In the fall of 2016, following the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, I offered to donate 60 panels of my Map to the Prefectural Art Museum. They accepted. Then, in 2017, following a lecture on my work at the American Folk Art Museum in New York, I offered the curator a gift of 20 panels (like the ones above). She graciously accepted.
Since then I have been sending sets of 20 panels, unsolicited, to museums world-wide. Here are the results: four more museums have accepted the gift, and they include:
Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Vermont
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
Grand Rapids Art Museum
One museum, the Art Instute of Chicago, rejected the gift but failed to return the packet.
Several major museums have rejected and returned the gift. They are:
Denver Art Museum
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Tate Modern, London
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Another museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, sent a letter saying that the gift had been referred to the appropriate curator. That was in October, 2017, and I have had no further word.
And the there are those museums which have been sent packets and from whom I have had no reply:
CAM St. Louis
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
MOCA Cleveland
Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City
Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem MA
Pompidou Center, Paris
Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
No gift packets have been sent out since May of this year. In the future I will take the more conventional route of inquiring first to see if a museum is interested in the gift. I'll keep you posted!
