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A few years ago the heads of the world’s top museums signed a statement defiantly rejecting the claims from Italy and Greece to return art treasures looted over the centuries. Indianapolis Museum of Art president Maxwell Anderson shook up the international artworld when he announced that he was defying that trend and that IMA would “impose a moratorium on acquiring antiquities that left their probable country of modern discovery after 1970, unless we can obtain documents establishing that they were exported legally.” Hear how Anderson thinks this represents a step toward museums redefining their role as global citizens.

When: Monday November 12 7:00 PM
Where: The Allison Mansion, Overlook Room Marian College, 3200 Cold Spring Road

Free and open to the public, but Marian would like you to register.

Maxwell L. Anderson has been The Melvin & Bren Simon Director & CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art since May 2006. Along with a $380 million endowment, 152 acres of grounds, 325 staff members, and an encyclopedic collection of 54,000 works of art, the IMA has the 5th largest art museum facility (667,000 sq. ft.) in the United States. During his first year as director, the IMA added some $25 million to its endowment through gifts and pledges, resumed a free general admission policy, and acquired significant artworks including several Edo-period Japanese paintings, The Dream of St. Joseph by Francisco Rizi (Spanish, 1614-1685), Guillermo Kuitca’s Everything (2004) and numerous works from other periods. In addition the IMA scheduled a series of international exhibitions through 2009, declared a moratorium on collecting antiquities lacking provenance after 1970, announced the commission of the first 10 artists for the Museum’s 100-acre Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, saw to the online publication of 272 artworks lacking complete provenance during the Nazi era, and launched Viewfinders, a program bringing every third-grader in the Indianapolis Public Schools and the public schools of Washington Township to the IMA for an in-depth experience, as well as providing each student with a year-long family membership. He also serves as a Research Affiliate for Princeton University’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, a program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and writes a column on art world trends for The Art Newspaper. You can find out a lot more about him at his website.

Know before you go …For information about the controversy over provenance of antiquities, see this New York Times article. Maxwell Anderson explains the IMA’s decision here. For a sense of Maxwell’s bigger vision for IMA and Indianapolis, see the interview with David Hoppe of NUVO.

If this sounds interesting, check out the IMA’s important exhibition “Roman Art from the Louvre” through the end of the year. A curator of the exhibition will talk about the logistics, customs issues and other challenges of moving art across the globe October 18. Other discussions of community leadership through the arts? Conductor Leonard Slatkin September 20, and CICF’s Brian Payne October 24.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 12:54 am and is filed under Events, Crossing borders, Law & justice, Europe, China, Business, India, Rome, Art, Globalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.