Archive for the 'News' Category

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What Happened at Those Happenings?

Published on March 18, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Carol Kino from The New York Times

Half a century ago, on Oct. 4, 1959, an event took place at the Reuben Gallery in the East Village that changed the course of art history: a performance piece by the artist Allan Kaprow titled “18 Happenings in 6 Parts.” It is now known as the first Happening, a mythical event that knocked painting and sculpture from their previously unassailable perches and paved the way for performance art. Within months other artists were mounting their own performances too, including Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Robert Whitman and Red Grooms. The scene flamed out almost as quickly as it had begun, but not before prompting a radical reassessment of the boundary between art and life.

But what actually happened at the Happenings? Because they were so ephemeral, and documentation is so patchy, art historians have spent decades trying to figure that out. So have their creators.

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Making Way for a Dream in the Nation’s Capital

Published on March 12, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Photo by Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

By Patricia Cohen from The New York Times

About 600 people, including the country’s first black president, gathered on the National Mall on Wednesday morning for a moment nearly a century in the making: the groundbreaking for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“It is real. It is real,” Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, a hero of the civil rights movement, said of this latest Smithsonian museum, which is being built next to the Washington Monument and near the site of former slave pens.

A national African-American museum was first proposed by black Civil War veterans nearly 100 years ago, and Mr. Lewis began sponsoring bills to make that dream a reality in 1987, soon after he was elected to Congress. President George W. Bush signed the legislation into law in 2003, after it won support from conservative Republicans like Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas, then a senator, who was among those attending on Wednesday.

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Museum of Handcraft Paper

Published on March 5, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

By Tao form Dezeen

Designed by Chinese studio Trace Architecture Office (TAO), the museum comprises eight timber-clad blocks connected to one another by glazed corridors.

The largest of the buildings marks the museum entrance but also houses studios and accommodation for artists or other guests upstairs.

The six single-storey gallery huts line the edges of the site, sandwiching a small courtyard and a two-storey tearoom in the space between.

Square windows frame views of the landscape from inside the galleries, although all necessary ventilation is provided through the porous volcanic stone at the base of walls.

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German Exhibit Explores Discount Culture

Published on February 27, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

German artist Konstantin Voit poses for a picture in front of his installation

From Yahoo! News

A shopping trolley immersed in seven tonnes of white sugar, 2,000 vacuum-packed sausages littering the floor, thousands of slices of bread forming little houses. These installations are not classic art exhibit fodder but part of a modern art display at a German museum exploring discount culture, as pioneered by supermarket giants such as Aldi.

The exhibition, “I Love Aldi”, runs at the Wilhelm-Hack museum in the western industrial city of Ludwigshafen, situated on the banks of the Rhine, until March 4.

“The ‘Aldi-isation’, or the search for low cost, has long since become a social phenomenon which has swept through all social classes and companies,” said museum director Reinhard Spieler.

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Come for the Building, Stay for the Toasters

Published on February 23, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Photo by: Anthony O'Neil

From The Economist

When Sir Terence Conran opened the Design Museum in Shad Thames in London in 1989, he was told no one would make the trek across the river. Back then it was “an area nobody would go to”, still home to wharfs and disused factories, he said. Now it’s a different story. With the advent of the Tate Modern in 2000, and the various redevelopments of South Bank, you can’t cross a bridge without hitting a new cultural landmark. And now the Design Museum has run out of space.

This week plans were unveiled for a bigger space. With help from Deyan Sudjic, the museum’s director, Sir Terence is once again launching the museum in a relatively culturally sparse (albeit well-heeled) area. The new museum will be in what was the Commonwealth Institute on High Street Kensington. An anomaly on a British high street, this huge Grade II* listed structure from the 1960s, with its extravagant copper roof, has lain untouched for ten years, and has been the cause of quiet consternation among city councillors. Inside, it still welcomes visitors with photos of children from around the Commonwealth and a mural of the globe; a large gate at the front prevents people from sleeping rough in the disused courtyard. Futuristic and retro at once, it is a building Sir Terence believes “altered the way many architects thought about design.”

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Thieves Loot Greece’s Ancient Olympia Museum

Published on February 20, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Mark Lowen from the BBC News

Armed robbers have stolen dozens of artefacts from a Greek museum dedicated to the history of the early Olympics.

Two masked men smashed display cabinets and took more than 60 objects after overpowering a guard at the museum in Olympia, officials said.

The town’s mayor said the items, mostly bronze and clay statuettes, were of “incalculable” value.

Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos has tendered his resignation, but it has so far not been accepted.

He visited the site which is on a forested hilltop in western Greece.

The BBC’s Mark Lowen in Olympia says the robbery – the second major museum theft this year – raises fresh questions about museum security.

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Lottery Helps British Museum Dig Deep to Save Artefacts

Published on February 17, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

Building the British Museum's world conservation and exhibitions centre. Photo by: Graham Turner for the Guardian

By Mark Brown from The Guardian

It is still an enormous muddy hole from which around 50 lorries a day are taking away excavated London clay, but it is a hole the British Museum is quite proud of. In this hole, it believes, is the key to the survival of the collection.

The museum was told on Friday that it could have £10m of lottery cash to help complete ambitious plans for a £135m world conservation and exhibitions centre on the Bloomsbury site’s north-west corner.

It was, said the museum’s deputy director, Andrew Burnett, “a huge public endorsement of the project” and an important step closer to the finish line.

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New Exhibit in Philly Looks at Van Gogh Close Up

Published on February 10, 2012 in News. 0 Comments

People tour through the galleries during the media availability for the Van Gogh Close Up exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Friday, Jan. 27, 2012 in Philadelphia. The exhibit opens February 1st. Photo by Alex Brandon / AP

By Joann Loviglio from the Stamford Advocate

A new blockbuster exhibition takes a close-up look at Vincent van Gogh’s groundbreaking shift during the personally tumultuous but artistically triumphant last four years of his life in France.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is the only U.S. stop for “Van Gogh Up Close,” which opens Wednesday and will be on view until May 6.

The exhibit features 46 landscapes and still lifes painted by van Gogh from his 1886 arrival in Paris until his apparent 1890 suicide in Auvers at age 37. Many of the paintings, procured from museums and private collections, highlight the Dutch post-Impressionist’s radical shift in approach during this brief but artistically prolific period.

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Italy returns 2,000 year-old statue to Libya

Published on February 3, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Jan. 21, 2012: An artifact returned by Italy to Libya, known as the Head Domitilla, which was stolen from Sabratha, Libya in 1990, is seen on display during Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti's visit to Tripoli, Libya.

From the Associate Press

Italy has returned to Libyathe head of a 2,000 year-old statue that was smuggled out of the country in the 1960s.

Prime Minister Mario Monti gave the sculpted head of Domitilla Minor, the daughter of Roman emperor Vespasian, to Libyan authorities during his trip to Tripoli on Saturday.

The sculpture was taken from Libya’s northwestern city of Sabratha in the 1960s, and recently auctioned at Christie’s.

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Picasso Works Stolen From Greece’s Largest Art Museum

Published on January 29, 2012 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Carlos Boettcher from ABC News

Thieves executed a brazen early-morning burglary of Greece’s largest art museum Monday, making off with three works, including one by the 20th-century master Pablo Picasso.

The burglars were able to take advantage of the National Art Gallery’s soft security, which was short-staffed because of striking workers, officials said.

Greece, beset by riots, strikes and economic pressure, has had to make numerous cuts in the public sector, including museum security.

The heist was successful thanks to a combination of planning, patience and timing, officials said. Alarms were intentionally set off numerous times Sunday, leading the guards to disable at least one of the alarms, providing the thieves easy entrance through a balcony door.

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