Displaying items by tag: collection

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA has selected New York-based Ennead Architects to design their $200 million, 175,000-square-foot expansion. The project is part of the museum’s comprehensive, $650 million Advancement Campaign, which was announced in 2011. The goal of the Campaign is to celebrate outstanding artistic and cultural creativity in ways that transform people’s lives. Besides the expansion, which will include galleries, a restaurant and additional space for public programs and education, the endeavor includes reinstalling the museum’s collection, several infrastructure improvements and other initiatives.

Ennead Architects previously designed the renovation and expansion of the renowned Yale University Art Gallery. The firm has also worked on projects at the Brooklyn Museum, Natural History Museum of Utah and the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.

Groundbreaking for the Peabody Essex Museum’s expansion project is expected to commence in 2015 and the new wing is slated to open in 2019. The museum will remain open throughout the renovation process until the final months, when the collection will be reinstalled.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England will partner with the Hall Art Foundation to present a series of exhibitions of contemporary and post-war art drawn from the collections of the Hall Art Foundation and Andrew and Christine Hall. Together, the Foundation’s collection and that of the Halls includes some 5,000 works by Richard Artschwager, George Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Eric Fischl, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol and many other important contemporary art figures.

The collaboration will kick off on October 8, 2013 with an exhibition of works by leading British-born artist, Malcolm Morley. Malcolm Morley at the Ashmolean: Paintings and Drawings from the Hall Collection will present 30 works dating from 1964 to the present. Morley, who often paints colorful scenes of man-made disasters, is considered one of the founders of hyperrealism, a genre of painting resembling a high-resolution photograph. Malcolm Morley at the Ashmolean will be on view through March 30, 2014.

The partnership between the Hall Art Foundation and the Ashmolean Museum is expected to develop into a long-term relationship and will eventually include a new contemporary art gallery at the institution.

Graham Beal, the Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, published a letter in the New York Times addressing the rampant rumors that have dogged the institution recently. Media outlets ran countless stories speculating about the museum’s future and that of its artworks after Detroit’s emergency manager Kevyn Orr asked for an appraisal of the D.I.A.’s collection.

In his letter, Beal specifically responded to an article published in the New York Times comparing the Detroit Institute of Arts to the shuttered Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art and Science in California. Beal said, “True, any successful effort to liquidate D.I.A. art would precipitate a series of events likely to lead to its closing, but we are a very long way from actions that would denude its prestigious collection of its most valuable art works. We believe that a healthy D.I.A. is, in fact, a crucial component in any recovery of the city of Detroit.”

Beal’s letter can be read in its entirety at the New York Times.

The Croydon Council, a local authority in south London, will sell 24 antique Chinese ceramic vases, bowls and bottles to benefit the redevelopment of Fairfield Halls, a 50-year-old arts center in the area. Local businessman Raymond Riesco gifted the valuable objects to the Council in 1959 as part of a 230-piece collection of artifacts that included Ming dynasty bowls. The 206 objects retained by the Council will remain on view for the public.

The decision to break up the collection has drawn criticism from the museum sector. David Anderson, president of the Museum Association, told the BBC, “Croydon’s decision to sell valuable Chinese ceramics threatens not just its own reputation, but that of the museum sector as a whole. It would undermine the widespread public trust in museums and I strongly urge them to reconsider.”

Arts Council England has also voiced opposition to the sale and penned a letter to the Croydon Council earlier this month warning them that their decision was not in line with English museum standards.

British authorities have lifted the export ban on Raphael’s drawing Head of a Young Apostle. The Old Master work will go to Leon Black, a New York-based billionaire who paid $47.9 million for it at Sotheby’s London in December 2012. The drawing, which was created between 1519 and 1520, was a study for the artist’s revered painting The Transfiguration, which resides in the Vatican’s collection.

The UK’s arts minister Ed Vaizey quickly placed the work under an export ban following the sale, which broke the auction record for a work on paper. The point of the ban was to provide enough time for an interested buyer to raise the money necessary to keep the drawing in the country. The ban expired on July 3, 2013 and was not extended.

Britain has recently employed a number of export bans on culturally significant works. Two pieces, which were purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, are currently being held in the U.K. Officials are waiting to see if any buyers will step forward for a rare 15^th century Flemish manuscript titled Roman de Gillion de Trazignes and Rembrandt Laughing, a self-portrait by the Dutch master. The Getty paid $5.8 million and $25 million for the works respectively.

On Saturday, July 27, 2013 the Springfield Museum of Art in Springfield, MO will reunite two portraits that have been separated for 100 year. The paintings of Lewis Allen Dickens Crenshaw and his wife, Fanny Smith Crenshaw, are by the lauded 19^th century Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham.

Bingham, a pioneer of the Luminist style, painted the portraits late in his life. Mrs. Crenshaw’s portrait has been in the museum’s collection since 1990 after being donated by the couple’s late daughter. Mr. Crenshaw’s portrait remains in the family and is on loan to the museum through Rachael Cozad Fine Art, a Kansas City-based gallery.

The Crenshaws portraits will be hung side by side as part of a permanent “exhibition” highlighting the Springfield Museum’s collection. Other featured artists include Grant Wood, Charles Sheeler and Thomas Hart Benton.

American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on August 17, 2013. The exhibition will draw from MoMA’s extensive collection of American art made between 1915 and 1950. Using some of the finest paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and sculptures from the period, American Modern will illustrate the evolution of society and culture during the first half of the 20^th century.

Subjects explored in the exhibition will include urban and rural landscapes, scenes of industry, still lifes and portraiture. Works by modern art masters such as George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Alfred Stieglitz and Andrew Wyeth will be arranged thematically.

American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe will be on view at MoMA through January 26, 2014.

On July 27, 2013, the exhibition The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States will open at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The show will present a portion of the couples incendiary collection, which they gifted to the museum in 2008. The works include examples of Minimal and Conceptual art as well as figurative and neo-expressionist pieces.

The late Herb Vogel, a postal clerk, and his librarian wife Dorothy, began collecting art in New York in 1962, the height of the minimal, conceptual and post-minimal movements. They eventually amassed over 4,000 works, primarily drawings, in a tiny Manhattan apartment on a shoestring budget. Five years ago, the Vogels partnered with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and began a unique donation strategy. With the museum’s support, the couple distributed 2,500 works from their collection between every state in the country, with 50 works going to each one.

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States will be on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts through October 20, 2013.

Washington, D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution, which is comprised of 19 museums and 9 research centers devoted to the “increase and diffusion of knowledge,” has seen an rise in troubles relating to their storage system. The Smithsonian currently has 130 million objects ranging from paintings and furniture to skeletons in their storage and maintenance facilities, many of which reside in damaged containers or poorly organized archives. During a recent audit, the National Museum of American History was allegedly unable to locate 10% of their collection.

The Committee on House Administration held a hearing on Wednesday, July 17th to discuss the challenges facing the care of the Smithsonian’s collections of art, archival footage and delicate objects. Smithsonian Inspector, General Scott Dahl, claimed that the institution is still employing poor storage space that was built in the 1950s and never intended for long-term use. A report from the Smithsonian’s inspector general in 2006 showed that not only were the storage facilities inadequate, but that security and inventory controls were lacking, leaving some of the country’s most precious treasures susceptible to theft or misplacement.

The Smithsonian has been working to fix their storage and maintenance issues for the past seven years and has invested $462 million in collections management and $390 million in facilities improvements. However, ongoing budget cuts have made fixing these issues once and for all, increasingly difficult. In addition, a large portion of the Smithsonian’s budget is currently being used to digitize the museum’s collection, which could take years.

First Look: Collecting for Philadelphia, which opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on July 13, 2013, will present a selection of works from the 8,000 individual acquisitions the institution has made since July 1, 2008. The generosity of various donors is hugely responsible for the collection that is presented to museum visitors each day. Whether it is artworks or funds to make purchases, donations have helped sustain the institution since its founding in 1876.

First Look presents a cross-section of the many works acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the past five years, most of which will be on view for the first time. The new acquisitions span centuries, continents and media. Highlights include paintings by Claude Monet (1840-1926), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827).

 First Look: Collecting for Philadelphia will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September 8, 2013.