Displaying items by tag: art institute of chicago

On December 13 the Art Institute of Chicago unveils 44 contemporary works donated by collecting titans Gael Neeson and Stefan Edlis. The largest gift in the museum’s 136-year history, the mix reads like an art lover’s “Twelve Days of Christmas,” with one Robert Rauschenberg, two Cy Twomblys, four Gerhard Richters, six Cindy Shermans, and nine Andy Warhols among the blue-chip pieces.

Douglas Druick, the director and president of the Art Institute of Chicago, has announced that he will step down from the position when a suitable replacement is found.

Druick announced his decision during a meeting with the museum's board on Tuesday evening.

Druick, who first joined the Art Institute as a curator in 1984, was serving as acting president when he was appointed to succeed James Cuno as director of the institution in 2011.

The Art Institute of Chicago announced that Gloria Groom has been named the chair of the museum’s European Painting and Sculpture department. She will now oversee the museum’s collection of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, early 19th-century, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist art.

Groom, who is also currently the Art Institute’s David and Mary Winton Green Curator, is known best for her work related to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and has written about the work of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard.

A major private contemporary art collection with a value estimated at $400 million is being donated to the Art Institute of Chicago by local philanthropists Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, in what the museum is calling the largest gift of art in its history and a coup for the institution and the city.

Numbering 42 pieces, stocked with iconic works by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and many other instantly recognizable names and spanning a time period from 1953 to 2011, experts called it one of the most significant collections of its kind in the world.

Douglas Druick, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, announced today that Chicago attorney Irving Stenn Jr. has given the museum more than 100 drawings from his exceptional collection of seminal works produced in the 1960s. The drawings, by a who's-who of contemporary artists, represent a foundational period in the history of drawing when the way works on paper were made, used, and appreciated was undergoing radical change.

The gift includes works by Mel Bochner, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, and Fred Sandback, as well as pieces by Agnes Denes, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Nam June Paik, and Ellsworth Kelly.

The popular exhibition "Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections" at the Art Institute of Chicago has been extended for three months beyond its original closing date of Feb. 15, 2015. The show, which presents more than 60 superb artworks of the Byzantine era, from the 4th to the 15th centuries, will remain on view through May 10, 2015.

Organized by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports of Athens, Greece, with the collaboration of the Benaki Museum, Athens, and originally exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the exhibition includes major artistic holdings from Greece consisting of mosaics, sculptures, manuscripts, luxury glass, silver, personal adornments, liturgical textiles, icons, and wall paintings.

Douglas Druick, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, announced today that Barbara Levy Kipper has pledged to give the Museum nearly 400 items from her exceptional collection of Buddhist ritual objects and Asian ethnic jewelry. Kipper’s gift will provide an important new dimension to the Museum’s collections of Indian, Himalayan, Central Asian, Southeast Asian and Chinese art. An exhibition of the objects, with an accompanying catalogue, is planned for the museum’s Regenstein Hall in the summer of 2016.

Kipper, the former chairman of book distributor the Chas Levy Company and a Life Trustee of the Art Institute, is a wide-ranging collector who previously has made generous donations to the Museum’s departments of Photography, Prints and Drawings, and Asian Art.

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 new year has got off to a good start in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen with the return of three traveling masterpieces from the collection. Last year almost one million Americans enjoyed the Rotterdam Magrittes in New York, Houston and Chicago. The works by René Magritte (1898-1967) can be seen in an updated hanging of the outstanding Surrealism collection.

After a journey of more than a year the museum is celebrating the homecoming of three works of art with a rehang of the Surrealist rooms. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen took the unusual step of lending the paintings to the major Magritte exhibition in MoMA, the Menil Collection and the Art Institute of Chicago.

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.