Displaying items by tag: Renovation

In 2008, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (formerly the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum) embarked on a sweeping renovation of its home -- New York City’s landmark Andrew Carnegie Mansion. Founded in 1896, the museum has been housed in the massive Georgian structure, brimming with wood-paneled walls, stained glass, and carved ceilings, since 1976. Dedicated to historic and contemporary design, the institution hoped to create a space that better communicated its devotion to design evolution.

On December 12, following a three-year closure, the Cooper Hewitt will unveil its renovated and redesigned home to the public. The project, which cost approximately $91 million to complete, added sixty-percent more exhibition space, allowing the institution to present more of its monumental collection and temporary exhibitions. The revamped space also includes a new shop, casework, and movable displays designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a new public staircase, a new freight elevator, and a redesigned outdoor garden by Hood Design.

Murals of "national importance" by war artist Evelyn Gibbs have been uncovered and repaired as part of the restoration of a Medieval church. The paintings were thought to have been destroyed during 1972 modernizations, but were discovered by electricians prior to the work starting.

A celebration event was held at St Martin's Church in Bilborough, Nottingham, on Saturday. The Heritage Lottery Fund gave £744,100 towards the restoration.

A hard-hat tour on Thursday of the galleries currently under renovation at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford showed a lot of what one would expect at a hard-hat tour — ladders, primered walls, workmen with power tools — and one fun surprise.

On one wall of what was once the management office of the Amistad Center for Art & Culture in the second-floor Colt mezzanine area is a room-wide, three-primary-color mural by Sol LeWitt. "Wall Drawing #352" has been there since 1980.

Employees have always known about the mural. They put their office furniture in front of it and sat there every day. But the area has been off-limits to the public for 15 years.

From Philadelphia soup tureens made by German immigrants to a sweeping American landscape painted in Italy, there’s a surprising twist to the newly renovated American Wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art: many of the objects have an international accent.

The museum is already well known around the world for its 500-piece Henri Matisse collection and other European masterworks. Now curators in its new American Wing have reframed its pieces to underscore how U.S. artists continually exchanged ideas and styles with their counterparts abroad. The museum spent two years and $7.9 million renovating the 15,000-square-foot wing, which opens Sunday.

The Smithsonian Institution has announced the details of a new $2 billion plan to renovate the area of museums and gardens in its South Mall campus, including a “revitalization” of the Castle, its administrative headquarters.

Under the design by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, new entrances will be installed and connections made between the museums and gardens along Independence Avenue, SW, from Seventh to 12th Streets.

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 Milwaukee Art Museum has hired a new curator to oversee its design and decorative arts collection. Monica Obniski will join the staff as the Demmer curator of 20th and 21st century design in January. She will lead the effort to rethink the display of MAM's design collection as part of a top-to-bottom renovation and reinstallation of the permanent collection.

For the last several years, Obniski has been at the Art Institute of Chicago as the Ann S. and Samuel M. Mencoff assistant curator of American decorative arts. She began her years at the Art Institute as a research associate and exhibitions coordinator in 2007.

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.

Philippe Vergne, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, has started talking to Frank Gehry about the possibility of renovating the museum’s Geffen Contemporary branch downtown. The US architect oversaw the initial conversion of warehouses in the early 1980s. The space, which measures 55,000 sq. ft, has proved popular with artists but does not have adequate climate controls for many art loans.

Gehry told "The Art Newspaper" during a fuller interview about a range of museum projects: “Philippe asked me to help him. I don’t think they have a lot of money at this point. He asked about an upgrade of the entrance and some work on the inside. I guess they’re going to try to [install] mechanical systems.”

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., is kicking off its 40th anniversary celebration with the long-term installation “At the Hub of Things: New Views of the Collection.” Featuring works from the collection from the past 75 years, “At the Hub of Things” is organized thematically rather than by artist or movement, revealing a fresh perspective on the Hirshhorn’s holdings of modern and contemporary art. The exhibition creates a lively conversation between artworks from different countries and generations.

“At the Hub of Things” is the first exhibition to be held in the Hirshhorn’s newly renovated third-floor galleries. The $1 million overhaul, which is the first full renovation that the galleries have received since their inception, has restored the space to architect Gordon Bunshaft’s original vision.