Four art museums in the market for directors

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) – Four art museums, all located in Maine, are entering the new year seeking new top executives. The Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Museum of Art in Rockland, Ogunquit Museum of American Art and Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick are all operating with interim directors.

The biggest of the four is the Portland Museum of Art, which has been without a permanent director since Daniel E. O’Leary retired last spring. There’s no timetable for naming a successor at the museum, which lures 150,000 visitors a year and has a budget of $4.5 million.

Michael Conforti, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, says the situation in Maine is a fluke and doesn’t suggest any particular trend.

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Information from: Portland Press Herald,
http://www.pressherald.com

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

AP-ES-01-11-09 0938EST

Author reveals lost chapter in New Orleans furniture history

Image courtesy Xavier Review Press.

Image courtesy Xavier Review Press.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – For author and historian Margo Moscou, the decision to research New Orleans cabinetmakers who were free men of color started at the cradle.

Not hers, but an antique cradle at Oak Alley plantation.

Moscou, a native of Boulder, Colo., was visiting friends for the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2003 and took a side trip to the Vacherie estate, where she saw the piece.

“The guide … pithily pointed out a beautifully carved cradle that, he said, was made by a plantation slave whose name remained lost to history,” Moscou writes in her recently released book, New Orleans’ Free-Men-of-Color Cabinet Makers in the New Orleans Furniture Trade, 1800-1850 ($18.95, Xavier Review Press).

“I could not forget that cradle. In fact, what was a fleeting tour-guide moment set me on a course of research that consumed the next five years of my professional life.”

After her trip to Jazz Fest, Moscou went to London for two years to work on a master’s degree in fine and decorative arts. When it came time to choose a topic for her thesis, the memory of the exquisite cradle and its forgotten maker led her to New Orleans.

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