He is at work on a book about the deaccession.
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The Augustana Teaching Museum of Art plans to deaccession around 450 works.
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Deaccession negates these qualities; it takes from the people what once was theirs.
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The Toledo Museum of Art is seeking to deaccession 145 works from its collection.
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The seven works marked for deaccession will be sold at auction or in private sales.
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Others may be museums seeking to quietly deaccession works from their collection without causing a big fuss.
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The first 13 of the 433 works marked for deaccession by the Berkshire Museum have been sold.
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The museum controversially decided to deaccession the works, including two paintings donated directly by Norman Rockwell, last month.
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" They have said that the works they selected for deaccession are "not essential to the museum's refreshed mission.
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"Deaccession is not meant to be an attack on the artists or the merits of their artwork," she added.
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But doing so, the report allows, may require new legislation to enable national museums to deaccession state-owned art.
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The Berkshire Museum withdrew its affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution following its controversial decision to deaccession works from its collection.
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Two members and one former member of the Berkshire Museum filed a lawsuit against the museum's decision to deaccession works from its collection.
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The acquisitions were made possible as a result of the BMA's decision to deaccession seven works from its contemporary collection through Sotheby's sales.
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Six years later, Lefkowitz prosecuted the Brooklyn Museum in the so-called "Kan case," which further served to formalize institutional practice concerning deaccession.
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In late September, a petition penned by intellectuals and activists urged Belgian parliament to deaccession looted objects and trigger the process of restitution.
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The Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro announced plans to deaccession a work by Jackson Pollock in order to raise funds for its operations.
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However, as TAN's Michael Bailey reported, restitution is not currently possible as the V&A does not have the legal power to deaccession the objects.
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The news comes just days after the museum earmarked a further nine artworks for deaccession, including paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Benjamin West.
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Beckmann's "Self-Portrait with Cigarette" belonged to the Metropolitan Museum until 1971, when its deaccession set off a series of disputes that reshaped museum practices.
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The late 1980s and early '90s also saw a boom in museums finally establishing their own formal guidelines and policies concerning collection management and deaccession.
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The La Salle University Art Museum announced that it will deaccession 22017 works from its permanent collection to help fund the school's five-year strategic plan.
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To this day, the museum's collection policy says that the donor's wishes should be considered before any deaccession decision; in this case, those wishes seem abundantly clear.
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The law remains restrictive on the possibility of the deaccession of objects from the French national collections and defends this policy as an essential component of museum practice.
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Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads The legal dispute over some 40 artworks that the Berkshire Museum planned to deaccession and sell through Sotheby's has taken another turn.
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Curators have dodged this debate before by pointing to France's centuries-old "inalienability" law; national institutions do not have the right to deaccession anything in a public collection.
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The family is opposed to the Berkshire Museum's controversial decision to deaccession "Shaftsbury Blacksmith Shop" (1940) and "Shuffleton's Barbershop" (1950), paintings the artist directly donated to the museum.
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"The possibility of sanctions was carefully considered by the board when deciding whether to deaccession any works to secure and sustain the museum's future," she said in an email.
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In 1974 the Ghanaian government submitted restitution claims against several UK museums, which were rejected by the British government on the grounds that national museums are unable to deaccession.
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The Baltimore Museum of Art announced that it will deaccession seven works by white male artists — including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg — in order to acquire work by female artists and artists of color.
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They could deaccession more and make a real impact on the institution, to change how culture sees itself, full of diverse and complementary stories, but if you don't sell the works, you don't have the resources.
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A small amount will also possibly go towards covering a lawsuit Varella wants to file against the commission to fight its eight-month-old deaccession policy, provisions of which she believes may violate federal and state laws.
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Believing her work was intended to be permanently installed, Varella was shocked when she received an email from the Public Arts Commission in August informing her that the city will vote to deaccession "Digital DNA" on November 16.
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In a Baltimore Sun op-ed, David Maril, president of the Herman Maril Foundation and the artist's son, wrote: The use of deaccession — selling seven paintings to achieve this goal of supporting local and regional contemporary art — is a horrendous decision.
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In a progress report filed this week, the office of the Massachusetts Attorney General said that it is on track to complete its investigation into the Berkshire Museum's controversial plan to deaccession and sell works from its collection at Sotheby's by January 22017.
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The Berkshire Museum's controversial bid to deaccession works from its permanent collection — including two works donated directly by Norman Rockwell — will go ahead after a judge ruled that the plaintiffs who filed suit against the sale had failed to make a sufficiently compelling case.
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The Berkshire Museum, an art and science museum located in Pittsfield in western Massachusetts, first announced in July that it planned to deaccession and sell 40 works from its collection at auction to shore up its endowment, fund renovations, and help implement its "New Vision" project.
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The National Trust U-turned on its decision to bar volunteers who refused to wear rainbow gay pride badges to mark 50 years since the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK. Members of Norman Rockwell's family denounced the Berkshire Museum's plans to deaccession works by the artist.
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When they discover that a curator has decided to deaccession these works and sell them to a museum in Denmark (to make room for dung sculptures and other contemporary pieces, no less!), the trio refuses to be separated from objects they have spent years studying and safeguarding.
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The first time I spoke with Jim Rosenquist, in 6900, he reiterated his vow never to return to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, where I serve as president.. He was still fuming over the threatened closure of the museum and deaccession of major works, his among them.
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More substantively, the attorney general makes a very strong case that the core of the deaccession is not only unethical (the Berkshire Museum has already withdrawn its affiliation with the Smithsonian, and faces unanimous opprobrium within the museum profession, including from the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors) but also illegal.
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Although the Met no longer owns his painting — it was eventually acquired by the Museum am Ostwall in western Germany — the artist's self-portrait offers a bold image of a pensive man constantly adjusting to the displacements and tumults of his life, which mirror in no small way the changes and disruptions to museum practices that the painting's deaccession set off.
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As a direct result of the public blowback over the de Groot sell-off — which culminated in a public hearing and tit-for-tat editorial salvos in the New York Times from Hoving, then-Met President Douglas Dillon, and the critic John Canaday — the museum published for the first time in June of 10003 a four-page booklet outlining its amended procedures for deaccession.
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All of this means that if the museum's trustees are smart, they'll take this opportunity to restart the entire process: Come to an agreement with the AG that halts the sale (and which doesn't leave them on the hook for massive penalty payments to Sotheby's); quietly inform Shields that he doesn't need to bother returning from his medical leave; start engaging with and apologizing to the community, especially those who were angriest and most vocal about the deaccession plans; and, perhaps, begin good-faith discussions with other Berkshire museums, including the Norman Rockwell Museum, about solutions that might help shore up some of the Berkshire Museum deficits while keeping its most valuable treasures in Berkshire County.
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The process undertaken by a museum to deaccession a work involves several steps that are usually laid out in a museum's collection management policy. The terms under which an object may be considered for removal, as well as the individuals with the authority to approve the process are outlined in the deaccession section of this article. Additionally, this section lays out the legal restrictions and ethical considerations associated with removal of the object and the types of disposal that are appropriate based on the reason for the deaccession.
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Each museum establishes its own method and workflow for the deaccession process according to its organizational structure. However all object deaccessioning involves the two processing steps of deaccession and disposal. The process begins with the curator creating a document called a "statement of justification," which outlines their decision criteria and reasoning for presenting the work as a possible deaccession. In order to determine if a work should be deaccessioned from a museum's collection, a curator or registrar completes and documents a series of justification steps and then present their findings to the museum director and governing board for final approval.
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The decision to deaccession includes two parts. These are making the decision to deaccession and deciding the method of disposal. Generally, first choice is to transfer an object to another use or division in a museum, such as deaccessioning a duplicate object from a permanent collection into a teaching collection. Second choice is to transfer the object to another institution, generally with local institutions having priority.
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Several professional museum associations have drafted codes of ethics governing the practice of deaccession. Two majors areas of ethical concern that are common in these codes of ethics are the prohibition of sale or transfer of collection items to museum trustees, staff, board members, or their relatives and the need to restrict the use of proceeds from any works disposed of via sale or auction.Weil, Stephen E. A Deaccession Reader. Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1997.
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In November 2006, the Albright-Knox Gallery announced its intention to deaccession Artemis and the Stag from its collection. The statue was much-beloved by the public and had been part of the permanent collection since 1953. Director Louis Grachos defined Artemis and the Stag along with about 200 other works of art from the museum's permanent collection as falling outside the institution's historical "core mission" of "acquiring and exhibiting art of the present."Lee Rosenbaum, "Mission Creep: Albright-Knox Belatedly Releases Its Complete Deaccession List" Arts Journal The decision to deaccession was made by a vote of the museum's Board of Directors, was voted on and ratified by the entire membership (at a meeting forced by opponents of the sale), and followed the guidelines of the American Alliance of Museums, according to Albright-Knox officials.
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Works by Gustave Courbet, Honoré Daumier, Jacques-Louis David and Eugène Delacroix had been purchased by the museum in earlier decades.Lee Rosenbaum, "Mission Creep: Albright-Knox Belatedly Releases Its Complete Deaccession List" Arts Journal The decision to deaccession certain art works was made by a vote of the museum's Board of Directors, was voted on and ratified by the entire membership, and followed the guidelines of the American Alliance of Museums. The sale raised questions about how museums can remain vital when they are situated in economically declining regions and have limited means for raising funds for operations and acquisitions.
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Students from the Sioux City Community School District make models of local landmarks that are judged every year by the museum and the Historical Association. The museum's deaccession criteria is a six step process that was used as an example in the book Museum administration: an introduction.
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Amid speculation that the museum may close its doors, deaccession artworks, and/or merge with another institution, a grassroots, artist-led organization called MOCA Mobilization petitioned for MOCA to remain independent and keep its collection intact. The Attorney General's office, to whom Eli Broad had been a campaign contributor, investigated MOCA.
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In R.A. Buck & J.A. Gilmore, Museum Registration Methods 5th Edition, (p. 100-108). Washington, DC: AAM Press. Written collecting and deaccession policies and procedures that clearly outline the collection priorities and acceptable rationale for deaccessions are also documented for the museum's records. This protects the museum from potential backlash when objects are removed from the collection.
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The auction house was represented in the deaccession suit by Terrence M. Connors, an attorney who was Masiello's chief of staff at the time Devlin was appointed to the court. The sale also raised questions about how museums can remain vital when they are situated in economically declining regions and have limited means for raising funds for operations and acquisitions.
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Archivists could acquire, deaccession, redact, and reorganize materials. The finding aids could reflect these changes to the collection, but also reflected that only the archivists would know about these changes to the collection. Paper based collections with finding aids ensured that patrons would have to rely upon the archivist to find and utilize materials. The content of a finding aid may differ depending on the type of material it is describing.
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Though selling art to cover operating costs has long been frowned upon, the Association of Art Museum Directors has relaxed its prohibitions due to the pandemic in April 2020, permitting some degree of deaccession through 2022 in order to "support the direct care of the museum's collection". The Brooklyn Museum is among the first to make use of this window, putting 12 Old Masters up for auction in October 2020.
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When an institution decides to deaccession a cultural artifact, documentation discussing the process of consideration for this decision is required. The institution documents the value of the object, the reasons why it is no longer appropriate for the collection; namely: out of context, deteriorated beyond usefulness, duplicate of another object, etc., and how disposal of the artwork will be executed—private sale, auction, donation to another museum, etc.Morris, Martha & Antonia Moser. (2010). Deaccessioning.
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Schellenberg continued to provide archival training throughout his tenure at NARA by planning a two-semester course at American University, organizing a series of symposiums for senior archivists, and traveling to records centers throughout the U.S. to provide three-day classes on archives management. Schellenberg also oversaw a massive reappraisal of documents to deaccession old records and enforced a methodology more selective in the appraisal of new records. He then went on to serve as the assistant archivist of the United States until he retired in 1963.
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Deaccessioning is a controversial topic and activity, with diverging opinions from artists, arts professionals and the general public. Some commentators, such as Donn Zaretsky of The Art Law Blog critique the notion of "the public trust" and argue that deaccessioning rules should probably be thrown out altogether. Others, such as Susan Taylor, director of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the AAMD's current president, believes that proceeds from the sale or funds from the deaccession can only be used to buy other works of art.
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Their decision and perspective on the practice of deaccession reflects a long-term view of museum collections as items held in public trust and preserved for access, appreciation, education, and enjoyment of not only today's public but the future public. See public trust doctrine. An example of a recent controversy over deaccessioning was Northampton Museum and Art Gallery's sale of its ancient Egyptian statue of Sekhemka to an unnamed buyer despite protests from local residents and the Egyptian government. In 2014, Arts Council England deleted the museum from its accredited list.
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Gifford painted some 20 paintings from the sketches he did while in Vermont in 1858. (See "travels" section above.) Of these, Mount Mansfield, 1858 was the National Academy submission in 1859, and another painted in 1859, Mount Mansfield, Vermont, came in 2008 to be in the center of a controversy over its deaccession by the National Academy in New York. The controversy had been reported in December, saying that the sale of paintings to cover operating expenses was against the policy of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which organization in turn was asking its members to "cease lending artworks to the academy and collaborating with it on exhibitions." The report also said the 1859 painting in question was "donated to the academy in 1865 by another painter, James Augustus Suydam.""National Academy Sells Two Hudson River School Paintings to Bolster Its Finances" by Randy Kennedy, The New York Times, December 6, 2008, p. C1, NY edition. Retrieved 1/13/09. Amongst much more detail about on the deaccession, a later Times report said that the National Academy had sold works by Thomas Eakins and Richard Caton Woodville in the 1970s and 1990s respectively, according to David Dearinger, a former curator.
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The Tree of Jesse in the Gorleston Psalter, which Turner helped the British Museum acquire Turner worked at the British Museum from 1956 until 1973, and at the British Library from 1973 until his 1985 death, the move occasioned only by the deaccession of the museum's library elements in favour of the new institution. From assistant keeper he rose to deputy keeper. He focused on medieval liturgical studies and illuminated manuscripts, overseeing their exhibition, acquisition, and loans. Particularly while an assistant keeper he also focused on scholarship, seeing many articles published and teaching part-time at the Universities of Cambridge and East Anglia.
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Using his familiarity with science, Suydam reduced nature to calm, clean, planar forms, and then distorted proportional relations so that God's creations loomed superior over the work of man. The National Academy has most of his works such as Paradise Rocks (1865), and the Taft family's Taft Museum also holds works. The Taft also has a podcast website for this artist.Taft Museum Web site A painting of Gifford's from 1859 which Suydam, according to a report, "donated to the [National] academy in 1865," became the subject of a deaccession controversy at the Academy in late 2008.
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The IMA's collecting and deaccessioning practices have utilized technology to provide public access, openness, and transparency in museum operations. Unveiled in March 2009, the museum's online deaccession database lists every object being deaccessioned and links new acquisitions to the sold objects that provided funds for their purchase. The IMA has been praised for being the first among museums to openly share their deaccessioning practices and for including the ability to post public comments on entries in the searchable database. The IMA also developed the Association of Art Museum Director's (AAMD) Object Registry, a database that helps museums more easily abide by the 1970 UNESCO ruling that prevents illicit trafficking of antiquities.
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According to the Smithsonian Institution, a record is "any official, recorded information, regardless of medium or characteristics which are created, received, and maintained" by an individual collector or institution. As every object within a collection must have accompanying documentation, records management functions as the primary focus of collections management, and covers a wide range of documentation and policy standards. Topics covered under the umbrella of records management include collection information management systems, collections accession and deaccession policies, collection management policies, cataloging, and curation. The lack of appropriate record keeping systems in museums compromises the security of museum collections and threatens the role of museums as information centers.
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Cataloging is the process of entering informational data about an object into a collection catalog or database. This process involves assigning unique identification numbers to individual objects within a collection, and attaching relevant accompanying documentation to the item such as curatorial worksheets, photographs, condition assessments, and accession and/or deaccession information. A catalog is meant to serve as a systematic written or digital record of every object within a collection, and should at the very least, include an object description that will allow for easy identification of an object. Cataloging is an important aspect of collections management as it provides the individual records associated with each object within a collection.
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The museum, whose original board of trustees included Alfred Barr, Joseph Hirshhorn, Philip Johnson, and Vera List, was renamed The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in 1967. To better focus on its founding mission to exhibit only the very newest art, the museum's board voted in 1981 to deaccession the museum's permanent collection. Mr. Aldrich stayed active and involved with the museum until his death in 2001, shortly prior to which The Aldrich's board of trustees, with their chairman emeritus in attendance, had voted to proceed with a major renovation and expansion. Groundbreaking took place in April 2003, and the galleries reopened to the public in June 2004 with a new name, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
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In the 1990s, Mahon lent his entire 57 piece art collection to various museums in the UK, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. The loans included: 25 to the National Gallery, London; 12 to the Ashmolean, Oxford; 8 to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; 6 to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; 5 to the Birmingham Art Gallery; 1 to Temple Newsam House, Leeds. In a complex legal arrangement via his personal charitable trust, a number of these paintings (such as The Rape of Europa) are on permanent loan from The Art Fund, which owns them. There are two conditions to the loans: that the museums in question never deaccession any of their works; or charge for admission.
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The first of these ethical concerns is rather straightforward. The second has become a point of contention in recent years since museums and cities, like Detroit, have been struggling with financial shortfalls. According to the Association of Art Museum Directors: "Funds received from the disposal of a deaccessioned work shall not be used for operations or capital expenses. Such funds, including any earnings and appreciation thereon, may be used only for the acquisition of works in a manner consistent with the museum’s policy on the use of restricted acquisition funds." This stipulation was relaxed in April 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its negative impact on museum revenues, permitting some degree of deaccession through 2022 in order to "support the direct care of the museum’s collection".
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The issue came to a head in 2001-02 when then-curator Bruce Lanning refused an order from the Everhart's Board of Trustees directing him to pack up the Matisse to be shipped to Sotheby's where it was to be offered in a public auction, a move that cost him his position at the Everhart. The newly created Community Board felt that, while the ownership of a Matisse gave the museum a limited amount of prestige, the museum would better serve the spirit of Ms. Levy's gift by creating an endowment from its sale to acquire a wider variety of works and exhibitions. It was an acceptable museum practice to deaccession works not consists with its current collections. With board approval, the Matisse was offered for auction at Sotheby's but did not make the reserve of $1 million.
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Written as a subsection of the overarching collection management policy, most collectors and cultural institutions utilize a collections policy, or selection criteria policy, in which it is outlined what purpose the collection serves, and the types of objects that are considered most relevant. The collection policy lays out the scope of the collection and its relevance to the institution's mission statement by serving as "a broad description of the [institution's] collections and an explanation of how and what the museum collects and how those collections are used." The scope of the collection as laid on it in this policy serves to define if, when, and how a cultural institution chooses to accession or deaccession objects from its collection. Additionally, as different types of collections require unique care protocols, the collection policy also details the categories associated with the collection such as library or archive, education or research, permanent, and exhibit.
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Art museums in the United States and the United Kingdom have been hit especially hard by the 2008–2012 global recession. Dwindling endowments from wealthy patrons forced some museums to make difficult and controversial decisions to deaccession artwork from their collections to gain funds, or in the case of the Rose Art Museum, to close the institution and sell the entire collection. Such actions have prompted censure from Museum organizations such as the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council in the UK and the Association of Art Museum Directors in the US. These organizations charge that the actions of their members were in violation of not only their ethics code but also the core of their mission- to provide access to a fund of cultural heritage for future scholarship- by selling works to private buyers for purposes other than funding new acquisitions. Consideration of the dire financial state of these institutions, and the intensifying effect that any punitive action by an ethics organization will have on the finances of an individual museum, has fostered debate on the merits of deaccessioning.
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