Arts/Culture

The Museum of Fine Arts launched a campaign to raise more than $1 million to buy the “Lime Green Icicle Tower.’’

The MFA quietly began the campaign last week by adding a donation box next to the piece and sending an e-mail to museum members pointing them to the contribution website. This week, they plan to add tweets and Facebook posts to spread the word.

The MFA’s public appeal includes, for the first time, a chance for museum visitors to give online and by texting on their phones.

While crews work to erect tents and stages for the upcoming Newport jazz and folk festivals, the festivals' creator and guardian angel continues to build something else: a legacy that he hopes will continue long after he's gone. New York jazz impresario George Wein, who started the festivals more than 50 years ago, took them nonprofit earlier this year to shield them from the financial ups and downs of corporate funding.

The Barnes Foundation announced it has surpassed the $200 million fundraising target for construction of its new facility in Philadelphia.

The foundation, which has struggled financially in its longtime location in Merion, Pa., also reported that it has seen rapid growth in museum membership — from 400 members two years ago to more than 10,000 now.

The announcement means that about $40 million in new donations have been booked over the last year or so. Officials provided no details about the sources of the funds, although they said all donors were private.

The Philadelphia Orchestra Tuesday morning announced some major funding for its $160 million drive to underwrite the bankruptcy process and related costs, operations in the next few years, special projects and endowment.

According to an announcement, the orchestra has recieved $11.2 million from the William Penn Foundation, the Wyncote Foundation, philanthropist Gerry Lenfest, the Neubauer Family Foundation and an unspecified number of orchestra board members. The orchestra says it has another $16.3 million in matching offers that will require the group to identify an additional $17.5 million by the end of 2011.

The McKnight Foundation awarded 128 grants totaling $14,248,000 in its second-quarter 2011 grantmaking. 
 
Of the $14.2 million total approved, $1.4 million went to 18 small and midsized arts organizations that model innovation in connecting artists and people, or that develop and deliver the work of Minnesota artists.

In a sign that the Metropolitan Opera may be easing itself out of several years of recession-battered books, company officials said Wednesday that the opera expects to achieve a balanced budget this year for the first time since 2004.

While specific financial figures for the current fiscal year, which ends July 31, will not be released until next spring, a spokesman for the company, Peter Clark, said the balanced budget can be attributed to increased revenues.

Stanford University will receive a major donation of 121 works of painting and sculpture by 86 artists, including Jackson Pollock's "Lucifer," from a family of Peninsula art collectors. Added to existing art holdings, the gift moves Stanford to the front rank among universities with teaching museums.

The donation, from Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson of Atherton, Calif., and their daughter, Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, comprises the cream of their peerless collection of postwar American art.

Pierre Omidyar, the French-born founder and chairman of eBay, is giving $3 million to the American Friends of the Louvre that will go toward funding educational and scholarly programs on Persian art and culture at the Paris museum. The announcement comes just a few months after Iran declared that it would cut ties with the Louvre over a dispute involving the exhibition of Persian artifacts.

Organizers said that income from the new fund will go toward projects at or in collaboration with the Louvre, including special exhibitions, installations, conferences and publications.

The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation is to inject £32 million ($51.8 million) into arts projects across the U.K., it announced on Thursday.

The initiative will be funded by using the money the charity received from its sale of the Picasso painting “Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto” – a Blue Period masterpiece that sold to an undisclosed buyer for £34.8 million ($56.3 million) at Christie’s London last May.

A seven-figure gift to the Detroit Institute of Arts from former General Motors group vice president Roy Roberts and his wife, Maureen, has put a spotlight on the relative dearth of high-profile African-American philanthropists, Crain's Detroit Business and the Detroit Free Press report.

In recognition of the first seven-figure contribution to DIA by an African American, the museum will rename one of its galleries after the couple.