Membership Newsletters - Member Endowment Announcement
Dear CU Art Museum Community,
I am excited to share the exciting news about our new Diversity Acquisition Endowment. This is our first endowment for purchase of artwork. We are so grateful to CU alum Ann Bateson for launching this initiative. I invite you to join us in developing a collection that recognizes the important contributions of artists of color, artists with disabilities and LGBTQ+ artists. Read about the initiative below and in the College of Arts & Science Magazine.
Donations to the CU Boulder Art Museum Diversity Acquisition Fund can be made on the Colorado Giving Page.
Warm regards,
Sandra Firmin
Math alum sows seeds of diversity in art: $25K gift establishes Diversity Acquisition Fund at CU Boulder Art Museum
In fall semester 2020, Hope Saska, decided to create a new collection plan for the University of Colorado Boulder Art Museum. “It’s a document to articulate what we collect and why we collect it, and what our mission is,” says Saska, curator of collections and exhibitions at the museum. “It also is a history of the collection, so we can better understand past motivations.” Started in the 1940s, the art museum’s collection accumulated over the decades in a broad, general direction. Saska thought it was a good time to sharpen the focus.
“It occurred to me that we should be more intentional about charting a direction for the future, thinking about where opportunities might be to expand, and thinking about diversity was really important,” she says. “We needed to find a clear path, and if we were reimagining, why not be as broad and diverse as possible.”
Enter Ann Bateson, a long-time Boulder resident who earned a PhD in mathematics in 1977 and spent much of her career working at the Center for the Study of Earth From Space—now the Earth Science and Observation Center at CIRES, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science.
A current member of the museum’s collection committee, Bateson made a $25,000 donation as a seed endowment of the new Diversity Acquisition Fund, which will be used to acquire works by historically underrepresented artists such as artists of color, artists with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ artists.
Read the rest of the article here: https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2021/03/04/math-alum-sows-seeds-diversity-art
Above: Body Language: Picturing People (Installation view), CU Art Museum, July 18, 2019– March 12, 2020. Photo by Patrick Campbell, © University of Colorado Boulder.