Art school gives museums artist lectures

SKOWHEGAN, Maine, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is giving five U.S. museums recordings of more than 500 lectures by 20th century artists.

The lectures, recorded on compact disk, will go to the Archives of American Art in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, Colby College in Maine, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Getty Center in Los Angeles, it was announced Tuesday.

Marella Consolini, executive director for development at Skowhegan, said the five institutions received the school's initial disc donations as an outright gift, but future donations will be made with a fee for materials and administration. She said the old reel-to-reel tapes had been transferred to gold-back compact discs in the interests of preservation.

Each institution will receive more than 800 CDs of lectures on contemporary art given by a wide range of artists and recorded by the school since 1952, including talks by David Smith, Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn, Ad Reinhardt, Kiki Smith, and Lisa Yuskavage. They will all be accessible to the public at the recipient institutions sometime next year.