Displaying items by tag: anniversary

The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art marks its 20th anniversary this year, but the celebration is bittersweet.

R. Crosby Kemper, the banker and civic leader who put the museum in motion with co-founder Bebe Kemper, died eight months ago, raising questions in the arts community about the museum’s future. Is there funding — and a commitment from his children — for the museum to continue?

“We have no thought of closing,” said Mary Kemper Wolf, an accomplished filmmaker who is the daughter of Crosby and Bebe Kemper (now a trustee emeritus).

On Sunday, July 28, 2013, a gunman sneaked into the posh Carlton Intercontinental hotel in Cannes, France, held up a diamond show and made off on foot with $136 million worth of jewels. It was the biggest heist to take place in Cannes, a notorious hot spot for the rich and famous, in years.

Current investigations show that the suspect acted alone and wore a scarf, hat and gloves to disguise his identity. The thief entered through the hotel’s ground floor showroom, held up some of the show’s staff with a handgun, grabbed the valuables, and exited through a side door that led to a side street. The entire holdup took approximately sixty seconds and occurred while three security guards looked on.

The jewels were on display as part of a presentation highlighting the Leviev diamond house, which is owned by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev. The show was slated to remain on view at the hotel through the end of August. The Carlton, a Cannes landmark, was famously featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief starring Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. The hotel is celebrating its 100^th anniversary this year.

Investigations are still underway and French authorities are currently reviewing surveillance video footage.

Officials at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia announced that the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will design a freestanding addition to the institution’s existing structure. Founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, the Hermitage is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world.

Koolhaas, a Pritzker Prize winner, has designed Portugal’s Casa de Música, the Seattle Central Library and Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has worked with the Hermitage for over a decade and designed the fleeting Hermitage Guggenheim in Las Vegas in the early 2000s. Koolhaas has been working with the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, since 2008 on a rearrangement of the museum’s existing interior. That project is expected to conclude in 2014 and will coincide with the museum’s 250^th anniversary.

The Hermitage’s new building will be located outside of St. Petersburg’s historic center. Contemporary architecture is banned from the area so to preserve the unity of the city’s aesthetic. The Koolhaas-designed structure will include a library, costume museum, a publishing house and various public spaces.  

The Cloisters museum and gardens, a branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art located in northern Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park, will celebrate its 75^th anniversary this year. Assembled from architectural elements, both domestic and religious, that date from the 12^th through the 15^th century, the Cloisters houses approximately 3,000 works of art from medieval Europe.

To commemorate its 75^th year, the Cloisters has a number of celebratory exhibitions planned. Search for the Unicorn: An Exhibition in Honor of the Cloisters’ 75^th Anniversary will present the Unicorn Tapestries (1495-1505), a series of seven tapestries, which were a gifted to the museum by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. when the Cloisters opened in 1938. The Tapestries are the museum’s best-known masterpieces, but their history and meaning remain mysterious. The Unicorn Tapestries will be exhibited alongside approximately 40 works from the Metropolitan, sister institutions, and private collections. Search for the Unicorn will be on view from May 15-August 18, 2013.

In September, the Cloisters will mount an installation by Janet Cardiff (b. 1957). The Forty Part Motet (2001) is comprised of 40 speakers, each playing the sound of one singer in a 40-voice choral performing “Spem in alium numquam habui” (circa 1573) by the Tudor composer Thomas Tallis (circa 1505-1585). The installation will play on a loop in the Cloister’s Fuentidueña Chapel through December 8, 2013. The Forty Part Motet is the first piece of contemporary art to be featured at the Cloisters.

The Cloisters will wrap up its anniversary celebrations with the exhibition of six near life-size stained glass windows on loan from England’s historic Canterbury Cathedral. It will be the first time the panels have left the cathedral since their creation in 1178-80. Current repairs to the cathedral’s stonework required the removal of the windows, which have recently been conserved. The stained-glass windows that will be on view at the Cloisters feature six figures from an original cycle of 86 ancestors of Christ, the most comprehensive stained-glass cycle known in art history. The Romanesque masterpieces will be on view from March through May 2014.