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‘Junk Bond King’ Michael Milken to Open American Dream Museum Michael Milken, better known as the “junk bond king,” has reinvented himself once again. Milken has a sorted resume that includes working at a diner during high school, becoming one of the highest-paid financiers of all time, being convicted of securities fraud and serving time in prison, and finally remaking himself again as a philanthropist for medical research. Now, he is the founder of a museum—the Milken Center. A 60,000-square-foot exhibition space in Washington, D.C., the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, a will open July 4, 2023. “It will tell the story of American Dream through the eyes of people who have sought the American Dream, but we’ll also be asking people to define their American Dream,” Kerry Murphy Healey, the center’s president said in an interview. “We’re trying to capture those stories and the evolution of the idea of the American Dream. We want to weave storytelling into what we do, so that whoever comes through the doors, they find the stories of people like them inside.” The center will be housed in the Riggs National Bank building on Pennsylvania Avenue very close to the White House. Shalom Baranes Associates, which also renovated the Pentagon and the Main Treasury Building, is the named architect of the project.
Courtesy of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream.
flesh out the tapestry of the American Dream.” Healey added that the center will include a five-story, modern atrium and a solicitation for proposals for public art will begin in January 2021. Baltimore Museum Halts Art Sale Amid Escalating Controversy
“We’re interviewing multichannel design firms to help us envision the space, which will include the newest technology but also historic documents from partners who have been reaching out to us,” Healey said. “And there will be art created by the public that relates to the American Dream, so we expect to have an ongoing effort to solicit submissions, whether for essays, photographs, spoken word poems, or film, to
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) recently announced that it will suspend the sale of three paintings in its collection. The decision was made just before the Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in which two of the works, Brice Marden’s “3” (1987-1988) and Clyfford Still’s “1957-G” (1957), were slated to go under the hammer. A private sale of the third work, Andy Warhol’s “The Last Supper” (1986), was to be brokered by the auction house; it has also been halted.
ArtDiction | 6 | November/December 2020
“The decision was made after having heard and listened to the proponents and the detractors of the BMA’s ambitious Endowment for the Future and after a private conversation between the BMA’s leadership and the association of Art Museum Directors,” said a statement from the museum’s leadership and board of trustees. The museum has faced a flood of backlash against the deaccessioning plan in the last three weeks, including the resignation of two honorary board members, threats from two philanthropists to withdraw pledges, and a spate of critical op-eds and open letters. A group of former presidents of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) sent a letter to BMA board chair Clair Zamoiski Segal urging that the museum reconsider the sale. Among its 12 signatories as were Maxwell L. Anderson, former director of the Whitney Museum; Madeleine
