Museum Director

Arnold Lehman offered the museum world a preview in 1989 of how he would behave as director of an art museum under siege.That was the year Washington's Corcoran Museum bowed to criticism and canceled an exhibition funded by the National Endowment for the Arts that featured homoerotic art by Robert Mapplethorpe.Then director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Lehman urged his employees and trustees to write to their congressmen and to the Corcoran administration stressing the importance of freedom of expression both for artists and for museum administrators.

Be careful what you wish for.Museum director Arnold Lehman sought to create buzz and draw attention to the Brooklyn Museum of Art by importing from England a controversial exhibition that included human blood, animal parts and a painting of the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung.He surely has done so. But he also has incensed New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who on Wednesday threatened to cut off all financial support to the museum unless the exhibition, scheduled to open next week, is canceled.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani certainly has kicked up a firestorm of controversy with his declaration that the Brooklyn Museum of Art's current exhibition, "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection," is "sick stuff," and that a multimillion-dollar subsidy to the museum will be withheld.In 1955, Baltimore Mayor Thomas J. D'Alesandro Jr. was both praised and denounced by critics after he ordered local artist Glenn F. Walker's painting, "In a Room," which showed a nude man and woman lying on a bed, removed from the Peale Museum's "Life in Baltimore exhibit."

THE HISTORICAL Electronics Museum at West Nursery and Elkridge Landing Roads has named Noel Peterson and Gary Ryan its Volunteers of the Year.Peterson and Ryan were among 30 volunteers honored for putting in a total of 6,118 hours of work at the museum this year .John McCarty received the award for the most time volunteered this year, 1,528 hours. It is the equivalent of 38 weeks of full time work for free.The names of Peterson and Tom Ballard will be added to the plaque bearing names of volunteers who have given more than 1,000 hours to the museum.

THE HISTORICAL Electronics Museum at west Nursery and Elkridge Landing roads in Linthicum has acquired a 90-mm anti-aircraft gun to add to its quirky collection of antennae, tube radios and encoding machines.The gun is part of a World War II-era weapons system. The museum has two other parts of the system -- the radar and a fuse -- but needs an M-9 gun director to complete it.The gun was made available to the museum in 1996 by officials at the Rome (N.Y.) Air Force Base. It arrived in Linthicum by flatbed truck last spring, then went to Fort Meade, where it was rigged so it could not be fired.

The ancients made do with seven wonders of the world, but that wasn't enough for art critic Thomas Hoving.So Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has made his own list, "Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization," a sumptuous coffee-table volume that includes no fewer than 111 objects. The book arrives in stores this month, just in time for the holiday season.Hoving includes most of the usual suspects: Michelangelo's "David," Goya's "The Third of May, 1808" and Botticelli's "Primavera" would be prime candidates for any such compendium.

Gregory P. Andorfer, a TV producer who has won Peabody and Emmy awards, will become the next executive director of the Maryland Science Center, board chairman Tom Bozzuto announced yesterday.The 46-year-old Ohio native is vice president for national projects and executive producer at WQED television station in Pittsburgh. On Sept. 1, when Andorfer begins his new job, he will relieve Robert O. Pearce, former head of the Peabody Conservatory, who was interim director. However, he will be officially replacing former director Paul Hanle, who resigned last October.

London--The British Museum will create a new and permanent North American Gallery for its unique Native American collections with a $1.6 million grant from the Chase Manhattan Bank, the largest single corporate gift in the 241-history of the museum.In announcing the grant yesterday, Thomas Labrecque, chairman of the American bank, said "the sponsorship continues the bank's tradition of supporting the communities in which we do business and demonstrates our high regard for London and the United Kingdom."

The British Museum will create a permanent North American Gallery for its unique Native American collections with a $1.6 million grant from the Chase Manhattan Bank, the largest single corporate gift in the 241-history of the museum.In announcing the grant yesterday, Thomas Labrecque, chairman of the American bank, said "the sponsorship continues the bank's tradition of supporting the communities in which we do business and demonstrates our high regard for London and the United Kingdom.""Nothing could be happier for us than to announce this munificent gift," said Claus Moser, head of the museum's development trust.

Vacuum tubes and radar components, telecommunications equipment and more electronic gizmos than you could imagine are on display at the Historical Electronics Museum in Linthicum.And now all those gadgets are comfortably housed in 11,000 square feet of a Westinghouse warehouse on West Nursery Road, next to the BWI Marriott at Friendship Square.The museum now has nearly twice as much space as it had at the Westinghouse Electronics Systems Groups offices it used to occupy on Elkridge Landing Road.

History is often a word that people associate with textbooks and professors speaking in monotones. But with the Naval Academy Museum's complete renovation and redesign, the history of the U.S. Navy has become something real and vibrant to academy visitors and midshipmen. The museum reopened two weeks ago after undergoing an $11.6 million head-to-toe makeover. "We completely gutted this building," said Scott Harmon, the museum director. The only things left standing at one point, he said, were "the outside walls and the concrete floors."

History is often a word that people associate with textbooks and professors speaking in monotones. But with the Naval Academy Museum's complete renovation and redesign, the history of the Navy has become something real and vibrant to academy visitors and midshipmen. The museum reopened two weeks ago after undergoing an $11.6 million head-to-toe makeover. "We completely gutted this building," said Scott Harmon, the museum director. The only things left standing at one point, he said, were "the outside walls and the concrete floors."

JOHN A.H. SWEENEY, 77 Winterthur Museum curator Mr. Sweeney, curator emeritus and former assistant to the director of Winterthur Museum and Country Estate, died Thursday in Wilmington, Del., according to his sister-in-law. Mr. Sweeney helped turn Henry Francis du Pont's collection of American decorative arts into a world-class museum exhibit, said Leslie Greene Bowman, museum director and chief executive officer. Mr. Sweeney attended Yale University, continued his education in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture and joined the museum staff as assistant curator after graduation in 1954.

Downstairs in the new space at the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis, Janice Hayes Williams, a 48-year-old local historian, said an exhibit on cultural artifacts made her feel oddly at home. "William Henry Hebron, that's my great-grandfather," Williams said, pointing to a name listed in the Annapolis Underground exhibit, which features artifacts of African-American family life dug up from the very block where the museum stands at 84 Franklin St. "He was a fish merchant, half-black and half-Jewish."

Sandy Bellamy, executive director of Baltimore's seven-month-old Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, is leaving next month to become a partner in a private business venture. "It's just been totally fulfilling," she said yesterday of her stint as head of the $34 million museum, which opened with great fanfare in June at Pratt and President streets. "We've had wonderful people who have literally entrusted us with their lives' treasures, with financial contributions, with their labor."

The Contemporary Museum director who helped revive the once-ailing institution and enhance its profile as a venue for cutting-edge art in Baltimore is leaving to become director of the art museum at Purchase College in Purchase, N.Y. Thom Collins, a former assistant curator of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art and a senior curator at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, was hired as the Contemporary's director in November 2003....

Watching thousands of visitors streaming through the doors, Courtney Wilson said he felt like a proud father. He looked up and admired his "baby," the 120-year-old roundhouse building and home to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, which was badly damaged in a huge snowstorm last year. "I can't believe we almost lost all of this," the museum director said quietly, as visitors milled around where, in February 2003, debris and broken iron girders from the collapsed roof lay. After months of repairs, the museum at 901 W. Pratt St. reopened its doors yesterday.

Atreasure trove of more than 2,000 works by the late American painter Clyfford Still that has been stored unseen for nearly a quarter century in rural Maryland is being moved to Denver. The collection, which local arts boosters had hoped to one day display in Baltimore, will be housed in its own building as part of a $100 million expansion of the Denver Museum of Art, said Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. "We're not going to make this just another museum but a facility that will be worthy of the work that will be in it," Hickenlooper said yesterday.

CHANTILLY, Va. -- The B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay, the warplane that began the nuclear age with the first use of an atomic weapon on human beings, has been installed in a place of honor at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center here. It is the first time the airplane has been fully reassembled in 40 years. Eight years ago, another Smithsonian exhibit featuring a portion of the airplane was scrapped and the museum director resigned after a furor erupted over the museum's plans to use the exhibit to address the moral debate over atomic warfare.

WASHINGTON - Last spring, a visiting museum director from Scotland was rummaging through a storeroom of the Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt collection in New York when he turned to a box full of lighting-fixture sketches by unknown Italian artists. One unsigned drawing of an enormous branched candelabrum, possibly a menorah, struck the visitor as special. Tuesday, the Smithsonian confirmed his judgment. According to an international panel of Renaissance art scholars, the drawing is the work of the great Italian sculptor and artist Michelangelo.