Press

To further bolster the Fleet Great Art Exhibition and Education Program, the New York State Museum has received a generous $100,000 challenge grant from The Hearst Foundation, Inc.

"These additional funds will enable the Museum to strengthen our program of bringing world-class art to Albany," said Cliff Siegfried, the Museum's director. "Being part of the State Education Department, we are particularly excited because of the opportunity to provide quality educational programs for the Fleet Great Art Series."

"We are very grateful to Hearst," said Laurie Roberts, the executive director of the Museum Institute, the fundraising arm of the Museum. "The gift permits us to enrich the outreach and educational components of the program."

Fleet has generously given the State Museum $450,000 toward the program featuring exhibitions from New York City museums, such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

State Sen. Roy Goodman of Manhattan and Harry M. Rosenfeld, editor-at-large of the Times Union of Albany were instrumental in helping the State Museum launch partnerships with New York City museums.

"This generous grant from the Hearst Foundation helps to fulfill a dream of mine to bring to the State Museum world-class, quality art from the collections of other major museums around the state," Goodman said.
A previous grant of $50,000 from Hearst helped to begin building the partnerships with the New York City museums.

"The first Hearst Foundation award in 1997 launched the Great Art Exhibition Series," Rosenfeld said. "Now, the follow-up contribution enables the arts presentations to flourish in a fuller dimension. The Hearst Foundation has been a very good mentor indeed to this innovative program."
William Randolph Hearst established The Hearst Foundation in 1945 as an independent, private philanthropy operating separately from The Hearst Corporation.

The first exhibition in the Fleet Great Art Series will open Feb. 26 and run through May 2. Pop Art: Selections from The Museum of Modern Art, an overview of the movement, will include works from Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann. Six more scheduled exhibitions will follow through 2002.

The State Museum hosted Still Life: The Object in American Art last year and Winslow Homer and his Contemporaries in 1997, exhibitions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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*For Pop Art slides or more details about future exhibits, call 518/474-0079.