Chelsea Art Museum Closes While Restructuring

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Aug 17th 2010 at 10:01PM

New York's Chelsea Art Museum announced that it is closing to the public for the rest of the month as it tries to avoid foreclosure. The Wall Street Journal reports that a company controlled by Dorothea Keeser that owns the West 22nd Street building filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this month. A lawyer for Keeser told the WSJ that the museum's shutdown is temporary while the museum works to restructure its finances. Keeser has been in debt restructuring talks with her creditor, Hudson Realty Capital which is owed about $13 million. Earlier the WSJ reported that the museum had put up its entire permanent collection of artwork as collateral for a loan, a move violated regulations of the state Department of Education's Board of Regents, which supervises and grants charters to museums.

The Chelsea Art Museum is the home of the Miotte Foundation and defines its mission as an exploration of "art within a context." The museum focuses on 20th and 21st Century art highlighting artists that have been less exposed in the United States than in their home countries. The museum itself is a 30,000 square foot renovated historic building located opposite the piers. The museum is also dedicated to archiving, preserving, presenting and making available for exhibitions the work of Jean Miotte and rotating selections of Miotte's work are shown on a regular basis along with other pieces from the permanent collection including pieces by artists as Pol Bury, Mimmo Rotella, and J.P. Riopelle.

Tags: chelsea art museum, culture in trouble, miotte foundation, museums in trouble