Displaying items by tag: curators

When it comes to exploring Picasso, it would seem there is little left for curators to discover, despite his prodigious output. Right now, there are two major gallery exhibitions, at Gagosian and at Pace, as well as a show of Cubist works including Picasso from the Leonard Lauder collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But what few people realize is that Picasso’s sculpture is still relatively uncharted territory. The last show devoted to it in this country took place in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art. B

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art will display rarely-exhibited tapestries from the eighteenth century in its soaring Morgan Great Hall during the final phase of the museum’s five-year, $33 million renovation. The large, intricate tapestries-which depict the saga of Greek hero Jason-will be on view through April 2015, at which point the Great Hall will be transformed in preparation for the Sept. 19 grand reopening of the Morgan Memorial Building.

The Jason Tapestries are enormous in size-ranging in height up to 14 feet, and in width up to 24 feet-presenting a challenge for curators in exhibiting them on a regular basis.

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 Phillips Collection wants to share its vast collection of scholarship, photographs and interviews with preeminent African-American artist Jacob Lawrence by creating a special website devoted to his life and work. But it needs the public to chip in to pay for it.

Phillips’ officials have raised $80,000 of the $125,000 required for what they are calling a “robust microsite” featuring images of all 60 panels of Lawrence’s masterwork, “The Migration Series,” as well as unpublished interviews conducted by Phillips curators in 1992 and 2000, just before his death.

Fear was the emotion that came to mind when Ana Gamazo was first approached about putting her private art collection on display.

Gamazo and her husband, prominent Spanish businessman Juan Abelló, had spent nearly three decades amassing some 500 pieces in a collection considered by Spanish curators to rank among the best in the world. But the collection had been guided by the pair’s personal taste, leaving Gamazo terrified of how revealing the exhibition would be. “What would critics say? What would people think of the art we own?”

The couple were eventually convinced and the Abelló Collection, currently on display at Madrid’s CentroCentro Cibeles, features 160 works spanning five centuries.

Leading curators have given their preliminary verdict on Okwui Enwzor’s curatorial vision for the 56th Venice Biennale, which opens next spring (9 May-22 November). At a recent press conference, Enwezor, the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, outlined his plans for the world’s oldest and most prestigious biennial.

His broad curatorial framework for the presentation in the Arsenale and Central Pavilion in the Giardini, entitled “All the World’s Futures,” appears to tap in to potent political and social topics of our time.

Last month, Colby College Museum of Art put on a view a 1968 painting by Joan Mitchell that museum director Sharon Corwin believes is the best example of abstract expressionism in Maine. Next month, the Portland Museum of Art will unveil an 8-foot-tall steel “Seven” sculpture by Robert Indiana, once rejected by the Prince of Monaco, in the pedestrian plaza out front.

The two works share few similarities, but they represent the latest high-profile acquisitions by two leading museums in Maine and highlight the challenges facing curators and museum directors as they shape collections across the state.

In both instances, the museums acquired the art because benefactors took personal interest in bringing it to Maine.

The name Pieter Coecke van Aelst, though plenty illustrious-sounding, is not widely known — or at least, according to the curators behind his current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not nearly as well known as it ought to be. A Netherlandish artist-of-all-trades active in the early- to mid-16th century, Coecke was a contemporary of Raphael, supported the fledgling Pieter Bruegel the Elder (who would go on to marry Coecke’s daughter), and was collected competitively by King Henry VIII and Cosimo de Medici, among others. And still, he is often relegated to the annals of art history. The Met’s “Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry,” on view through January 11, 2015, represents his first-ever major solo exhibition.

Of course, part of Coecke’s lesser notoriety may be connected to that of his primary medium.

If you thought everything about the future of the Corcoran Art Gallery was parsed and settled, much to the dismay of its students, faculty, curators and various formers in all three categories, think again. There’s another outrage.

The Corcoran’s archives, which relate its entire 145-year history, are slated to be broken up.

Any archivist will tell you that, more important than the possibly wonderful individual items, it’s the whole of an archive that matters most to the historical record.

Following its inaugural outing in 2012, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ 5×5 program takes to the streets again this fall. The city’s largest public arts project kicks off with an opening weekend celebration on September 6 and 7, promising both visual art and cultural events spread across each of the city’s eight wards through December. The works take the form of everything from site-specific performance art to sculpture to screenprinting demonstrations, all of which are free and open to the public.

The 25 participating artists — as chosen five apiece by five curators, hence the festival’s name — range in both medium and background.