Displaying items by tag: Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum has announced the appointment of Nancy Spector as its deputy director and chief curator. Spector joins the museum after having served for more than 29 years at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. She comes to the Brooklyn Museum as the first senior staff member hired by Anne Pasternak following her recent appointment as the Museum's Shelby White and Leon Levy director.

It is a microcosm of American popular culture in all its ersatz glory, the anti-Disneyland, a realm of tawdry spectacle and mindless distraction catering to the basic instincts of hoi polloi. It is, of course, Coney Island, whose history and culture are chronicled in “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008,” opening Friday, Nov. 20, at the Brooklyn Museum.

Coney Island has ridden a roller coaster of highs and lows since Civil War times, when it was already a leisure destination.

Ratcheting up one of the oldest rivalries in history, 219-year-old Phillips Auction House is resurrecting its Modern art business and launching a blitz of hiring and powerful partnerships. It will seek to compete head-to-head with age-old rivals Sotheby’s and Christie’s this fall in the high end of the billion-dollar art market.

People close to the matter say that, after downsizing about a decade ago in the wake of some unsuccessful sales, the company—working with just-announced partners eBay, former Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman and executives with ties to the deep-pocketed Arabian collecting world—could be making a play to disrupt the Coca-Cola/Pepsi-like hold on the art auction market that the Big Two have long enjoyed.

In the almost 70 years since the term was first coined, “outsider art” — a somewhat dismissive designation for the work of self-taught artists — has been steadily finding its way inside the mainstream art world. These days, it is no longer unusual to see pieces by artists with no formal training displayed in even the most prestigious venues; just the past two years have seen such works included in exhibitions mounted by the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

For much of the past half-century, though, the significance of self-taught art was largely recognized only by a few enthusiasts.

Last September, Arnold Lehman announced that he was retiring from his post as director of the Brooklyn Museum, a job he has held since 1997. Today, however, it became clear that his retirement won’t last very long, with Phillips announcing that he has joined the auction house as a senior advisor to its chairman and CEO, Edward Dolman.

Dolman joined Phillips last July after having spent 27 years at Christie’s and three years as the executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority.

The Brooklyn Museum announced this evening that it has named Anne Pasternak, president and artistic director of Creative Time, as its next director. The appointment completely upends the well-established career path to the directorship of a major museum, and makes Ms. Pasternak, who has virtually no museum experience, one of the few women helming a top museum in the U.S.

Current director Arnold Lehman had previously announced he will retire, after 17 years, next month.

A selection of 100 works from the nearly 10,000 acquired during the tenure of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold Lehman, is being presented in his honor on the occasion of his retirement in the summer of 2015. "Diverse Works: Director’s Choice, 1997–2015," on view through August 2, 2015, includes works in a wide range of media from every corner of the globe. Spanning many centuries, the exhibition brings together important objects from all of the Museum’s collecting areas.

The selections range from an ancient Chinese mythical carved figure (5th–3rd century b.c.e.) to contemporary works by Kiki Smith and Chuck Close, and a mixed-media collage (2013) in a customized frame from the American artist Rashaad Newsome.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's first retrospective in Canada opens in Toronto this weekend, with nearly 100 large paintings as well as drawings, sculptures, and video filling the halls of "Now's the Time," (a Martin Luther King quote/the title of a painting) at the AGO.

More impactful and comprehensive than past shows like the Brooklyn Museum's "Street to Studio," the exhibit witnesses the curators separate Basquiat's works into nine sections that successfully represent the themes and stylistic variety of the multifaceted 1980's American artist. The show's only downfall may come from Toronto itself.

All exhibitions during the 50th anniversary year in 2015 are inspired by the MFA’s stellar collection. Masterpieces created by French artists and by others working in France are a hallmark, and four are included in "Monet to Matisse—On the French Coast."

Exceptional paintings are also coming from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and closer to home, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Private collectors in both the U.S. and Europe are sharing their treasures.

"Monet to Matisse," set for Saturday, February 7-Sunday, May 31, brings together paintings created on both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of France and opens on the same day the MFA opened to the public in 1965. To commemorate this joyous occasion, the MFA is presenting a Founders Day Open House—free for everyone—on the first day of the exhibition from 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

The Brooklyn Museum in New York City announced that it will exhibit eight rarely seen notebooks created by Jean-Michel Basquiat between 1980 and 1987. The volumes, which feature 160 pages brimming with poetry, wordplay, sketches, and personal observations, have never been publicly exhibited. “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” will also include thirty paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works drawn from private collections and the artist’s estate.

Basquiat, who rose to fame in the 1980s, is best known for his graffiti-tinged Neo-expressionist and Primitivist works.