As the embattled Boy Scouts of America prepare to face an estimated 1,700 lawsuits over allegations of sexual abuse, creditors are taking stock of the organization’s assets. Buried in a bankruptcy filing last week was a listed for its collection of original Normal Rockwell—potentially worth millions of dollars—as an asset that could be liquidated to help pay victims. 

For more than 50 years, Rockwell—a painter largely ubiquitous with midcentury Americana—created original illustrations for the covers of Boys’ Life, the organization’s magazine, in the process helping to define the group’s wholesome visual brand, which also became a trademark of much of Rockwell’s art. In the collection are 65 original works by Rockwell, with 51 of them being illustrations for the magazine’s annual calendar. In 2018, the Norman Rockwell Museum featured works from the collection in “Norman Rockwell and the Boy Scouts of America,” an exhibition highlighting the artist’s 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts, and the Medici Museum of Art in Ohio will open a show, titled “Norman Rockwell: American Scouting Collection” and featuring all 65 works by the artist, on March 22.

Such valuable assets may figure in what is gearing up to be a contentious and expensive legal battle between the plaintiffs and nonprofit, which allotted victims an 80-day deadline to submit their claims in federal court. Jeff Anderson, an attorney representing victims in the case, told USA Today that the likelihood of creditors seeking to liquidate the collection “will depend upon how candid the Boy Scouts of America are,” adding, “If they’re looking to come clean…then they will have no problem, I’m pretty confident, preserving things like that.”

Rockwell’s auction record was set by the 1951 oil-on-canvas Saying Grace sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2013, where it went for $46.1 million. Less important works by Rockwell regularly sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Kevin Consey, who helmed several major art institutions, including, most recently, the University of California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) from 1999 to 2008, died on Wednesday at age 68. A representative for BAMPFA said that he died “following a long illness.” Consey is known for his role in overseeing the institution’s capital campaign for the museum’s current home, which was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and opened in downtown Berkeley in 2016.

Having begun his career as director of the art gallery at his alma mater, Hofstra University in New York, Consey took the top post at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas in 1980. There, he led the $12 million transformation of the historic Lone Star Brewery into a museum space. Nearly a decade later, while directing the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Consey oversaw a $72 million building and endowment campaign and would go on to open a 220,000-square-foot facility designed by Josef Paul Kleihues at the institution in 1996.

Consey joined BAMPFA in 1999 and helped the university find a site and architect for its planned new building. He also guided the institution through a period of major growth in its programs and collection, with exhibitions of work by Joe Brainard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Paul Kos, Richard Misrach, Bruce Nauman, and more organized during his tenure. Additionally, thousands of works were added to the museum’s art and film holdings while he was director.

After he retired from BAMPFA in 2008, Consey worked as a consultant for museums undertaking capital projects and served as an adjunct professor of museum studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.

The gala opening for The Art Show, the annual fair put on by the Art Dealers Association of America, has historically provided a smooth landing into the fair-packed Armory Week in New York. The evening, a benefit for the Henry Street Settlement, is the epitome of a civilized affair, with top-notch hors d’oeuvres and liberally flowing champagne. Dealers and collectors tend to be in a good mood, coming off the sleepy winter season. The gala for the 32nd edition of the fair took place on Wednesday night, and this time around the mood was a little different thanks to a newly crowded winter art fair calendar (some of the dealers barely had a chance to recover from the second edition of Frieze Los Angeles, which took place two weeks ago) and, more pressingly, the steepest stock-market dip in two years due to coronavirus jitters and political uncertainty around the upcoming presidential election.

But if attendees were anxious or overworked, it didn’t seem to affect attendance much. The 70 galleries in modestly sized booths running along four aisles in the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall saw plenty of visitors, including Jerry Saltz (art critic for New York magazine), Richard Armstrong (director of the Guggenheim Museum), Tom Eccles (of Bard College), Melissa Chiu (of the Hirshhorn Museum), Terrie Sultan (of the Parrish Museum), Maxwell Anderson (of Souls Grown Deep Foundation), Jessica Morgan (of Dia Art Foundation), and David Schrader (from Sotheby’s private sales), as well as artist Nina Chanel Abney and advisers Kim Heirston and Wendy Cromwell, among many others.

The most visible change to the fair this year was the floor. The Park Avenue Armory spent months restoring its floor and sourced reclaimed southern pine for the purpose. The Art Show is the first fair to expose the floor; in the past they have used grey carpets. The effect is curiously like being on the deck of a ship—it works.

Still, it’s always interesting to see what choices dealers make with regard to the floors in their booths. Some had carpeting, others kept it raw. Petzel, whose booth is the first you see when you enter, solved the problem handily by using the space for an artwork: a mirrored floor by Walead Beshty. Mirrors were more potent at the booth of Luxembourg & Dayan, in a large painting by Michelangelo Pistoletto, La Gabbia (The Cage), for which images of steel bars were silkscreened onto a mirror, giving the impression that the viewer is either a prisoner or the one doing the imprisoning. Pistoletto started the piece in 1962 and, after he finished it in 1974, showed it at Sidney Janis gallery, arranging the panels into an actual cage that viewers entered. Luxembourg & Dayan was more forgiving, placing it along a wall.