Loan of Cuban Works to Bronx Museum Is Delayed

Loan of Cuban Works to Bronx Museum Is Delayed
By RANDY KENNEDYJUNE 9, 2016

The Bronx Museum of the Arts said Thursday that a long-planned show of
works to be lent from the National Museum of Fine Arts in Cuba — part of
a major exchange originally scheduled to happen this year — would be
delayed until early next year at the soonest because of legal,
diplomatic and logistical hurdles.

Last summer, more than 80 works of art from the Bronx Museum's permanent
collection, dating from the 1960s to the present, traveled to the
National Museum in Cuba, representing the first part of the two-country
exhibition, titled "Wild Noise," the largest collaboration between Cuban
and United States museums in more than 50 years. But the Bronx half of
the collaboration has turned out to be more complicated, in part because
of questions about whether state-owned art works from Cuba could be in
danger of being seized while in the United States to satisfy legal
claims by Americans whose property was confiscated in Cuba after Fidel
Castro took power in 1959.

The delay of the exhibition, first reported by The Art Newspaper, was
not primarily caused by concerns of such a legal seizure, said Holly
Block, the executive director of the Bronx Museum. She said a recent
change in the directorship of the National Museum in Cuba, along with
complications involving shipping, a need to make repairs to some
air-conditioning systems at the Bronx Museum and the demands on her
small staff have all contributed to the delay. But she said concerns
about protecting the lent artwork from legal seizure had factored into a
decision to move the exhibition to January 2017, and for the Bronx
Museum to make applications for legal immunity to the State Department
and for insurance indemnity to the National Endowment for the Arts.

Since the United States imposed an embargo on trade between the two
countries in 1960, exhibitions of Cuban art have been organized here,
and pieces from private American collections have gone on view in Cuba.
But there has never been an exchange like the one being planned by the
two museums.

The possibility of seizure has "been a worry from the very beginning,"
Ms. Block said. "There are no test cases for something like this,
because it hasn't been done." She said that the applications for
immunity and indemnification, which are often made by American museums
borrowing works from other countries, would be submitted sometime this
summer.

Source: Loan of Cuban Works to Bronx Museum Is Delayed - The New York
Times -
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/arts/design/loan-of-cuban-works-to-bronx-museum-is-delayed.html?_r=0