Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Art Two Troubled Manhattan Museums to Team Up?
Posted by Benjamin Sutton on Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 12:26 PM
It's been a bad year for the South Street Seaport Museum and the American Folk Art Museum. The latter sold its main space on 53rd Street in May to neighboring MoMA to repay the loan that helped build said structure, shifting all its activities into the much smaller Lincoln Square location in September. The former shut down its galleries in March, keeping open only its tours of the ships moored at the South Street Seaport. But the two cash-strapped institutions are hoping to thrive through collaboration.
Both institutions are hoping to regain their footing in the new year, which may include mounting an exhibition drawing on the Folk Art Museum collection in the Seaport Museum's galleries, DNAinfo reports.
Said Susan Henshaw Jones, director of the City Museum of New York and interim director of the Seaport Museum, during a City Council meeting last week: "We are very much hoping that the Museum of American Folk Art will do exhibitions in four galleries [at the Seaport Museum] starting in June."
The subject or theme of the joint exhibition remains a mystery. In the meantime, the Folk Art Museum just closed a show of quilts at its Lincoln Square space, and the Seaport Museum is preparing to reopen its galleries late next month, nearly a year after closing them.
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