Displaying items by tag: commissions

The airport is not often a site for the calm contemplation of beautiful things. For most, it’s a place of extreme stress: the stress of securing your ticket, checking your bags, waiting in security, taking off your shoes, pulling out those liquids, locating your gate — and if you’re on time — purchasing overpriced snacks for your snack-less flight.

Or, if you’re like me before a recent transcontinental flight, you’re simply sprinting through the airport in your socks, praying you make to the gate in time.

The Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution’s decorative arts and crafts museum in Washington, DC, is due to reopen to the public on November 13 after a two-year, $30m renovation. Built in 1859 across from the White House, the Renwick is the first American building designed specifically to showcase art.

The inaugural exhibition, “Wonder”, will take over the entire museum. The Renwick commissioned nine contemporary artists, including Chakaia Booker, Tara Donovan, Maya Lin and Leo Villareal, to create site-specific, room-size installations out of unorthodox materials such as insects, tires and glass marbles.

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was one of the leading painters of his generation. His captivating portraits are universally admired for their insight into character, radiance of light and color, and painterly fluency and immediacy. "Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends," written by Richard Ormond, one of the foremost authorities on the artist, showcases Sargent’s cosmopolitan career in a new light—through his bold portraits of artists, writers, actors, and musicians, many of them his close friends—giving us a picture of the artist as an intellectual and connoisseur of the music, art, and literature of his day. Whether depicted in well-appointed interiors or en plein air, the cast of characters includes many famous subjects, among them Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Gabriel Fauré, W. B. Yeats, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Henry James. Because many of the sitters were his close friends, the artist was able to take a more informal, intimate approach to these portraits than in his formal commissions—and not only are the works penetrating studies of character, they are also records of friendships, allegiances, and influences.

Palm Springs Art Museum will feature the exhibition "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold," a group of sculptures by internationally acclaimed contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, from December 20 through May 31, 2015 at the Palm Springs Art museum.
 
The installation consists of 12 gilded bronze animal heads - rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig - that are each a representative symbol from the ancient Chinese zodiac. Ai Weiwei's work extends beyond the visual statement and reaches into history. These sculptures were based on the zodiac heads originally located at the Imperial retreat Yuanming Yuan (Old Summer Palace) just outside of Beijing, where they adorned the famed fountain-clock. The original heads were made by Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), an Italian Jesuit who executed a number of commissions for the Chinese emperor in the 18th century.

The Park Avenue Armory has announced an ambitious lineup for the 2015 season including mammoth installations, artist commissions, and cross-disciplinary collaborations from artists including Philippe Parreno, Olafur Eliasson, Laurie Anderson and Marina Abramovic.

The season launches in March with FLEXN, a commission co-directed by Reggie "Regg Roc" Gray and director Peter Sellars focused on street dance. It will be followed by a work from Philippe Parreno that promises to "radically morph the exhbition tradition by enveloping the viewer and the Armory's building into the artwork itself," according to a release from the Armory.

The 18th-century cabinetmaker Nathaniel Gould left inkblots in his battered gray notebooks as he recorded the luxurious mahogany output of his workshop in Salem, Mass. His listings of clients and fees, found seven years ago in forgotten boxes at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, have enabled researchers to attribute his mostly unsigned antiques. Next weekend, about 20 of these pieces will go on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem in the exhibition “In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould.”

The show’s catalog blends tragic family lore with statistics. Gould’s clients lost their furniture in fires, their fortunes in bankruptcies and war and their family members in shipwrecks. Coffins for children were among his workshop’s frequent commissions.

For its 2014-2015 season, the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has asked artists Nicole Cherubini, Mario Garcia Torres, Iman Issa, Shana Lutker, and Gary Simmons to create site-specific projects in the museum. In creating the commissioned works, the artists have been asked to respond to both the museum’s architecture and Miami. Projects range from Cherubini’s clay works to a large mural by Simmons to a historiographic installation from Torres.

“Site-specific and commissioned works are a vital part of PAMM’s curatorial and public vision and program."

For a picturesque ride, few railroads in New York rival Amtrak’s Empire line along the Hudson River.

The West End line on the D train, between Sunset Park and Coney Island in Brooklyn, would not seem to be among them.

What it lacks in scenery, however, it makes up in art. Twelve of the 14 stations between 36th Street and the Stillwell Avenue terminus now offer some kind of visual delight: mosaic proletarians, cast-bronze bees and a 20-foot-long translucent hot dog. (You’ll never guess where.)

The internationally regarded Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) opens tomorrow with an exciting month-long calendar of more than 40 exhibitions, special events, performances and tours across 30 of the city’s museums, galleries and institutions, as well as artist-run, temporary and pop-up spaces. In its 11th year, the festival brings together over 100 leading and emerging Scottish and international artists and features the return of its annual, city-wide commissions programme, including a major presentation by leading Indian artist Nalini Malani as part of 14-18 NOW’s LIGHTS OUT and WWI Centenary Art Commissions. As part of the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme, and during the year of Homecoming Scotland, the 2014 programme also sees the presentation of a major international group exhibition Where do I end and you begin programmed by Edinburgh Art Festival in collaboration with City Art Centre.
 
Edinburgh Art Festival also features a daily programme of events for all ages, featuring one-off artist performances, live musical events, film screenings and festival tours, as well as talks by some of the world’s leading artists and curators.

Design Miami/Basel, a global forum focused on collectible design, offered select guests a sneak peek of its offerings during a VIP preview on Monday, June 16. The event, which takes place alongside Art Basel in Switzerland, is open to the public from Tuesday, June 17 through Sunday, June 22.

Bringing together collectors, gallerists, designers, and curators, Design Miami/Basel celebrates design culture and commerce through museum-quality exhibitions, educational lectures, and commissions from the world’s top emerging and established designers and architects. The marketplace portion of the fair features celebrated design galleries from around the world exhibiting furniture, lighting, and objets d’art. Offerings range from 18th- and 19th-century antiques to early Modernist objects and contemporary design.