Displaying items by tag: centennial

Museums do not usually like surprises, but the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) is planning an entire year’s worth of them. In honor of its centennial, the MIA is unveiling a series of high-profile international loans and public art projects without warning. The first birthday surprise, unveiled today, is "Woman Reading a Letter," around 1663, by Johannes Vermeer, which is on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam until April 19.

Maxwell K. Hearn remembers when he first arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1971. “There were only two spaces for Asian art: the Great Hall Balcony, which housed Chinese ceramics, and an adjacent gallery of Chinese Buddhist art,” he recalled. “Douglas Dillon, then chairman, and Thomas Hoving, the director, surveyed the museum and realized that Asian art was the weakest department. They also recognized that it was too important an area to neglect.”

Since then the number of galleries devoted to Asian art has grown to over 50, and the Met now has one of the world’s greatest collections.

The Montclair Art Museum in Montclair, NJ will celebrate its 100^th anniversary on January 15, 2014. Beginning this fall and continuing throughout the following year, the museum will hold a variety of celebratory events and activities. In addition, the Montclair Museum will install the first in what it hopes to be a series of commissioned works for the institution’s outdoor sculpture garden. The sculptor Jean Shin will create works for this year’s installation.

Highlights from the upcoming centennial celebration include 100 Year, 100 Voices, a crowdsourced audio-tour project that invites members of the Montclair community to comment on their favorite work in the upcoming exhibition 100 Works for 100 Years; a lecture by University of San Francisco professor and author of Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of the Museum in America, Marjorie Schwarzer; and Robert Smithson’s New Jersey, an exhibition highlighting the monumental works of New Jersey native and one of the founders of the Land Art movement, Robert Smithson.

The Montclair Art Museum is devoted to American art and Native American art forms. Its collection consists of over 12,000 works and includes paintings, prints, drawings, photographs and sculpture dating from the 18^th century to the present. The museum has the only gallery in the world dedicated solely to the work of the 19^th century American painter George Inness, who lived and worked in Montclair.

Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Ides of March:’ The Making of a Masterpiece is currently on view at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA. The exhibition is part of a five-year sequence of events that will culminate in 2017 with a centennial celebration of the realist painter Andew Wyeth (1917-2009), including a major retrospective of the artist’s work. A native of Chadds Ford, Wyeth was a prominent force in the art world during the mid-20^th century.

The privately owned Ides of March (1974), which is rarely exhibited, will be presented alongside more than 30 of Wyeth’s preliminary studies for the tempera painting. The exhibition offers viewers a rare glimpse into Wyeth’s painstaking approach to composition and his renowned use of evocative imagery.

Organizers hope that The Making of a Masterpiece and the museum’s future events will introduce Wyeth as well as his family members to a new crop of art enthusiasts. Wyeth’s father, N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), was a celebrated American artist and illustrator and his son, Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), is a well-known realist painter and heir to the Brandywine School of painters, which was created by his grandfather and father.

The Making of a Masterpiece will be on view at the Brandywine River Museum through May 19, 2013. Visitors of the museum can also take a tour of Wyeth’s studio now through November 19, 2013.