Artist foundation purchases former Portland museum property for $245K
Courtesy / NAI The Dunham Group
A retail space that changed hands at 13 Brown St. in Portland will remain focused on art, but in a different way.
PORTLAND — The repository of works by the New York City abstract artist Leo Rabkin has found a home at 13 Brown St. in Portland.
The Museum of African Art and Culture sold the 1,129-square-foot retail condo to the nonprofit Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation for $245,000. Sylas Hatch from NAI The Dunham Group and Cheri Bonawitz from KW Commercial brokered the sale, which closed July 15.
The building, in Portland’s Art District, is part of the Kimball Court Condominium Association and offers a central HVAC system, basement storage, private office, bathroom and 12-foot ceilings.
The foundation is administered by Dr. Susan Larsen, who met Leo Rabkin in 1972 when she was a graduate student and remained friends with both the artist and his wife, Dorothea.
“I had a family-like relationship with Dorothea and Leo Rabkin for many decades,” she said.
Larsen is a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, professor of art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, consulting curator at the Clinton Hill/Allen Tran Foundation, and chief curator of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. She’s also a long-time resident of Tenants Harbor.
The foundation selected Portland for its home, rather than New York, for its affordability, fresh vibe and size.
“There are already a lot of artist foundations in New York and, among artist’s foundations, we’re one of the smaller ones, so this is a good fit,” she said.
Rabkin died in 2015, at age 95, and left well over a thousand works of art to the foundation, Larsen said. The foundation is responsible for dispersing Rabkin’s works to museums, and will also hold small shows at 13 Brown St., which will be open by appointment, with rotating exhibits in the storefront windows and participation in First Friday Art Walks.
An artist and a collector
Rabkin created colorful painted sculptures inside new and antique boxes, working with commonplace things found on city streets. His work has appeared at prominent museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Leo was adamantly an abstract artist,” said Larsen. “He used found materials, like plastic he found in the street, rope, cigar boxes, strawberry boxes. He put lights in some of his sculptures. He would do stitching in the middle of some of his works. The flow of flotsam and jetsam that came through his life ended up in his art, and it never felt old or time-bound. He was sending out little artworks in the mail only a few months before he died.”
He married Dorothea Herz in 1958. With her sisters, Dorothea was a refugee from Nazi Germany. She arrived in New York in 1949. During their 50-year marriage, they amassed a landmark collection of more than 1,200 items of American folk art. More than 200 pieces are in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York, according to her 2008 obituary in the New York Times.
On Brown Street, every inch of the building’s space will be occupied, said Larsen, who is assisted by recent Maine College of Art graduate Danielle Frye. And today’s internet world facilitates the foundation’s continued reach throughout the nation, she added.
“It’s a handsome, very contemporary space,” she said. “We’re lucky because it was a museum before, so we’re not changing it much. We’re just customizing it.”
Rehab includes storage rack-and-bin construction, custom cabinetry, lighting, painting and flooring. Fore River Woodwork, with Paul Leddy supervising, is on the job, along with Dirigo Design, Old Port Specialty Tile, Creative Office Solutions, The Art Store, Fogg Lighting and DeePainting and More. Warren, Currier and Buchanan attorney Carol Warren is doing the foundation’s legal work. The space is expected to be operational this fall.
According to a 2015 BDN article, the Museum of African Art and Culture was founded in 1998 on Spring Street by Oscar Mokeme, a Nigerian native who collected African art for four decades and moved to Brown Street in 2008. The museum’s July Facebook post said the collection will become a traveling exhibit.
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