Displaying items by tag: Institute of Contemporary Art

The philanthropist and collector Barbara Lee is giving the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston 20 works by 12 female artists with a value estimated at $42 million, the largest gift by value in the museum’s history, officials said.

The new donations build on the gift last year by Ms. Lee of 43 other works by female artists that established the Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women at the museum.

The Institute of Contemporary Art received permission Tuesday night to demolish three homes in a historic district in order to build a sculpture park, but some conditions placed on the approval may make the decision unpalatable.

Miami’s Historic and Environmental Preservation Board voted 3 to 2 to allow the museum, which is located in the Design District, to tear down the homes behind the building on parcels in the southern edge of the Buena Vista East Historic District.

When auto magnate Norman Braman and developer Craig Robins laid the groundwork last year to build a new home for the Institute of Contemporary Art, they envisioned the private institution carving a cutting-edge niche in Miami’s arts scene and serving as the crown jewel of the city’s luxury shopping mecca.

But only half the museum campus is actually in the Design District.

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the cultural anchor in the evolving Seaport District since its 2006 opening, is planning a 20,000-square-foot-plus expansion.

The waterfront museum will expand into the adjacent 100 Northern Ave., a 17-story glass office tower under construction by the Fallon Co. on Fan Pier.

The ICA plans to use the additional 23,000 square feet for more gallery space.

The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami (ICA) has lost its interim director less than five months after announcing the appointment of Suzanne Weaver to the post.

The ICA, an institution set up by the former trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, informed the press in September that it had hired Weaver, a veteran of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky and the Dallas Museum of Art, to help lead the institution as it prepared to open a temporary space in the Design District.

Until 2005, the 78-year-old Institute of Contemporary Art had no permanent collection, assembling most of its shows with borrowed works. Philanthropist and ICA board member Barbara Lee gave the museum one of its first pieces: British sculptor Cornelia Parker’s “Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson),” an ethereal work that has become a favorite of visitors.

Now Lee has given the ICA a much weightier gift: a group of 43 works by 25 international artists, all women. The Barbara Lee Collection of Art by Women, the institution’s largest gift of art ever, will expand the ICA’s holdings by roughly 30 percent, ICA director Jill Medvedow said.

Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the Institute of Contemporary  Art/Boston (ICA), announced today the appointment of Eva Respini as Barbara Lee Chief Curator. Respini is currently Curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, where she organized the critically acclaimed retrospectives Cindy Sherman and Robert Heinecken as well as exhibitions with artists Klara Liden, Anne Collier, Leslie Hewitt, and Akram Zaatari. She will assume her new position at the ICA in March 2015.

“Eva Respini brings a combination of scholarship and a 21st-century sensibility to image-making, technology, and the role of the museum of the future,” says Medvedow. “She offers a rich understanding of contemporary art and is a creative and intelligent leader in her field. We look forward to the contributions that she will bring to the museum.”

The longtime rift between the Museum of Contemporary Art’s board of trustees and the city of North Miami turned into a physical breakup Wednesday as the nonprofit that has overseen MOCA moved its employees out of the city-owned building and announced plans to establish a new arts organization.

The new Institute of Contemporary Art will open a temporary space in November at the Moore Building in Miami’s Design District, according to a statement from board co-chairs Irma Braman and Ray Ellen Yarkin.

Earlier this year, the Institute of Contemporary Art got disappointing news: It would no longer be in charge of painting the massive Dewey Square wall mural, at the head of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. The job would instead go to the more mainstream Museum of Fine Arts.

Jill Medvedow, ICA director, was not pleased. “Really?” she said. “It’s walking distance to the ICA.”

Other Greenway changes, perhaps more universally welcomed, are in the works. On Wednesday the nonprofit funder ArtPlace will announce a $250,000 public art grant for the Greenway, a 15-acre network of parks in downtown Boston. That follows by just a few days the announcement of plans for a $1 million public art expansion that will include the installation next year of a huge, billowing fabric work meant to hover over the park, by Brookline-based artist Janet Echelman. The Greenway is even hiring its own art curator.

On March 7, the Whitney Museum of American Art launched its 77th Whitney Biennial -- a highly-anticipated survey of the latest developments in American art. This will be the last Biennial in the Whitney’s building on Madison Avenue before the museum moves downtown to its new Renzo Piano-designed building in the spring of 2015.

The 2014 Whitney Biennial was co-curated by Stuart Comer, the Chief Curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art, Anthony Elms, an Associate Curator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and Michelle Grabner, an American artist and Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The curators have selected 103 participants that together, offer a sweeping view of contemporary art in the United States. Two Whitney curators, Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussman, both of whom organized the renowned 2012 Biennial, oversaw the process. 

Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, said, “The 2014 Biennial brings together the findings of three curators with very distinct points of view. There is little overlap in the artists they have selected and yet there is common ground. This can be seen in their choice of artists working in interdisciplinary ways, artists working collectively, and artists from a variety of generations. Together, the 103 participants offer one of the broadest and most diverse takes on art in the United States that the Whitney has offered in many years.”

The 2014 Whitney Biennial will take place through May 25, 2014.