Amid Recovery, Reports of Sandy\'s Damage to Art Institutions Keep Coming

“We're beginning to see progress,” Linda Blumberg, the executive director of the Art Dealers Association of America said on Tuesday morning. “Galleries are reopening, albeit sometimes in raw states, but they are rebuilding, and putting their best foot forward. We're determined to bring this community back and get people down there.”

Ms. Blumberg was speaking of West Chelsea, the gallery district that experienced up to five feet of flooding when Sandy passed through the region. Last week, her association announced a $250,000 fund to help flooded galleries get back into action, and within 24 hours David Zwirner, who owns a gallery on West 19th Street, and the gallery Mitchell-Innes and Nash (which operates on West 26th Street and on Madison Avenue) each donated $50,000 to the fund. Ms. Blumberg said that other donations and pledges have come in as well, but that in some cases the donors did not want to be named.

Mr. Zwirner's gallery reopened on Friday w ith “Chernobyl,” a show devoted to works by Diana Thater. The Kitchen, which estimated its damage as “between $400,000 and $500,000, if not above,” a spokesman said, is opening a Matt Keegan and Eileen Quinlan exhibition on Tuesday, and has rescheduled its Kitchen Benefit Auction for Nov. 26. The Jack Shainman Gallery and ZieherSmith also planned to open on Tuesday. George Henoch Shechtman, the owner of Gallery Henoch, said he would reopen on Nov. 17, and Zach Feuer planned to reopen soon after Thanksgiving.

Heartening as well was the post on Printed Matter's Facebook page announcing that the renowned art book store on 10th Avenue was open for business, despite having lost about 9,000 books, tens of thousands of pamphlets and office equipment.

The news is, not surprisingly, not all upbeat. The New York Observer reported on Monday that Christiane Fischer, the president and CEO of AXA Art Insurance, estimated that her company's loss would be around $40 mill ion. And the Web site DNAinfo.com reported on Tuesday that hundreds of works were damaged when the East River flooded into the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City.

“The permanent collection of 360 works was unharmed,” said Libby Mark, a spokeswoman for the museum. “And the works on paper, as well as the offices, are on a higher floor, and are fine as well. But water did seep into a lower-level storage area where there were a few hundred works in wood, metal, stone and plaster.”

She added that the conservation experts from the Alliance for Response, NYC were on the scene the day after the flood. In a statement, the museum said that though patinas were marred by the water, the museum believed that “roughly eighty percent of the works can be restored with cleaning, while the remainder will require other minor restoration work.” The museum will reopen on Nov. 17.