Displaying items by tag: Expansion

The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has received a fifteen-million-dollar gift—one of the largest in its history—reports the "New York Times"’ Robin Pogrebin. The money will support the Clark’s campus expansion and programs.

The gift came from Felda and Dena Hardymon, who split time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Berkshires.

The Rhode Island School of Design has received $2.5 million from David Rockefeller to endow a curatorial position at the school’s museum and to support a new gallery.

RISD announced Monday that Rockefeller’s pledge would fund and expand the museum’s collection of decorative arts and design.

RISD says the majority of the money will go toward a position to lead the department of decorative arts and design.

Serge Lasvignes, a high-level French government official, was nominated this week to head the Pompidou Center, in a surprise choice to replace Alain Seban.

Mr. Seban’s term of service is ending after eight years in which he drove the expansion of the Paris museum, which houses one of the largest collections of modern art in Europe.

The succession — the topic of rumors for weeks — must still be approved by a government council, which will weigh the appointment of Mr. Lasvignes, 61, whose hiring was unexpected because of his low profile in the art world. (When Mr. Seban was hired in 2007, he had no museum management experience.)

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum director Anne Hawley, whose 25-year tenure began with a notorious art heist and culminated in a successful $180 million capital campaign, announced Wednesday that she plans to step down at the end of the year.

Hawley said she has been quietly weighing the decision for two years now, as the museum completed fund-raising efforts that included $114 million for the museum’s sleek 2012 expansion, designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, and an additional $50 million to fortify the museum’s endowment.

The Norton Museum heralded the opening of the public phase of its capital campaign with a presentation Tuesday by Foster + Partners, architects of the plan that’s expected to chart the facility’s growth for the next 10 to 15 years.

The plan will restore the original 1941 Marion Sims Wyeth design’s central east-west axis; reorient the entrance from the south side toward the more heavily traveled Dixie Highway; and add gallery, education and support spaces that will increase the museum’s size from 118,000 square feet to 132,000 square feet.

London's Royal Academy of Arts (RA) has been awarded a grant of £1 million from the Clore Duffield Foundation for the new Clore Learning Center, which forms part of the major redevelopment to transform Burlington Gardens and enable the RA to share and interpret its heritage for a broad 21st century audience.

The Burlington Project is the Royal Academy of Arts’ most ambitious transformation since its move to Burlington House in 1868. The Masterplan, led by the award-winning architect David Chipperfield CBE RA, will see the major expansion of the RA’s current visitor and learning facilities, including a new central link between Burlington House and Burlington Gardens (the former Museum of Mankind), a grand double-height lecture theater, and a Clore Learning Center within Burlington Gardens.

The Saint Louis Art Museum has received a $5 million gift from Barbara Taylor, president of the museum’s Board of Commissioners, and her husband Andy Taylor, chairman of the Missouri-based company Enterprise Holdings. The generous donation will fund a new sculpture garden, marking the end of a phased landscape plan created by Michel Desvigne. Desvigne, a Paris-based landscape architect, crafted the plan as part of a major expansion project at the museum, which included an addition by the British architect David Chipperfield. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s East Building opened to the public in June 2013 and a number of Desvigne’s landscape improvements have already been completed.

Construction is currently underway on the sculpture garden, which is located immediately south of the museum.

The Cleveland Institute of Art's long journey toward unification of its bifurcated campus in University Circle is nearing completion after nearly two decades of dreaming, three college presidents, a couple of recessions and several changes in architects.

On Tuesday, President Grafton Nunes conducted a hardhat tour of the art institute's new George Gund Building, a nearly 80,000-square-foot addition to the college's Joseph McCullough Center for the Visual Arts at 11610 Euclid Ave.

Steven Holl Architects has been selected to design a new extension to one of India’s oldest museums, the Mumbai City Museum, also known as the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum. Selected over OMA, Studio Mumbai Architecture, Zaha Hadid and four others, Holl is now the first architect ever to be chosen through an international competition to design a public building in Mumbai.

“The winning design was distinctive for its sculptural and calligraphic qualities,” stated the official press release. “It proposes a simple volume, which is enlivened by deep subtracting cuts, creating dramatic effects of light and shade. Its central feature is a reflecting pool in a new garden courtyard between the old and new buildings. The scheme will establish a cultural campus around the Museum in this growing district within Mumbai.”

The Harvard Art Museums at 32 Quincy St. announced the launch of their redesigned and expanded website. The website, www.harvardartmuseums.org, provides an enhanced digital platform, increasing access to the museums’ collections of approximately 250,000 objects.

Works from the collections of the Harvard Art Museums, comprising the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger and Arthur M. Sackler Museums, feature prominently throughout the site, and each of the approximately 250,000 objects also has an individual page with details about its exhibition history, provenance and conservation. Object images are a key component; users can examine works using the site’s improved scrolling and zoom functionality. In many cases, multiple photos are available of the same object at various stages in its history, offering insight into conservation and condition over time.