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Archive for the 'News' Category
From Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine…
The American Museum of Folk Art American Folk Art Museum is one of my favorite museums in America. It’s also one of my least favorites. I love the museum because it’s committed to showing so-called “outsider art,” which I would define as art so visionary that the “real” art world can’t process it without relegating it to this ridiculous niche. (All great art is visionary; all great artists are in some way self-taught.) I hate the museum because its horrendous building smothers the art and vision contained within. And now the institution faces a new challenge: Last week brought the sad, startling news that curator Brooke Davis Anderson has been snatched up as Deputy Director for Curatorial Planning at the ambitious Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In the last decade as AFAM’s curator, Anderson, a brilliant scholar, organized extraordinary exhibitions of Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, and Adolf Wolfli — three of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Come September, LA’s gain will be New York’s loss. (This, by the way, makes the fourth such coup, after Anne Philbin leaving the Drawing Center to become Director of the Hammer, Michael Govan departing Dia to work as Director of LACMA, and Jeffrey Deitch being named Director of LA MoCA.) More…
From The Economist…
Get art out of the basements,” declared Eli Broad, a Los Angeles billionaire and art collector, to a conference of museum professionals in May. “With all the money being spent to store and conserve work,” he later told the Art Newspaper, “it doesn’t make sense economically or morally not to share it with the largest possible audience.”
Sage advice, particularly in these rough times for museums, when dusting off what’s in storage is far more appealing than coordinating a big and costly show.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is already revelling in its decision to stage “Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art”, a magnificent in-house blockbuster we reviewed when it opened in April. The show featured hundreds of Picasso’s paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics from the Met’s permanent collection, most of which are typically hidden from public view. As my colleague said last week, Picasso had the Midas touch; new figures show that the exhibition drew over 703,000 visitors during its 17-week period, which ended on Sunday, making it the seventh most popular show at the museum since the Met began keeping track 50 years ago. Luring so many people to see works you’ve had all along must be like making a killing at a garage sale, but then keeping all the golf clubs, Nancy Drew paperbacks and lawn furniture. More…
From Keith Schneider at The New York Times…
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art formally celebrated its 75th anniversary on Jan. 18 with an eye to attracting millennial generation multitaskers. The event included handing out to museumgoers iPod Touches loaded with a rich mix of pictures, interviews, video and graphics exploring 200 pieces in the institution’s permanent collection.
Like almost every major art museum in the country, according to communications officers here and in other cities, the San Francisco institution is using mobile multimedia devices — iPods, iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones — to tell the stories of its exhibits in new ways.
“Essentially, we’ve liberated the audio tour,” said Peter Samis, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s associate curator of interpretation. “We’ve developed five hours of content, made it extremely portable and easy to use, and devoted it to rediscovering aspects of our collection and its history. This is not about techno-fetishism. It’s about focusing on artworks in meaningful sound and video.”
Art museums have always viewed communications as their primary mission. Never, though, have the editorial, design and production staffs of art museums been busier than they are now. Digitization has steadily brought down the cost of the software and tools of multimedia production — audio, video and interactive motion graphics. More powerful and available online access has made smartphones and other mobile devices ubiquitous and more useful. More…
From Holland Cotter at The New York Times…
In a disaster, you focus on lives first, all else later. When the earthquake hit Haiti in January, the news was about the dead and missing, miraculous survivals, towns smashed to bits.
Behind this news came other news. One of Haiti’s proudest cultural monuments, the Episcopal cathedral of the Holy Trinity in the capital city of Port-au-Prince, had collapsed, destroying murals painted in the late 1940s by some of the great artists of what is often called the Haitian Renaissance: Philomé Obin, Castera Basile, Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud, Prefete Duffaut. Their images of verdant, fruit-colored tropical heavens had helped turn a politically volatile nation into a tourist destination, and art itself into an export industry.
The Centre d’Art, where these artists once met with André Breton, Aimé Césaire and Wifredo Lam, was seriously damaged, as was the Musée d’Art Haitien. Catastrophically, many of the 12,000 Haitian works, accumulated over half a century, in the Musée/Galerie d’art Nader were lost when the building that housed them, a family home, disintegrated. More…
From Dezeen…
Fredrich August Stueler’s 1859 Neues Museum, located on Museum Island in the heart of the former East Berlin, was initially constructed to extend the space of the Altes Museum, built immediately to the south by Stueler’s teacher, Karl Fredrich Schinkel.
The original design had formed part of an overall architectural concept for Museum Island – prompted by Fredrich Wilhelm IV – of a series of art and archaeological museums styled so as to promote a greater appreciation of classical antiquity.
Among these museums, and in terms of its construction and rich interior decoration, the Neues Museum was considered the most important monumental Prussian building of its era.
Seen today alongside the four other reconstructed museum buildings on the island, Stueler’s Neues Museum is the only structure still ruined from the war – a contrast that demonstrates ideas of history and decay in a compelling and powerful way, although throughout the building the degree of destruction varies greatly.
Certain interiors have survived almost completely, with elaborate finishes and ceiling frescoes still intact, while other building elements exist only as the enclosures of a gaping void. The power of the ruin not least stems from this exposed brickwork shell, investing the building, 150 years after it was first imagined, with the indelible presence of a picturesque classical ruin. More…
By Noam Cohen at The New York Times…
The has begun an unusual collaboration with , the online, volunteer-written encyclopedia, to help ensure that the museum’s expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference’s pages.
About 40 Wikipedia contributors in the London area spent Friday with a “backstage pass” to the museum, meeting with curators and taking photographs of the collection. And in a curious reversal in status, curators were invited to review Wikipedia’s treatment of the museum’s collection and make a case that important pieces were missing or given short shrift.
Among those wandering the galleries was the museum’s first Wikipedian in residence, Liam Wyatt, who will spend five weeks in the museum’s offices to build a relationship between the two organizations, one founded in 1753, the other in 2001. More…
From bdonline.co.uk…
The new Design Museum will embody the spirit of minimalism after John Pawson was selected in an international competition to transform London’s grade II* listed former Commonwealth Institute building.
Pawson triumphed over the shortlisted David Chipperfield, Tony Fretton, Stanton Williams, Caruso St John, Haworth Tompkins and Dutch firm Claus en Kaan following a long-delayed Ojeu contest.
As BD went to press, the Design Museum had made no official announcement of the result, despite predicting a practice would be appointed in February.
Nevertheless, rival firms rushed to congratulate the winner while Sunday Times architecture critic and RIBA Journal editor Hugh Pearman predicted Pawson’s approach would complement RMJM’s 1962 Kensington building, the subject of a wider commercial development drawn up by Dutch firms OMA and West 8. More…
We have organized two fantastic tours for the 2010 Inclusive Museum Conference.
Museum Day Tour - Thursday, 1 July (9:00am-4:30pm)
Explore 3 of Istanbul’s most magnificent museums – Hagia Sophia Museum, Istanbul Archaeological Museums and Topkapi Palace Museum. Delegates have the opportunity to visit and see the collections in all three museums. The tour includes the cost of entrance as well as an English speak guide. Reserve tickets now.
Bosphorus Boat Tour - Thursday, 1 July (6:00pm)
Zig zag between Europe and Asia on a private boat tour. Along the way — Dolmabahce Palace, Beylerbeyi Palace, both residences of Ottoman Sultans, Rumeli Fortress from the 15th century, Bosphorus bridge and many historical seaside timber houses will be seen. Tickets now available.
The 2010 Inclusive Museum Conference delegates and plenary speakers will gather together for the annual Conference Dinner on Wednesday, 30 June, 7:00 PM at the Istanbul Modern Museum Café & Restaurant.
Located in the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art with a view of the Bosphorus and the old city, this restaurant with its spacious terrace, stylish décor and delicious menu will provide a perfect setting to dine with friends and colleagues.
To reserve your place at the dinner, or for more information, please visit the Activities and Extras webpage.
In this Dezeen podcast, curator Nina Due gives a guided tour of the Sustainable Futures exhibition now on show at the Design Museum in London, UK.
Due walks through the five themed areas of the exhibition: Cities, Energy and Economics, Materiality, Food and Creative Citizens. For more information and images…
From Tamar Lewin at The New York Times…
Sitting in the dark, knees crossed, looking up at the stars projected on the planetarium dome, the fourth-grade class might have been on a field trip to the Museum of Science in Boston.
But instead, they were having what Katie Slivensky, an educator from the museum, calls a “backwards field trip” in a portable, inflatable planetarium set up for the morning in the old gym at Sutton High School — a 50-minute lesson on the stars, moon and planets, tied to state learning standards for physical science, earth and space.
Over the last few years, many schools have eliminated or cut back on museum trips, partly because of tight budgets that make it hard to pay for a bus and museum admission, and partly because of the growing emphasis on “seat time” to cover all the material on state tests. More…
From Chloe Veltman at The New York Times…
It’s hard to talk about museums’ after-hours programs without getting confused. Differentiating among Nightlife (at the California Academy of Sciences), After Dark (the Exploratorium) and L@TE (Berkeley Art Museum) — in name, and in concept — is not easy.
As in New York and Los Angeles, these events have become de rigueur in the Bay Area. Some institutions, like the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, with its Big Idea Night parties, offer free programs. Its latest Big Idea Night — which included D.J.’s, dancers and various artists, as well as the opportunity to explore exhibitions — attracted about 2,500 visitors, the highest tally since the program began in January 2009. More…
From dezeen.com…
French architect Jean Nouvel has unveiled his design for the new National Museum of Qatar. The museum will comprise a series of interlocking discs of varying dimensions and curvatures, which will form walls, ceilings, floors and terraces. Each disc will be made of a steel truss structure clad in glass-reinforced concrete and the voids between discs will be glazed. This new structure will be built around an existing palace.
From the Qatar Museums Authority…
Marking the next stage of its program to develop Qatar into a hub of culture and communications for the Gulf region and the world, the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) today revealed its plans for the new National Museum of Qatar, as expressed in a striking and evocative design by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Jean Nouvel.
Embodying the pride and traditions of Qatar’s people while offering international visitors a dialogue about rapid change and modernization, the National Museum of Qatar will be the setting for a program in which entire walls become cinematic displays, “sonorous cocoons”, shelter oral-history presentations and hand-held mobile devices guide visitors through thematic displays of the collection’s treasures. Though built around an historic structure, the Fariq Al Salatah Palace, which had served as a museum of heritage since 1975, the National Museum of Qatar is conceived and designed as a thoroughly new institution, in keeping with the high aspirations that animate QMA. More…
From Manisha Verma at 3quarksdaily.com…
Visiting the California Academy of Sciences was like going to an undiscovered tropical jungle in a private patio next door. Not only had I had spent several months of gleeful obliviousness to its understated existence in the Golden Gate park right next door to my abode, I had relegated the rectangular block of grey concrete in my mind to a less glamorous cousin of the more prevailing de Young Museum located directly opposite it. I felt it looked like it would host a dry natural history equivalent of the interiors and proceeds of a City Hall or a United Nations jerry-build, only with an even more dull manuscript’s taste. I went for regular runs in the park for months, paying more heed and silent mental visits to the Japanese Tea garden and the botanical gardens, amidst the montage of foliage, chirping birds, scrawny lakes, tennis courts, a northern windmill and cascading waterfalls embellished with pudgy green ducks at their base.
On the day of the visit, the museum teemed with extraordinary biodiversity, but without the discomfort of spiders or stray rattlesnakes, and though obviously organized and mundane as a zoological park might feel, it gave you no excuse to dismiss it as remotely anything but real. On the upside, your attention could be fully applied to enjoying the assortment of a rain-forest as showy of its stuff as the Amazon, but you didn’t have to divert your energies to the heightened sense of self-preservation you tend to build in primeval wilderness. A four-story rainforest was bathed in acrid humidity and sounded of dripping water off the tips of giant leaves, and of frogs croaking to the beat of the jungle. Macaws and other new world parrots were presented with equal emphasis as leafcutter ants, while carnivorous plants stood pretty and bulbed, inconspicuous to their prey. Strings of slimy toads and camouflaged lizards stood still like rocks and made me want to flit to the next exhibit fast enough, lest they emerge suddenly out of their seeming lifelessness into the reality of movement, which I wished to escape witnessing. Exotic ants, butterflies, geckos, lemurs, toads and plants from Madagascar, Borneo and Costa Rica were housed in their represented habitats. More…
From Edward Rothstein at The New York Times:
“Iron Chink” proclaims the raised words on a cast-iron sign, once mounted on a fish-processing machine. In the early 1900s in Seattle the machine had been invented to replace Chinese laborers, who presumably were constructed of weaker mettle.
Now, of course, its casual slur inspires some shock. It is a companion piece to another object, a cap-gun toy from the 1880s, when the “Chinese Question” (as objections to Chinese immigration was called) turned violent: pull the trigger, and a suited gentleman kicks a braided Chinese man in the rear, setting off the miniature explosion. More…