks, as
well as attempts to correct past inequities and educate people
about a black experience that historically has been sparsely
represented in mainstream museums. U.S. Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga.,
and J.C. Watts, R-Okla., introduced legislation this year to
create a national black history museum on The Mall in Washington.
The museum, which would be part of the Smithsonian Institution,
would be a repository for black history. A second project in
Washington is the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, led by
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. The organization has until November
2003 to break ground for the project. In Indianapolis, organizers
are planning an interactive black history museum that features
arts, music and other cultural information about the history of
blacks in Indiana. In Louisville, Ky., the Muhammad Ali
Center, an interactive educational institution to promote
peace, is scheduled to open in late 2003, and the Kentucky
Center for African American Heritage also is expected to open
in 2003.
Lillian Kiesler, 91, art patron and widow of avant-garde
architect Frederick Kiesler, died July 25, reports AP. Kiesler
studied painting with Hans Hofmann in the 1930s and was
introduced to her future husband by the artist Burgoyne Diller.
After her husband's death in 1995, Kiesler placed his work and
papers at Harvard, Yale and the Archives of American Art. In
1996, she helped establish the Frederick and Lillian Kiesler
Foundation in Vienna. In 1995, she established the Austrian
Frederick Kiesler Prize. She taught art education at New York
University.
Arie L. Kopelman, president of Chanel USA and chairman of
the Winter Antiques Show committee, has announced that the
loan exhibition for the 2002 Winter Antiques Show
will be from the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
in Winterthur, Del. The exhibition, titled "Shells, Scrolls, and
Cabrioles: American Furniture from Winterthur" will be featured
at the 48th annual Winter Antiques Show from January 18 to
January 27, at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City. The
focal point of the exhibition will be five signature high chests,
including the Van Pelt high chest from the renowned
Reifsnyder collection that du Pont purchased at auction in
1929. Du Pont was in a bidding war with William Randolph
Hearst and acquired the piece with a winning bid of $44,000,
a record for American furniture that was unsurpassed for years.
In addition, Winterthur director Leslie Green
Bowman has announced that the institution has received a
grant of $250,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation to
support the Winterthur Professorship in the American Decorative
Arts to teach and mentor students in the Winterthur Program in
Early American Culture (WPEAC). With this grant, Winterthur
has met the goal of an anonymous challenge grant from a private
foundation to raise $75,000. To date, the institution has reached
80 percent of the endowment objective of $3.5 million.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA -has received
a $1 million endowment gift from Wallis Annenberg
and the Annenberg Foundation. The gift will enable the
museum to establish the Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellowship, a
two-year post that will offer emerging curators the highest level
of professional training within a museum setting.
