In the Arts: Boston Museum Moves Into Fund-Raising Big Leagues

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has dramatically widened its donor pool to outdraw major institutions in bigger cities in recent years, The New York Times writes.

The Boston museum raised $504-million plus $165-million worth of art–much of it from new donors outside New England–in a seven-year campaign that ended in 2008 and funded its new Art of the Americas wing, which opened with a gala Saturday. It has raised close to $100-million more since July 1, 2009.

In other arts news, the New York-based American Symphony Orchestra and its musicians are close to an agreement that would make the players salaried employees for the first time in the ensemble’s 48-year history, The Wall Street Journal says.

Executive director Lynne Meloccaro, who presented the proposal to the musicians’ union Wednesday, said the shift from freelance to standing orchestra seemed “almost crazy-sounding” in a weakened economy, when many symphonies are cutting back. But she added, “We didn’t want to do that because the perception people had that orchestras were collapsing all over the place was affecting philanthropy.”

Also, Cleveland’s PlayhouseSquare performance complex has amassed a 1-million-square-foot property portfolio to financially underpin its arts and education programs, The Plain Dealer writes.

The holdings, which include commercial and industrial buildings as well as arts spaces, amount to roughly 30 percent of the PlayhouseSquare Foundation’s assets and provide what Art Falco, its chief executive, termed a “working endowment” for the country’s second-largest performing-arts center.