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Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Connections Program Receives $1 Million Annenberg Foundation Grant
5/15/2006 San Francisco, 15 May 2006—John E. Buchanan Jr., Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, announced today the generous $1 million Annenberg Foundation grant in support of the museums’ contemporary Connections Program. The Connections Program, organized by Curator and Director of Contemporary Projects, Dr. Daniell Cornell, will present new works that aim to reinterpret traditional objects from the de Young’s collections.
The Annenberg grant will help fund this unique and exciting program, enabling the museum to transform a nontraditional space to engage the viewer through strong visual connections created by the artists. Through these artistic connections and the Annenberg grant, the works in this gallery will offer visual and educational opportunities (including a full-color brochure for each project) to explain, interpret, and recontextualize the museum’s collection. “We feel it is important to support the work of contemporary artists, and to give the public access to creative projects and artistic thinking,” said Wallis Annenberg, Vice President of the Annenberg Foundation.
Each year the Connections Gallery will host three exhibitions that trace a common theme and highlight the intersections of artwork from a variety of cultures and time periods. In its inaugural year, the Connections Gallery will have housed three exhibitions revolving around the themes of shifting identities, personal narratives, and cultural assumptions. Together they form a cohesive exhibition series highlighting the influence of art and cultural objects on the self-discovery of the viewer. The exhibition cycle includes Catherine Wagner’s conceptual photographs exploring the role of the museum’s descriptive systems and cultural assumptions; John Bankston’s works in drawing and painting presenting the museum’s objects as visual icons and playing on cross-cultural juxtapositions; and Armando Rascon’s focus on the US-Mexico border through video and soundscape, incorporating objects from the museum’s collections as well as various personal artifacts.
About the Annenberg Foundation
The Annenberg Foundation exists to advance the public well-being through improved communication. As the principal means of achieving its goal, the Foundation encourages the development of more effective ways to share ideas and knowledge. The Annenberg Foundation has offices in Radnor, Pennsylvania and Los Angeles, California.
About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The de Young museum and its sister museum, the Legion of Honor, together comprise the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the largest public arts institution in the city and one of the largest art museums in the United States.
The Legion of Honor is located in San Francisco's Lincoln Park (34th Avenue and Clement Street). Its collections span four thousand years and include major holdings in Rodin sculpture; paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Watteau, de la Tour, Vigée Le Brun, Cézanne, Monet, and Picasso, among other Dutch, Italian, German, English, and French masters; a fifteenth-century Spanish ceiling; European decorative arts; tapestries; and over 70,000 prints and drawings.
Founded in 1895 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the de Young museum has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the city and a cherished destination for millions of residents and visitors to the region for over one hundred years. In October 2005, the de Young reopened in a state-of-the-art new building and attracted more than 50,000 visitors during its opening weekend. Designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Fong & Chan Architects in San Francisco, the new de Young provides San Francisco with a landmark art museum to showcase the museum’s significant collections of American art from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, art from Central and South America, and from the Pacific and Africa, as well as an important and diverse collection of textiles.
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