Displaying items by tag: Expansion

Officials at the Frick Collection knew their plan to build a six-story addition to a beloved, landmark, jewel-box museum would draw detractors. But leaders of that Fifth Avenue museum say they didn’t expect it to get so intense so fast.

Since the museum announced its expansion in June, more than 2,000 critics of the plan have signed a petition put together by a consortium of preservation groups that have created a website and given themselves a name: Unite to Save the Frick.

Now, the group says it has found evidence that the museum, whose plan needs city approval, is going back on a promise made in its original landmark review roughly 40 years ago to make permanent a garden by the noted landscape architect Russell Page that is to be destroyed in the expansion.

The High Museum of Art announced today that Michael E. Shapiro, the Museum’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Director since 2000, will leave the position next year, after 15 years as director. Shapiro has been part of the High’s leadership team for two decades, during which he oversaw unprecedented growth of the Museum’s collections, endowment, and audiences, as well as the completion of a 177,000-square-foot, three-building expansion. Shapiro’s last day as director will be July 31, 2015.

“It has been a privilege to be at the helm of the High for the past 15 years, and to help shape the vision and future of Atlanta’s art museum,” said Shapiro.

Paris’ Picasso Museum will reopen on Saturday, October 25, following a turbulent renovation and expansion. The institution closed in 2009 for what was expected to be a two-year refurbishment, but once underway, the scope of the project expanded. Five years later and $27 million over budget, the renovation is finally complete.

The Picasso Museum, which is housed in a 17th-century Baroque mansion in Paris’ historic Marais quarter, first opened to the public in 1985. The majority of its collection, which features around 5,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, and documents, was left to the French state by the Picasso family after the artist’s death in 1973.

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, a vibrant modern and contemporary art museum in Buffalo, New York, is gearing up for its first expansion in over fifty years. Earlier this month, the 152-year-old institution announced that it will hold a series of meetings with its members and the public to help determine the size and scope of its eventual growth and development. The meetings, which will be followed by a series of focus groups, are slated to begin on October 27.

While Albright-Knox’s parent organization, the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, was founded in 1862, construction on the Gallery didn’t begin until 1890. Designed by prominent local architect Edward B. Green and funded by Buffalo entrepreneur and philanthropist John J. Albright, the Greek Revival structure opened to the public in May 1905.

For decades, travelers have made their way to the Corning Museum of Glass to view all the ways that light can sparkle and shimmer.

The museum in this rural Finger Lakes town, which began as what the company called a gift to the community for its 100th anniversary, opened in 1951 with a modest footprint. In the years since, the museum has earned world renown, with a collection of nearly 50,000 pieces of glass art, some dating from 1500 B.C.

On the back of its success, the museum has undergone three major expansions. But despite those enhancements, it is again on the verge of exceeding itself as a glass showcase.

The Historic Districts Council, which can influence the city’s decisions but has no official role, has come out in opposition to the Frick Collection’s planned expansion, the council announced on Wednesday.

The council’s public review committee — which examines proposals for work on landmark buildings that are to come before the Landmarks Preservation Commission — said in a statement that the proposed expansion “will destroy the design intent of Thomas Hastings’ residential composition and John Russell Pope’s graceful museum transformation.”

The Victoria and Albert Museum is planning a new branch in London’s former Olympic Park—and it’s going to be huge. According to a brief from London Mayor Boris Johnson, quoted in the British press, the so-called V&A East will spread over 20,000 square meters (215,000 square feet), half of which will be dedicated to exhibition space.

This dwarfs Tate Modern’s 7,900 square meters of display space and further demonstrates that the trend for ever-bigger museums shows no signs of abating (see “Does Britain Need a New Tate Modern?“). But Tate Modern won’t ever really languish in second place. When its new building opens in 2016, exhibition space will increase by 70 percent to reach 13,500 square meters.

John Marciari first spotted the painting among hundreds of other works carefully filed in pullout racks in a soulless cube of a storage facility in New Haven, Connecticut. He was then, in 2004, a junior curator at Yale University’s renowned Art Gallery, reviewing holdings that had been warehoused during its expansion and renovation. In the midst of that task, he came upon an intriguing but damaged canvas, more than five feet tall and four feet wide, which depicted St. Anne teaching the young Virgin Mary to read. It was set aside, identified only as “Anonymous, Spanish School, seventeenth century.”

On Tuesday, September 30, 2014, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced that postwar American masterworks from the integrated SFMOMA and Doris and Donald Fisher collections will travel to two museums in France while the Bay Area museum is closed for a major expansion. “American Icons: Masterworks from SFMOMA and the Fisher Collection,” which features approximately sixty paintings and sculptures, will be on view at the Grand Palais in Paris from April 8 to June 22, 2015, and at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France from July 9 to October 18, 2015. 

In 2010, SFMOMA announced an unprecedented partnership to house and display the art collection of Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher. Comprising over 1,100 works by 185 artists, the Fishers’ collection is one of greatest private collections of modern and contemporary art in the world.