Displaying items by tag: Guggenheim

Architecture has been a definitive feature of the Guggenheim since Frank Lloyd Wright constructed the museum’s Fifth Avenue spiral rotunda in 1959. In its myriad domestic and foreign manifestations, the museum has consistently commissioned and championed expressive, sculptural buildings — produced by leading practitioners — that often dominate contemporary discussions about trends in museum design. The significance of the Guggenheim as an institution at the center of debates about architecture’s role in museum identity and experience makes Tuesday morning’s announcement especially curious....

The Guggenheim has become something of a brand over the years, with satellite locations in Venice and Bilbao, Spain, and one planned in Abu Dhabi. Now this museum’s proposed branch in Helsinki, Finland, has taken a step closer to reality, with the selection of a design that features charred timber and glass punctuated by a lighthouselike tower overlooking South Harbor.

It is still uncertain whether the design, by the relatively young husband-and-wife firm Moreau Kusunoki Architectes, founded four years ago in Paris, will be accepted by its surrounding city, which has been bitterly divided over the project, largely because of concerns over its price of about $147 million.

The Smithsonian plans to open its first international exhibition space at a new cultural complex being developed at the former Olympic park in London, officials announced Tuesday.

The deal would mark the first time in the institution’s 168-year history that it would have a public presence outside the United States. It also would make the Smithsonian part of an elite group of museums — including the Guggenheim in New York and the Louvre in Paris — that have opened venues in other parts of the world.

Among the beneficiaries of the latest round of funding from New York's Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts are exhibitions devoted to Alberto Burri, R.H. Quaytman, Walid Raad and Arlene Shechet. The $4 million, or £2.6 millon in grants will go to more than 40 organizations, that will range from New York museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim, to organizers of the Raad and Burri shows, respectively - to non-profit organizations like Atlanta's Burnaway, which publishes an art magazine that trains young writers.

A fact which artlyst considers to be a worthy beneficiary, especially considering Warhol's acceptance of media in its entirety - including, of course, the creation of his own magazine 'Interview' - and Squeaky Wheel/Buffalo Media Resources, in Buffalo, New York, which promotes and supports film, video and new media arts.

The six Guggenheim Helsinki finalists shortlisted early last month will begin Stage Two of the highly debated competition with a visit to the museum site in Helsinki from January 14-16 as they start further development on their current proposals for final submission this April.

The names of the finalists have been revealed, but will not be matched to their proposals until the winner is announced in June 2015. The winning team will receive a prize of €100,000 (approx. US$136,000), while each runner-up will receive €55,000 (approx. US$75,000).

The Guggenheim has announced the finalists in the competition to design Guggenheim Helsinki, whittling down the entrants from a record-breaking 1,715 submissions to just six. Representing both emerging and established practices with offices in seven countries, the shortlisted entries show a variety of responses to the challenge of creating a world-class museum.

“The final shortlist encompasses a number of different scenarios: from schemes which are more experimental in engaging with the program and whose outward form will only emerge in the second phase, to ones that might seem more resolved from the outside but whose programmatic concept will only evolve fully in the second phase,” notes the jury’s official statement.

A black flag emblazoned with the word ZERO hangs outside the museum, less ominous than classically revolutionary. Inside, a projection screen in the rotunda shows selections of films and printed matter from the exhibition upstairs. The signature image is a rocket launch, a perfect expression of the technologically inflected postwar optimism that defines the German art group Zero and the larger “Zero network” of like-minded artists, whose members hailed from various Western European capitals (and included outliers from America and Japan). Taken together, their work reveals a shared preoccupation with natural processes, everyday materials, plays of light and texture, and moving parts, both optical and mechanical.

“ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s,” which fills all six floors of the Guggenheim through January 7, 2015, was clearly an ambitious undertaking by Guggenheim curator Valerie Hillings (it is Zero’s first major museum survey in the United States). The group’s core members — Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, who met as students in Düsseldorf in 1959, and Günther Uecker, who joined them in ’61 — are relatively established figures, but less is known about their collaborative work and connections to the larger European scene.

The Guggenheim announced that Paul Chan is the winner of the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize. Chan is the tenth artist to win the biennial $100,000 art prize, which is administered by the Guggenheim Foundation, and singles out an artist whose body of work is considered an outstanding contribution to contemporary art. "The prize is firmly established as one of the art world's most resonant accolades, honoring contemporary practices of enduring power and influence," noted museum director Richard Armstrong.

"It reflects our understanding of what are the most trenchant issues in contemporary art… It's like a Biennial in a way," added deputy director Nancy Spector.

The Guggenheim has named architect and scholar Troy Conrad Therrien as Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives. As the first person to hold this position, Therrien will contribute to the development of the museum’s engagement with architecture, design, technology, and urban studies, in addition to providing leadership on select new projects under the direction of the Chief Curator and the Director’s Office.

The Guggenheim's role in architecture has always been one of patronage, commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright to design its landmark building in New York City and Frank Gehry to design the celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which extended the institution's global constellation of museums.

It has been billed as one of the biggest architectural competitions of all time, an international contest open to practices both tiny and titanic, for a vast cultural complex for a world-famous institution, with a multi-million pound budget on a spectacular waterside site. It could mint the next Frank Lloyd Wright or Frank Gehry, and change the city’s skyline forever. But the race for who will design the Guggenheim Helsinki museum has spawned an unexpected side effect.

As the deadline for entries drew to a close this week, a counter-competition was launched as a riposte to what critics have branded a misguided vanity project, and a symbol of the Finnish capital selling out to an American brand.