MUSEO DE ARTE DE PONCE CELEBRATES ANOTHER YEAR OF FUNDING FROM THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) May 23, 2011 --

May 23, 2011—San Juan, PR—Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), announced that Museo de Arte de Ponce has been granted $60,000 to support a bilingual publication portraying the museum's British art collection as well as a symposium on the Pre-Raphaelite period. The Museum was embraced in the privileged group of non-profit organizations that received financial support under the category of Access to Artistic Excellence, which focus on two primary themes: access to the arts and preservation activities. In total, the Arts Endowment will distribute more than $88 million to support projects nationwide as part of the federal agency’s second round of fiscal year 2011 grants.

Dr. Agustin Arteaga, Chief Executive Officer and Director of the Museo de Arte de Ponce conveyed his pride about the “continuous support that through the years the National Endowment for the Arts has placed in our institution. This encouragement helps our museum to continue promoting academic research and awareness about the Museo the Arte de Ponce outstanding collection, within the local and international communities, meeting the highest standards of excellence”.

The National Endowment for the Arts has made possible several important initiatives at the Museo de Arte de Ponce over the last two decades including the exhibition Mi Puerto Rico: Master Painters of the Island 1780-1952, in 2007 which travelled to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts and the Newark Musem in New Jersey. In 2010, the National Endowment for the Arts funded the museum’s reinstallation of its permanent collection for the renovated Edward Durell Stone building and new annex.

The Spanish-English publication, dedicated to the museum’s British collection, will be the first of a multi-volume series of scholarly resources devoted to the different schools or sub-collections within its permanent collection. In addition, five international scholars will discuss the work of the Pre-Raphaelite artists represented in the museum’s collection at a symposium designed for an audience interested in the arts, history and literature.

Chairman of the NEA, Rocco Landesman visited the Museo de Arte de Ponce in January 2011 and stated “The museum is amazing. You would have no idea that in Ponce, Puerto Rico, there would be one of the world’s great collections of Pre- Raphaelite art. It is a very, very impressive collection”.

The following scholars are confirmed to participate at the symposium, scheduled for February 2012: Jason Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College; Paul Mellon, Professor at the Department of History of Art at Yale University; Franny Moyle, author of Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites (2009); Michaela Giebelhausen, Professor of Art History at University of Essex, England; and Alison Smith, Curator and Head of British Art Acquisitions, at Tate Britain, London. Some topics to be discussed are: the presence of psychological realism in the work of John Everett Millais; Ford Madox Brown and his uneasy relationship to academic painting; representations of women in Victorian painting in relation to the social history of the times; and religious iconography in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, among others. The British collection publication will be officially presented at the symposium’s closing event.

Museo de Arte de Ponce’s British collection consists of sixty-six objects dating from 1760 to 1905. Forty of these works are Pre-Raphaelite paintings, drawings, and a photograph. Masterpieces such as Flaming June (c. 1895) by Frederic, Lord Leighton, and The Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon (1881-1898) by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones make the museum an internationally renowned one for its Victorian painting collection which forms the core of its British collection. As part of the museum’s library exchange program, this publication will be distributed free of charge to more than one hundred libraries and museums in Europe, the United States, and Puerto Rico.

Both the publication and the symposium will provide a broad view of artistic production in Victorian England, and will also encourage a greater understanding of art, artists, and their contexts during this period. The goal of the symposium is to attract a diverse adult audience composed of local undergraduate and graduate students along with history, art, art history, literature and gender studies professors as well as museum goers.

The Museo de Arte de Ponce, a public, non-profit organization, founded in 1959, quickly became the steward of one of the most important collections of European art in the Americas. True to the vision of its founder, Luis A. Ferré (1904-2003), it offers an abridged, yet rich survey of Western art from the Renaissance to the present. It collects, preserves, studies, and exhibits the art of Europe and the Americas.