Displaying items by tag: curators

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore says it has digitized and catalogued more than 600 American paintings and other artworks, making them available for download and public use.

The new digital archive includes rarely seen works from John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and John La Farge, among other artists. The museum said it used a $111,615 grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services to pay for the project.

The Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) announced today its annual Awards for Excellence in the categories of museum Catalogues, Articles/Essays, and Exhibitions. All AAMC members are eligible for nomination. The AAMC Prize Committee and member juror groups determine awards prior to the AAMC’s Annual Conference and Meeting in May. New to this year’s vetting process, the categories of Awards for Exhibitions and Catalogues were subdivided based on the operating budgets of the members’ museums.

"We were impressed by the quality and depth of the nominations,” says Judith Pineiro, Executive Director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, "It is wonderful that our new selection process allowed for celebrating the outstanding work of so many curators.”

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced that Adrienne Arsht has pledged $1 million in support of the Met Museum Presents series of performances and talk, now in its second season. The grant will fund the next three seasons of the series, in 2014-2015, 2015-2016, and 2016-2017.

“For years, Adrienne Arsht has been a philanthropic force in the performing arts,” said Mr. Campbell, “and her generous grant to the Metropolitan Museum signals her confidence in the bold direction that our Concerts & Lectures General Manager Limor Tomer has embraced over the past two years. Adrienne’s support will encourage the growth of this ground-breaking programming as Limor mines our collections, collaborates with our curators, and takes creative risks to bring a fresh perspective to the Museum. We are grateful to Adrienne for her vision and generosity in making this possible.”

Scholars have discovered a previously unknown portrait by James McNeill Whistler hidden beneath a painting of a bridge over the River Thames from 1862. The subject is thought to be Whistler’s young mistress and model Jo Hiffernan, who lived with the artist in London for five years. Prior to the discovery, experts believed Whistler created only around six portraits of Hiffernan, including the well-known Symphony in White, No. 1: the White Girl, 1862, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is currently hosting the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium, a twelve-day program aimed at forging links and developing dialogues between some of the world’s most influential museums. The fourteen participants represent a wide variety of institutions, including national, state, municipal, and private museums. The colloquium will explore the major challenges that museum directors face, including management issues, conservation matters, and the well-being of the global economy.

The colloquium is the first of its kind at the Met, and has been spearheaded by the museum’s Director and CEO, Thomas P. Campbell. In a press release from the museum, Campbell said, “Ideally, this exchange of ideas and expertise will generate collaborative thinking that will prove beneficial not only to the participating institutions but to museums on a much broader scale.”

The Met has been an international institution since its founding in 1870 and has continued to collaborate with museums across the globe through exhibitions as well as training and research projects. In addition, the museum organizes a number of programs that bring international curators, conservators, and scholars to New York.

Participants in the Global Museum Leaders Colloquium include Mohammed Fahim Rahimi, Chief Curator at the National Museum of Afghanistan; Victoria Noorthoorn, Director of the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires; Liang Gong, Director of the Nanjing Museum; Stijn Huijts, Director of the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht; and Steven Sack, Director of the Origins Center in Johannesburg.

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.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has unveiled a permanent and public home for a glass and stone mosaic designed by Marc Chagall. ‘Orphée,’ which was donated to the museum by the late collector Evelyn Stefansson Nef, will reside in the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden.

The mosaic, which was a special gift from Chagall to Nef and her husband, John, spent over 40 years in the couple’s garden in Georgetown. The work was donated to the museum in 2009 as part of a major bequest of over 100 works from the Nef’s collection of 19th- and 20th-century artworks. Measuring around 10’ x 17’, the mosaic depicts various figures from Greek mythology.    

The work was one of the first large-scale outdoor Chagall mosaics to be installed in the United States and during the spring of 2010, a team of conservators, curators, art handlers, designers and masons spent five weeks removing the mosaic from the Nef’s garden wall. Over the next three and a half years, conservators, gallery masons, designers and Italian mosaic experts cleaned the glass and stone, repaired the mosaic’s structural reinforcement, and painstakingly re-installed the work in the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden.

The fourth annual Dallas International Art, Antique & Jewelry Show will kick off with an opening night preview party on Thursday, November 7 at the Dallas Market Hall. Each year, collectors, curators and art lovers from across the globe flock to the high-profile event to browse the selection of furniture, silver, fine art, antiquities, porcelain, manuscripts, Americana, jewelry, textiles and more.

This year’s show will include a Designer Showcase featuring room vignettes created by five leading local interior designers. In addition, guests of the Dallas International Art, Antique & Jewelry Show will be able to take exclusive tours of the show floor with Miller Gaffney, founder of Miller Gaffney Art Advisory and one of the stars of PBS’ hit series Market Warriors.  

The Dallas International Art, Antique & Jewelry Show, which is organized by the Palm Beach Show Group, will take place through Monday, November 11.

Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and the Cleveland Museum of Art announced a joint venture that will advance both institutions and prepare future curators, scholars, museum directors and academic leaders for careers in the arts. The endeavor was inspired by Cleveland Museum of Art trustee Nancy Keithley and Case Western Reserve trustee Joseph Keithley. The couple has committed $15 million to bring The Nancy and Joseph Keithley Institute for Art History to fruition.

Case Western and the Cleveland Museum have been longtime collaborators and the highlight of the Keithley Institute is its reimagined joint doctoral program that the museum and university first developed together in 1967. The program emphasizes object-oriented study, which entails seeing objects firsthand as well as participating in the curating process and other aspects of museum operation. The Keithleys’ generous donation will provide graduate students stipends and travel fellowships as well as compensation for curriculum development, teaching and collection seminars.

David Franklin, the Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, said, “We are honored that Nancy and Joseph Keithley chose to help us realize our shared dreams of a dynamic, world-class institute. Their gift is not a gift of collaboration, but also the opportunity to realize incomparable opportunities for students, faculty, staff and the public.”

Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum announced that it will host the exhibition Last Seen by the French artist Sophie Calle beginning on October 24, 2013. The show will feature works created by Calle in 1991 in response to the Gardner’s tragic heist, which took place the year before. New works created in 2012 will also be on view.

The exhibition presents 14 photographic and text based works divided into two categories. The first series includes pieces created shortly after the heist, which saw the theft of 13 works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and others. The second series was created at the Gardner Museum while Calle was revisiting her earlier project.

Soon after the heist, Calle interviewed curators, guards and other staff from the Gardner in front of the museum’s stark walls. Years later she repeated the process but this time, in front of the empty frames that the Gardner later hung. She asked her interviewees what they remembered of the missing works and what they saw when they looked at the blank frames. She used text from the interviews and her own photos to create visual interpretations of loss and memory. Pieranna Cavalchini, the Tom and Lisa Blumenthal Curator of Contemporary Art at the Gardner, said, “This exhibition is a poignant reminder of just how much power art and a great artist like Sophie Calle can yield in bringing life, energy and beauty to what is in essence a never-ending story of loss.”

Last Seen will be on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through October 24, 2014.