When the Lannan Foundation gave its contemporary art museum in Lake Worth in 1989 to the Palm Beach Community College Foundation, it removed the bulk of J. Patrick Lannan's world-class contemporary art collection.
Bob and Mary Montgomery bought the museum from the college foundation in 1999, and turned it into the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. About 1,200 lesser works, mostly glass and ceramics, came with the purchase.
The Montgomerys sold most of the art. Now that they've closed the museum,
they're giving away 22 pieces of kinetic art - art that moves - to the
Kinetic Art Organization under a deal finalized in May, said Sidney Brien,
the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art's acting director.
Lannan bought most of the works during the 1960s. Almost all the art has been in storage for about two decades, Brien said.
It wasn't easy to find a home for the art. The institutions Brien contacted didn't want it.
In some cases, the works have been disassembled and there are no instructions for reassembling them. Some pieces are broken. Records are sketchy. It's not known who made three of the pieces.
The handover was complicated by the Montgomerys' desire to keep the collection intact, in homage to Lannan, and to dispose of the works quickly. "I just wanted to get it in good hands," Montgomery said.
The Internet-based Kinetic Art Organization calls itself the largest kinetic art organization in the world. It has 860 members in 45 countries, said founder and president Ralf Gschwend, a Palm Beach-based kinetic artist, who recently won a $500,000 commission from BAP Development to create a sculpture for its Opera Place condo, retail and cultural complex in West Palm Beach.
The group will be a good custodian because its artists will know how to refurbish the art, Brien said. One of its board members, Vassilakis Takis, has a piece included in the gift. Restoring the works is no small task, considering that much of the technology is obsolete and parts are hard to find, Brien and Gschwend said.
Another point in the group's favor is its intention to exhibit the works on the Internet, Brien said. "They're motivated, skilled and interested," he said. "They seem excited about it. They're not going to put this stuff in storage."
For the time being, the art will stay in storage until the organization can rally a team to document and repair it. Gschwend, who has inspected about a third of the works, said he doesn't know how much repairs will cost. As the works are restored, they'll be posted online at the group's Web site, www.kinetic-art.org, he said.
"This is the first nucleus of what hopefully will be a growing kinetic art collection to share with people," Gschwend said.
Several of the artists featured in the gift were leaders in the kinetic art movement, which flowered from the 1950s to the 1960s. They include Wen-Ying Tsai, Howard Jones, Takis and Julio Le-Parc, who won the Grand Prix at the 1966 Venice Biennale.
Lannan bought at least seven of the works in the gift from the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. Wise was an early champion of kinetic art and the founder of Electronic Arts Intermix, a New York-based nonprofit resource center for video art and interactive media. As artists began turning to video, Wise's interest in kinetic art faded, as did that of most of the art world. Gschwend's organization calls it "the forgotten orphan in today's cultural environment" on its Web site.
Brien said the Montgomerys have not had the works appraised, but he estimated that once they're repaired, they'll be worth "tens of thousands of dollars." Gschwend said, "Now we have the nucleus of a collection to refurbish and bring back to life. We hope other people will do likewise in the future."
In June 2005 KAO received a major
donation and 
which will hopefully be the beginning of a growing Kinetic Art
Collection for us to share with the world online and in the future
hopefully in the first Kinetic Art Museum in the world as well
as
