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Professors seek meeting of Albright-Knox members
To the Editor:
The undersigned professors at UB, who are also members of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, would like to hold a special meeting of the members to discuss and vote on a resolution to reject the decision of the board of directors to sell at auction some 144 objects from the permanent collection, mainly Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, European art before 1800 (especially Medieval and Renaissance), and older work from India, China, Africa, Central and South America, and the Middle East. If you care about keeping in our city this irreplaceable part of our cultural heritage, you will want to attend.
Such meetings are usually called by the president or by the majority of the board, but after some of us spoke to a few members of the board and asked for a special meeting, we were informed, after a few days of discussion among board members, that the board did not choose to call a meeting. That leaves the third method allowed for by the bylaws of the gallery-the request of 5 percent of the members-which means that we will need at least 400 requests for the meeting in order to make it happen (5 percent of the total membership of about 8,000).
If you are not a member and care about this issue, please join at once by visiting the gallery or by email, so that you can send in your request for a meeting. We must act now. The items have all been shipped to Sotheby's in New York, and the first lot is scheduled to be auctioned in March.
Your written request, which should include your address and the date, could take the following form:
To the
President and Board of Directors:
I, (your name), a member of the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, hereby request that a special meeting of the
members be held as soon as possible to discuss and vote on a motion to
withdraw from the scheduled auction of some 145 pieces from the gallery.
(Your signature, with printed name beneath.)
The letter should be sent to the President and the Board of Directors, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Ave., Buffalo, N.Y., 14222. A backup copy should be sent to Carl Dennis, Department of English, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, N.Y., 14260.
The board argues that the older art is not relevant to our mission, but while modern and contemporary art is the primary focus of the gallery, the collecting of the objects now sent off for auction has been going on from its beginning, under generations of boards and directors who believed that the art of the present cannot be understood in historical isolation, that to appreciate any single period requires placing it in the context of art of other eras and traditions. Selling off older work to buy new work would not only radically curtail the range of the beautiful in the visual arts in Buffalo, but would destroy the dialogue between past and present that increases our understanding of the modern and contemporary.
We have to add that the members of the gallery have been entirely excluded from the deliberations that led to the decision to sell. The board adopted a policy of total secrecy as part of what seems to have been a deliberate attempt to keep the membership and the community in the dark until the contract for the sale had been signed so that the protest would come too late. When the news of the sale was made public in The Buffalo News, the objects had already been sent off for auction.
This is not the open and honest dealing that we as members have a right to expect from the board that we have elected.
Sincerely,
Carl Dennis
Irving Massey
Martin Pops
Max Wickert
Howard Wolf