Baltimore Museum of Art to Sell Artworks by White People to Make Room for Black Artists to Better "Reflect" the 70% Black City...

If you've read The City that Bleeds: Race, History, and the Death of Baltimore, you know black people in Baltimore carefully protect their city by using black criminality to keep out white people from ever being a demographic threat to run things again.

You'll also know that in 1917, Baltimore was 88% white. Restrictive covenants and segregation kept city prosperous and safe from the very population now representing 70% of the city's population, with the white population below 25 percent.

In a city overwhelmed by Africans in America, a lingering vestige of western civilization is seeing stewards sell off art by white people to make room for artwork by people of color/blacks to better reflect a city whose population is below 25 percent white... 

Yes, Baltimore is a 70 percent black city. It was roughly 10 percent black in 1917. With black-fueled violence exploding across the city, it's important to remember the reality of homicide in Baltimore: Lynchings in USA over an 86-year time-span vs. Homicides in Baltimore over a 7-year time-span (91.5 percent Black-on-Black)

Again, in 1917, Baltimore was 88% white. Restrictive covenants and segregation kept city safe and prosperous from the very population now representing 70% of the city's population.

Today? [Baltimore Museum of Art to sell artworks by Andy Warhol, other 20th century masters, Baltimore Sun, 4-13-18]:

The Baltimore Museum of Art announced Friday that it is selling seven artworks by such 20th-century masters as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Franz Kline to make way for pieces by contemporary artists of color and women. 

Going up for sale at Sotheby’s in May are two artworks by Warhol (“Oxidation Painting” from 1978 and “Hearts” from 1979) and one each by Kline (“Green Cross” from 1956) and Rauschenberg (“Bank Job” from 1979). Rounding out the seven are three paintings by lesser-known artists: Kenneth Noland’s “Lapis Lazuli” from 1963 and “In-Vital” from 1982, along with Jules Olitski’s “Before Darkness II” from 1973. 

Kline’s painting alone is expected to fetch between $6 and $8 million, while Warhol’s “Oxidation Painting,” should bring in between $2 million and $3 million, according to a spokesman for Sotheby’s in New York, which is handling the sales. 

Five works will be sold at auction on May 16 and 17, while two extremely large artworks — Warhol’s “Hearts” and the Rauschenberg — will be put up for private sale. 

Museum director Christopher Bedford pointed out that the museum owns many other, and stronger, works by each of the artists who created the pieces leaving the collection. For instance, the BMA owns more than 90 artworks by Warhol, roughly a dozen by Kline and about two dozen by Rauschenberg.

During the same meeting in which the museum’s board of trustees announced that it was selling the seven artworks, it also approved the purchase of nine artworks by contemporary artists, several of whom are black. 

Bedford has spoken often of the necessity of ensuring that museums reflect the population of the cities in which they are located. Though the city of Baltimore is 63.7 percent black, according to 2010 census data, its flagship contemporary museum owns relatively few artworks by African-American artists. 

The purchases will be one small step toward diversifying the museum’s collection. 

Among them are works by the artists Mark Bradford, John T. Scott and Jack Whitten, who are African-American, and Zanele Muholi, who is South African. The museum also purchased pieces by artists Sara VanDerBeek and Trevor Paglen, who are white. The seven artworks being sold — five paintings, one mural and one work that combines paint and silkscreen — all were created by white men. 

“It is a very good thing to make room for new works by contemporary artists,” said Costas Grimaldis, owner of Mount Vernon’s prestigious C. Grimaldis Gallery. “It’s also a good thing to have room in a museum’s storage for works by artists like Kline, Rothko and Rauschenberg that have already made history.”

Baltimore already has a museum dedicated exclusively to black art. How is attendance there? [In Baltimore and nationwide, art museums fight sharp declines in attendance, Baltimore Sun, 1-12-18]:

When former Walters Art Museum director Gary Vikan remembers the late 1990s, he gets a little wistful. 

It was a time when as many as 600,000 people crowded through the doors of the city’s two largest art museums each year. Local celebrities would hit him up for tickets. Airline employees checking him in for his flight recognized his name. 

“Sometimes on Sundays, the galleries would get so full you could barely move,” Vikan said. “It was fun while it lasted.” 

Twenty years later, the scene in Baltimore and nationwide is very different. 

“You go into museums that have recently expanded, museums with these enormous spaces,” he said. “And you see nobody in the galleries. Zero.” 

Annual attendance at the Baltimore Museum of Art has fallen 12.7 percent in the last 15 years. At the Walters, it’s down 18.6 percent. Across the country, the National Endowment for the Arts reports, attendance at art museums dropped 16.8 percent — even as the population grew by more than 33 million people, and museums began offering free admission. 

Foot traffic at art museums climbed steadily throughout the 20th century. Now, for the first time in modern history, it’s falling. And the decline is expected to accelerate, aprospect that alarms museum officials. 

“Society has invested billions of dollars in these museums over the centuries,” said Michael Peter Edson, a longtime museum administrator. “If museums can’t prove their ability to make a difference, then society will choose to place its resources somewhere else — and it should. There’s a premium on urgency. We don’t have 20 or 30 years to sit on the sidelines.” 

The Baltimore Museum of Art is just beginning to recover from a sharp drop after closing 60 percent of its galleries for a renovation starting in 2011. When the full museum reopened in the fall of 2014, attendance was about 180,000, down 36 percent since 2002. By the end of the 2017 fiscal year, attendance had climbed to 246,100 — about the audience for 2005, but still down from earlier years. 

And at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, attendance declined to 48,775 in 2017, or 53 percent below the opening-year high of 104,500 visitors. 

So a museum dedicated solely to promoting black art in nearly 70 percent black Baltimore is sparsely attended, but the Baltimore Museum of Art is now selling art by white artists to make room for art by people of color in a Quixotic attempt to get more black patrons and better reflect the community.

Just another example of what Black-Run America (BRA) does to the every institution, private or public, in the USA.