Lynda and Stewart Resnick donate huge Jeff Koons Split rock musician The sculptures go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which will exhibit 37-foot-tall works near a newly formed group of galleries given by trustee David Geffen.
Split rock musician Contains a metal skeleton similar to the head of a child’s toy, half recalling the swing horse, another dinosaur. Planted on its surface are 50,000 flowers. Another fairly large version is located in the Maryland private museum in Mitchell Rales and Emily Wei Rales, Maryland.
The version given to LACMA by Resnicks is located in Versailles and Rockefeller Center in New York. LACMA does not specify the value of the sculpture, as it is common when museums announce gifts for artworks, but Resnicks listed a piece of Lacma given to LACMA in its 2023 tax filing and estimated it to be $9.6 million.
Resnicks have a history of patronizing LACMA, and after they agreed to donate $45 million to them, they named the pavilion after them. They also gave LACMA $16 million in the fiscal year ending 2023, according to public documents from the Resnicks Charity Foundation. Between 2019 and 2023, they provided more than $750 million in climate research to Caltech.
Most of their funds are concentrated around the environment, even in a review of business practices by climate activists. A series of lawsuits have also focused on Stewart Resnick’s Food Holding Company, which has reported $4 billion in revenue in recent years.
In November 2023, protesters gathered outside the museum’s annual party, as philanthropists at the criticism touched by Resnicks, California, for lobbying for the privatization of water supply, so protesters gathered outside the museum’s annual grand event.
The acquisition is part of LACMA director Michael Govan’s long-term goal to install another major sculpture on the museum’s campus that could compete on a massive scale with others already there, including Chris Burden City Light With Tony Smith smoke.
This is not the first time Lacma is trying to showcase a giant Koons on its campus. In 2007, the museum planned to install a different large-scale work by Koons, a 1943 70-foot steam train model that was suspended from industrial-sized cranes, and although Govan oversaw the proposal, it received some support. The project reportedly costs about $25 million.
