Albright College, a private liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania that is facing a multimillion-dollar budget deficit, is planning to auction off most of its collection of over 2,000 artworks, Spotlight PA reported Wednesday.
The college declined to share the estimated value of the pieces. James Gaddy, Albright’s vice president of administration, told the publication that the goal of the sales would not be to make money but to give the works to people or institutions that could better take care of them; the college, he said, lacks the resources to store the artwork properly, leading to the damage of some pieces.
The university and auction company are still determining which pieces will be sold. Gaddy added that some pieces could not be sold due to “donor restrictions, artistic intent” or historical significance to Albright.
The college’s Freedman Gallery—funded by Doris Freedman, an alum and an advocate for public art—opened in 1976 with the goal of displaying work by living American artists. Some alumni have criticized the decision of offload the artworks, as have Freedman’s daughters, who told the art news site ArtNet that they were not informed of the planned sale.
The college has been in talks about its collection with the nearby Reading Public Museum since last year, but the museum did not answer Spotlight PA’s questions about which works it might acquire, if any.
