Tag: Arts and Humanities

Philanthropy

Philanthropist Al Shands creates new arts grant

The Great Meadows Foundation grants will support visual artists in amounts from $500 to $5,000. They’re named for the home Al Shands and and his late wife Mary Norton Shands built in Crestwood; it includes a museum for their extensive collection of contemporary sculpture and art, according to WFPL.

Al ShandsThe couple developed their interest in collecting after Mary was asked to lead the Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation, now the KMAC museum, in the late 1980s, WFPL says. Shands, 87, is a longstanding Speed Art Museum trustee, and a member of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum advisory board in Venice.

An heiress to a broadcasting fortune, Mary died in 2009. The Shands’ collection is to be bequeathed to the Speed museum upon his death. It includes work by notable artists such as Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Jim Dine and Maya Lin. In a video last year, Shands spoke to The Courier-Journal about the collection.

Photo, left: Shands beside a LeWitt sculpture at Great Meadows; Hyperallergic.

Related: a book examines their art-filled estate.

Latest Headlines

Actors names new managing director
Kevin Moore
Moore

He is Kevin Moore, managing director of Theatre Communications Group, a New York non-profit with a $10 million budget and 50 employees serving more than 500 professional non-profit theaters nationwide, including Actors Theatre itself, according to The Courier-Journal. Actors announced Moore’s hiring today in a press release.

The Louisville repertory theater, now in its 53rd season, has an $11.25 million budget, a $12 million endowment, and 196 employees, the CJ says. It presents more than 350 performances annually, and is known especially for its Humana Festival of New American Plays each spring.

Moore replaces Jennifer Bielstein, who left in March after 10 years to be managing director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

In its announcement, Actors didn’t say what Moore would be paid. Bielstein was paid about $207,000, including benefits, for the fiscal year ended May 2014, according to its most recent IRS tax return on GuideStar.

Related: Actors’ profile page on Boulevard, with links to annual IRS returns and other information.

Philanthropy

dd72ef_c0fd1a9b1cd54df5a2778d9922efc6eeAdmission to the KMAC art and craft museum will be free for one year after its June 4 reopening, underwritten by a gift from Delta Dental of Kentucky, the benefits company said today, according to The Courier-Journal. The dental benefits giant didn’t disclose the amount, however.

The Louisville company’s budget was about $166 million in 2014, according to its most recent IRS tax return on GuideStar. It donated a combined $40,000 to four groups that year: Family & Children’s Place of Louisville ($5,000); Kentucky Dental Society of Lexington ($5,000), American Heart Association of Des Moines ($20,000), and the Kentucky State Police in Frankfort ($10,000).

CEO Clifford Maesaka was paid $524,546 in 2014; annual pay for all officers and directors starts on Page 7 of the IRS Form 990 return.

Books

Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel chronicles the star-crossed romance between Louisville debutante Daisy Fay Buchanan and a local soldier, the future tycoon Jay Gatsby. It’s 1922, and Gatsby is now wealthy. Having found Daisy again, he fantasizes she will leave her husband Tom Buchanan. Daisy’s cousin Nick Carraway, the book’s narrator, is visiting Gatsby after a party at his Long Island mansion.

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house — just as if it were five years ago.

He began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers. “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

Diversions

Where is one of the Speed Museum’s most famous residents?

She’s on an out-of-town trip, according to The Courier-JournalJ. From the Speed’s website:

Anthony van Dyck
Flemish, 1599 ‑ 1641
Portrait of a Woman, about 1635
Oil on canvas
29 1/2 ×23 inches (74.9 × 58.4 cm)
Museum purchase, Preston Pope Satterwhite Fund

 

About the painting’s donor

In an important milestone for the Speed in 1941, Dr. Preston Pope Satterwhite gave the museum his collection of 15th- and 16th-century French and Italian Decorative Arts tapestries and furniture.

Satterwhite was born in 1867 Great Neck, N.Y., but lived in Louisville until he was 25, when he moved to New York to complete his medical internship and residency, according to the Encyclopedia of Louisville. He became a successful surgeon and well-known art collector. His ancestors, the Breckinridges and Prestons, were early settlers in Kentucky. Satterwhite died in New York in 1948.

Satterwhite monument
Temple of Love

He and his wife are buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in one of the most elaborate memorials there. Erected in 1928 of pink Italian marble, the “Temple of Love” is a copy of Marie Antoinette’s ornate structure in her Petite Trianon garden at the Palace of Versailles in Paris.

Here’s a Find A Grave photo of Satterwhite and his wife, Florence in front of their 1927 Rolls-Royce Phantom 1 at their estate in Great Neck.

10722089_136865831762

Books

Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel chronicles the star-crossed romance between Louisville debutante Daisy Fay Buchanan and a local soldier, the future tycoon Jay Gatsby. In this passage set in summer 1922, Gatsby; Daisy, and her husband Tom Buchanan are in a suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel. Daisy’s childhood friend Jordan Baker is also there, and a wedding is taking place in the ballroom below.

“Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!” cried Jordan dismally.

“Still — I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered, “Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?”

“A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes — that’s a fact — and he was from Biloxi, Mississippi.”

“They carried him into my house,” appended Jordan, “because we lived just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died.” After a moment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, “There wasn’t any connection.”