Exterior of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) – An exhibition of more than 70 images by photographer Annie Leibovitz is set to open at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
The exhibition, titled “Pilgrimage,” features images of famous places and objects that Leibovitz captured on her travels.
They include Yellowstone National Park, Elvis Presley’s motorcycle and Emily Dickinson’s only surviving dress.
According to a news release from the Springfield museum, Lincoln plays a major role in the exhibition.
Among the items Leibovitz photographed are the stovepipe hat and gloves Lincoln had with him the night of his assassination, and a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address. Her photo of Lincoln’s blood-stained gloves was taken at the presidential museum.
“Pilgrimage” is scheduled for Feb. 8 to Aug. 31. It’s part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection.
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Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Exterior of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
A female African Bush Elephant in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania. Photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim, licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licanse, Version 1.2.COMMERCE CITY, Colorado (AP) – U.S. officials have destroyed more than 6 tons of confiscated ivory tusks, carvings and jewelry — the bulk of the country’s “blood ivory” stockpile — to support the fight against a $10 billion global trade that slaughters tens of thousands of elephants each year.
Officials on Thursday used rock crushers to pulverize the stockpile, accumulated over the past 25 years, at the National Wildlife Property Repository just north of Denver. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will donate the crushed ivory particles to a museum to be determined for future display.
Service officials showed off thousands of ivory tusks, statues, ceremonial bowls, masks and ornaments that were to be destroyed — a collection they said represented the killing of more than 2,000 adult elephants.
The items were seized from smugglers, traders and tourists at U.S. ports of entry after a global ban on the ivory trade went into effect in 1989.
“What is striking to me is the lengths that some commercial importers and smugglers will go to conceal their ivory — everything from staining it with colors to covering it with leather,” said Fish and Wildlife Special Agent Steve Oberholtzer. “The stakes are high in the ivory trade.”
The message from Thursday’s crush likely will reach consumers more than the faraway poachers and smugglers targeted by governments across the globe. Elephant poaching is at an all-time high, thanks in large part to U.S. demand and growing demand in Asia.
The British-based Born Free Foundation estimates that poachers killed 32,000 elephants last year. It says that black-market ivory sells for around $1,300 per pound.
Most elephants are killed in Africa, where there are about 300,000 African elephants left. There are an estimated 50,000 Asian elephants found from India to Vietnam.
Not everyone supported the ivory crush. Bob Weisblut, a co-founder of the Florida-based International Ivory Society, said he thought the carvings and tusks should be sold to raise money for anti-poaching efforts.
“A lot of this is beautiful art,” Weisblut said. “And it’s a shame to destroy it.”
The ivory being destroyed didn’t include items legally imported or acquired before the 1989 global ban.
“This is a way to say to people we are not putting a value on ivory. We’re putting a value on the lives of the elephants,” said Azzedine Downes, president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which works with U.S. agents to enforce animal protection laws.
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Associated Press writer P. Solomon Banda contributed to this report.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
A female African Bush Elephant in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania. Photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim, licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licanse, Version 1.2.
This fine example of Pre-Columbian gold artistry dates to 800-1500 A.D. Of a high-karat yellow gold, the piece is crafted in the form of a fierce, crouching reptile with beady eyes. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers and Antiquities Saleroom.
VERACRUZ, Mexico (AP) – Gulf-coast fisherman Raul Hurtado is a local legend, the man who found and lost millions of dollars’ worth of Aztec gold almost four decades ago, was tossed in prison, then found peace making $150 a month selling octopus and other seafood from a thatched-roof shack.
Now, Hurtado is back in the public eye because he’s at risk of losing even the modest livelihood he earns on a small patch of beach known as Punta Gorda. The government plans to expand Veracruz port and make it one of Mexico’s largest freight terminals, a move that threatens to evict him and dozens of others who have sold fish on the beach for decades.
It’s the latest twist in a life that has had some wondering over the years whether Hurtado has been the luckiest, or unluckiest, fisherman ever.
“It was a story that impacted us for days and months,” said Veracruz resident Enoch Rodriguez. “And it was also sad.”
Thirty-eight years ago, Hurtado discovered what became known as “The Fisherman’s Jewels” while looking for octopus in the shallow water of the coastal reefs of Coral de Enmedio. He saw a glitter of gold on the ocean’s sandy floor. It was a gold ingot, lost long ago in a shipwreck and uncovered by ocean tides.
Hurtado said he returned to the same place a year later, in 1976, “and I found another piece, also buried.”
“It was bigger than the other bar, and when I pulled on it, I moved the sand with my hand, and that is when all the jewels began to appear,” said Hurtado, 64. Altogether, he found 42 pre-Columbian gold pieces, including bracelets, pendants and cloak ornaments.
Unaware of their worth, Hurtado sold a few pieces. “With the small amount of money I got, I bought a few little things — a bed, new tin roofing for my house.”
He kept the rest. Punta Gorda residents remember Hurtado’s children attaching the gold ingots to a string and pulling them around the beach like playthings.
The fisherman said he later learned the gold had an incalculable value, and was a national treasure. But, until then, “For me, they were like toys.”
Things turned bad when an acquaintance reported Hurtado to authorities, who seized the artifacts and charged him with “looting the nation.” He said police beat him and accused him of being a thief, and seized some of the pieces. He spent more than a year in prison.
Mexico’s Supreme Court acquitted Hurtado in 1979, ruling he didn’t know that the find was a national treasure or that he was required to report it. “Ignorance, and not knowing how to read or write, that was my only crime,” the fisherman said.
Now, the local port authority is offering jobs to Hurtado and the other seafood vendors if they’ll leave the beach to make way for the expansion. Hurtado said he’s too old to learn a new skill. “I’m going to be 65,” he said. “I don’t think there will be work for me.”
He’s appealing to President Enrique Pena Nieto to prevent the evictions, and several environmental groups have joined the cause, saying the port will damage one of the area’s most important coral reefs. An appeals court is considering the case.
Hurtado said he turned his life around after he found and lost the gold treasure. He married the mother of his seven children in a church wedding and has supported his family with the modest earnings from the shack.
The gold pieces are now in a museum in one of Veracruz city’s old Spanish-era forts, the Baluarte de Santiago. The exhibition doesn’t even credit Hurtado by name, saying only that the gold was “seized from a fisherman who found it in the bottom of the sea.”
“It was a discovery that everyone says was great, but for me it was nothing,” Hurtado said.
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Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
This fine example of Pre-Columbian gold artistry dates to 800-1500 A.D. Of a high-karat yellow gold, the piece is crafted in the form of a fierce, crouching reptile with beady eyes. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers and Antiquities Saleroom.
The Arts Council said Thursday that the papers include a letter adorned with sketches and verses written by Lennon to his friend and bandmate Stuart Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe died of a brain hemorrhage at age 21 in 1962, before The Beatles achieved global fame.
Also donated were Lennon’s handwritten lyrics to Beatles songs including “In My Life” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
The items were donated by Beatles biographer Hunter Davies in place of 120,000 pounds ($190,000) in taxes. Davies said he was happy to see the Beatles’ papers in the library “next to the Magna Carta and works by Shakespeare and Beethoven, because that’s where I honestly think they belong.”
The government-funded Arts Council said almost 50 million pounds’ worth of works was given to museums and galleries through the program in 2012-13.
They include a painting by 19th-century artist Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot from the estate of painter Lucian Freud, given to the National Gallery in lieu of 1.4 million pounds in inheritance tax.
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Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Interior view of Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts at night. Photo by Wasted Time R.PHILA., Pa. (AP) – The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts plans to introduce a space for cutting-edge programming that officials hope will increase the building’s reputation for creativity and attract a younger crowd.
The SEI Innovation Studio, a 200-seat black-box theater, will house new jazz and theater residencies, plus a rotating art gallery. A formal unveiling is set for Thursday morning in downtown Philadelphia.
The $3 million initiative, which includes an art installation of a slow-motion car crash in the Kimmel’s lobby, comes as a result of a partnership with the Oaks-based financial services firm SEI.
Company CEO Alfred West Jr., a major collector of work by emerging artists, said he’s glad to support the facility’s vision to bring in avant-garde acts and new audiences.
“These people are changing what the establishment thinks of (as) performing art,” said West. “I just think it’s terrific that the Kimmel Center is taking this chance.”
The building, whose main tenant is the Philadelphia Orchestra, has been working to shed its image as an insular space for highbrow music and dance. Officials want its huge indoor plaza to be seen as an accessible community gathering point and gateway to a variety of art types.
To that end, West will loan a series of three works to be displayed in the lobby. The first is Jonathan Schipper’s “The Slow, Inevitable Death of American Muscle,” in which two high-horsepower cars crash together over several weeks and leave the floor littered with twisted metal and broken glass.
“It’s another opportunity for people to come in for free, to feel like they’re welcome, and see something exciting,” said Kimmel Center president Anne Ewers.
In addition, visitors will now be able to enter the building through a stylish new entrance that highlights the presence of the SEI Innovation Studio. It’s on the north side of the facility, next to another soon-to-be unveiled amenity: Volver, a lobby restaurant by chef Jose Garces that is expected to open in January.
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Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Interior view of Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts at night. Photo by Wasted Time R.
Although not the artwork in question, this is another painting from Vincent van Gogh’s (Dutch, 1853-1890) Saintes-Maries series, created in 1888 during the artist’s stay in Arles, France. It is titled ‘Street in Saintes-Maries’ and is held in a private collection.GENEVA (AFP) – Switzerland paid $1.6 million in legal fees despite winning a US lawsuit over a Van Gogh drawing donated by a businessmanaccused of exploiting its Jewish former owner, according to a report Friday.
The heir of a Jewish collector, Margaret Mauthner, who sold the drawing to Swiss businessman Oskar Reinhart in 1933 before fleeing Nazi Germany six years later, brought the case against Switzerland in 2009.
She insisted Reinhart, who later gave the drawing, “Street in Saintes-Maries,” to Switzerland, had taken advantage of the precarious situation her grandmother was in at the time to pay an unfair price.
Switzerland, which has always insisted Reinhart paid a fair price for the piece, won the case before both a lower New York court, and again upon appeal in 2012.
The drawing, valued at several million dollars, is again hanging in the Reinhart collection at the public Winterthur museum in northeastern Switzerland.
But the Tages Anzeiger daily reported Friday that an internal Swiss Federal Culture Office report showed the small Alpine country remained saddled with nearly 1.5 million Swiss francs ($1.6 million, 1.2 million euros) in legal fees.
The culture office in Bern told the ATS news agency that it was worth the cost, since the case set an important legal precedent.
While Switzerland strives to make things right when it has acted in a morally dubious manner, when it has done nothing wrong, it also must defend its property rights, at any cost, Yves Fischer, deputy chief of the culture office, told ATS.
In a similar case with the opposite outcome, Switzerland last year returned a 17th-century silver goblet from a national museum to the estate of German-American collector Emma Budge.
The Swiss National Museum said in June 2012 that an investigation into the origins of the “Lerber Lerche” goblet discovered it was purchased in 1937 at a sale of items belonging to Budge held months after her death.
The proceeds from the auction went to a bank account blocked by the Nazis, preventing the owners from benefiting.
Budge’s private collection, including paintings, furniture and porcelain, was reportedly one of the largest auctioned during the Nazi era.
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ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Although not the artwork in question, this is another painting from Vincent van Gogh’s (Dutch, 1853-1890) Saintes-Maries series, created in 1888 during the artist’s stay in Arles, France. It is titled ‘Street in Saintes-Maries’ and is held in a private collection.
