Displaying items by tag: university of texas

One of the first museums created for the enjoyment of the middle class was the Shakespeare Gallery, opened in 1789 by John Boydell. Each of its paintings depicted a different scene from a Shakespeare play, and the museum even had a shop on its lower level for purchasing souvenir prints. It closed in 1805, its collection of paintings dispersed through an auction, and its building at 52 Pall Mall was torn down in 1870.

The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin has announced that it will begin construction of Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin in October. A groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for October 31, and the building is projected to open to the public in late 2016 or early 2017. In celebration, the Blanton will host, on October 31, a symposium on Kelly with leading scholars and curators from across the country.

The project was announced in February, and the Blanton has received formal approval from the university’s Board of Regents, clearing the way for construction to begin this fall.

On Friday, February 6, 2015, the Blanton Museum of Art announced that it will acquire and construct Ellsworth Kelly’s only building. Kelly, an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with Color Field painting, hard-edge painting, and Minimalism, conceived the stand-alone structure in 1986 for a private collector. At the age of 91, he is finally seeing the project come to fruition.

Austin, a 73-by-60-foot stone building, will be constructed on the museum’s grounds at the University of Texas at Austin. The structure will feature luminous colored glass windows, a totemic wood sculpture, and fourteen black-and-white stone panels in marble -- all designed by the artist.  Kelly has gifted the Blanton the design concept for the work, including the building, the totem sculpture, the interior panels, and the glass windows. Once it is complete, Austin will become part of the museum’s permanent collection. The Blanton has launched a campaign to raise $15 million to realize the project and has received commitments totaling $7 million.

An Austin museum specializing in contemporary Latin American art has roughly 12 new pieces to display courtesy of a former Tyler couple.

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin campus was gifted 12 modern and contemporary art pieces, including paintings, drawings and sculptures from college alumni Judy and Charles Tate, who now live in the Houston area.

The Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, celebrates the homecoming of one of its most famous and frequently borrowed art works, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” (1940). The painting will be on display through March 31, 2015.

Since 1990 the painting has been featured in exhibitions in more than 25 museums in the United States and in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, Spain and Italy.

The painting was most recently on view at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. The work travels next to The New York Botanical Garden for the exhibition “Frida Kahlo’s Garden,” running from May 16 to Nov. 1, 2015, in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library’s Rondina and LoFaro Gallery.

A Houston couple has donated 120 modern and contemporary Latin American artworks valued at nearly $10 million to the University of Texas.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Charles and Judy Tate, UT alumni, selected the university's Blanton Museum of Art for the donation. They also gave more than $1 million to a university endowment that supports a Latin American curatorship.

The art includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and mixed-media works. Many are by artists who took part in the creation of modernism, such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Tarsila do Amaral, Lygia Clark, Carlos Merida, Wifredo Lam, Armando Reveron, Alejandro Xul Solar and Joaquin Torres-Garcia.