ArtsWatch

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has received a gift from California-based Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Foundation to help purchase the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, a group of more than 3,500 photographs (including Nude by Anita Brenner, pictured), and to build study and storage rooms for the photography collection. A museum spokeswoman declined to quantify the gift, but said it was in the tens of millions of dollars...The Curtis Institute of Music has received a qualified approval from the Philadelphia Historical Commission to proceed with demolition of the former Locust Club and partial demolition of other historic buildings to make way for an expansion of the conservatory. Curtis must restore the window in the 1610 Locust St. building, whose facade will be kept, to its original condition, according to a Curtis spokeswoman...The Bryn Mawr Film Institute has received $2.5 million from the state's Capital Redevelopment Assistance Program toward a project that includes the $10 million purchase and renovation of the former Bryn Mawr Theater (nee Seville Theater, 1926) on Lancaster Ave. The film center has raised about half of its $10 million goal, a spokeswoman said...Ross L. Mitchell has resigned as executive director of Laurel Hill Cemetery & Friends of Laurel Hill to become head of the Violette de Mazia Foundation...Samuel Barber's unpublished prelude and fugue for organ - performed only once before, in 1928 - will be played by Paul Jacobs at a Sept. 12 concert at the Tenth Presbyterian Church on Spruce Street. Barbara Heyman came across the work at the Library of Congress in 1984 while researching her Barber biography, and asked Jacobs whether he would want to program it.