Mario Testino Sells 400 Works To Benefit Peru's Museo Mate & Promote Peruvian Artists

Jackie Hoffmann, Iliana Lolas, Karen Miter, Naomi Campbell and Mario Testino at the MATE Museum

Master photographer Mario Testino, known for his glam shots of supermodels and fashion editorials for the world's leading magazines. Over the years, Testino has become a buyer of fine art, with 500 works from his collection going to auction this fall. The sale, slated for September 13-14 in London, will benefit the Museo Mate (Museo Mario Testino) in Lima, Peru, a nonprofit that aims to bring Peruvian artists to world attention. The sale is expected to raise in excess of $10 million.

Testino is a fan of beauty, talking about his first photography purchase in the 1980s, a picture of actor Vivien Leigh by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean. 

"Beauty today is considered a bit banal and a bit empty and a bit superficial. In the art world you probably can't mention that word, because it's not interesting or not deep enough. But I'm just always amazed by it," the BBC quotes the famous photographer. 

Prior to the Sotheby's sale, Testino will take over Sotheby's London galleries to curate an exhibition featuring a "series of talks by friends and collaborators from the worlds of fashion and photography. "

The collection represents artists of 45 nationalities, including Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. The collection is particularly rich in Latin American art, with works by the Argentine artists Pablo Bronstein and Amalia Pica, the Colombian Oscar Murillo and, not surprisingly, Peruvian artists such as William Cordova.

Testino has accumulated more than 1000 works without ever selling a piece. The decision to sell almost half the collection has been 'hard'. 

"It's sad to part," he says. "I've never sold anything. I've been too attached to my collection."

But he says: "I have a mission."

"I'm selling because I have a unique opportunity to change something in the country I come from," he says.

Testino addes that he can't maintain the museum "with the money I have. I can't carry on worrying every month if I have the money or not".

He says "getting sponsors today is quite difficult" so he wants to create an endowment to ensure the centre has financial security in the future.

ArtNet Interviews New York Philanthropist Agnes Gund, Founder of Studio in a School

artnet News' Andrew Goldstein introduces us to Agnes Gund, New York's 'renowned philanthropist' who brings art and money together for progressive causes. As a beloved figure in New York, Gund attained a special cachet joining Patti Smith, Serena Williams, Tavi Gevinson and more for the 2016 Pirelli calendar, lensed by Annie Leibovitz. . 

The daughter of an Ohio banking magnate, Gund has expressed guilt that she was given so much more in birth than others. Her fervor for philanthropy saw her on the boards of some 20 charitable and cultural organization as of a few years ago.

Gund is especially proud of her project Studio in a School, the nonprofit program founded in 1977 to bring art lessons, taught by real working artists, to New York City’s public schools. Forty years later, Studio in a School has reached nearly one million children in New York alone, with 90 percent of its activities benefiting students from lower-income families.

Agnes Gund and Sadie Rain Hope-Gund by Annie Leibovitz for Pirelli Calendar 2016.

Deana Haggag Leads USA's Fight To Protect The Arts Against Trump's Budget Knife

Photo: Olivia Obineme

Deana Haggag made a strong statement about protecting the arts in America, now under the knife in the Trump administration. The new president and CEO of the philanthropic nonprofit United States Artists until Inauguration day, writes Vogue.com. “It wasn’t lost on me what it means to take on the title of president of an organization whose acronym is USA,” Haggag said recently during an interview in Chicago, her USA home base. 

Less than 100 days later, Haggag is facing Trump's proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Indeed, Big Bird is under the knife. The arts in America represent about $741 million yearly, or less than one tenth of 1 percent of annual federal spending.

The arts generate $135.2 billion annually in a boost to the US economy -- a fact not lost on a growing list of Republicans in Congress, who are against these cuts. 

A letter signed by 11 House Republicans urges Ken Calvert and Betty McCollum, chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Subcommittee on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies, to continue funding the NEA.

They propose a budget of $155 million in fiscal year 2018, a slight increase over the $147.9 million that was allocated in 2016. ArtNet reported on Monday that 11 Republicans in the House signed a letter not only rejecting the zeroing out of federal funding for the the National Endowment of the Arts but proposed a small increase from the 2016 allocation of $147.9 million to $155 million. 

In other ways, it's impossible to quantify the positive impact of the arts on civic life. “We need the arts because they make us full human beings,” sociologist Eve L. Ewing wrote in The New York Times. “But we also need the arts as a protective factor against authoritarianism.”

In 1937, ascending leaders of the Third Reich hosted two art exhibitions in Munich. One, the “Great German Art Exhibition,” featured art Adolf Hitler deemed acceptable and reflective of an ideal Aryan society: representational, featuring blond people in heroic poses and pastoral landscapes of the German countryside. The other featured what Hitler and his followers referred to as “degenerate art”: work that was modern or abstract, and art produced by people disavowed by Nazis — Jewish people, Communists, or those suspected of being one or the other. The “degenerate art” was presented in chaos and disarray, accompanied by derogatory labels, graffiti and catalog entries describing “the sick brains of those who wielded the brush or pencil.” Hitler and those close to him strictly controlled how artists lived and worked in Nazi Germany, because they understood that art could play a key role in the rise or fall of their dictatorship and the realization of their vision for Germany’s future.

Haggag's organization United States Artists was created after deep cuts to the arts in the early 2000s. At 30, she is considered young for her job, coming off a career largely focused on curating in New York City, Cairo, and Baltimore, where she most recently headed the traveling museum The Contemporary. She was raised in a large family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the daughter of Egyptian immigrants. “I am not an artist, I never have been, but I’ve come to understand who I am through the arts, as a curator and as a person,” Haggag said. “Also, my parents are from Egypt, so there are ideas about colonialism and blackness and being African and being American and, growing up, when I didn’t have language for those things, there was always an artist who could help navigate that for me in his or her work. Understanding myself as a black woman, a brown woman, an Egyptian, and an American has been through the lens of all these amazing thinkers.” Read her interview with Vogue.