Displaying items by tag: designers

The iconic poppy at Marimekko blossomed to gigantic proportions and the prospect of a new Guggenheim museum summoned top architects to the Finnish capital last week. The 10-day Helsinki Design Week, which takes place every September, turns the entire city into a showcase for new ideas and Scandinavian interior style.

This year, the city hosted over 150 official events and another 100 fringe ones. Teurastamo, formerly a slaughterhouse, was the newest venue where young Finnish designers had the chance to show off their work.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is going east — far east, for The Costume Institute’s spring 2015 exhibition, to be titled “Chinese Whispers: Tales of the East in Art, Film, and Fashion.”

Incorporating the realms of fine and filmic art from the Department of Asian Art, the summer show will explore how China has fueled the creative imagination of designers all over the world for centuries, resulting in layers of cultural translations, re-translations, and, of course, mistranslations.

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation has launched a grant program to help artists and other creative professionals tackle pressing international and social issues. The Artist as Activist program offers artists, designers and other creative thinkers the opportunity for a two-year fellowship as well as smaller, ongoing travel and research grants. The foundation is now accepting proposals via an open call on its website.

The Rauschenberg Foundation suffered a blow in court last month when a Florida judge awarded $24.6m to three of its trustees following a long-running legal dispute.

Committed to promoting European culture and history, whether it is horology or the decorative arts, Swiss watch manufacture Breguet has made it possible for the new display of 18^th-century French decorative arts in the Louvre Museum in Paris to see the light of day, with the reopening last June of 33 dedicated galleries, previously closed for almost a decade.

It was the golden age of the French decorative arts, a time when everybody who was anybody had one wish: to make their way to the City of Light to make their fortune. The French capital was the epicenter of creativity and savoir-faire in every sphere of art in the 18th century (what has been called “a moment of grace in French art”), when all of the best artists and designers from around France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands flocked to Paris to work.

Design Miami/Basel, a global forum focused on collectible design, offered select guests a sneak peek of its offerings during a VIP preview on Monday, June 16. The event, which takes place alongside Art Basel in Switzerland, is open to the public from Tuesday, June 17 through Sunday, June 22.

Bringing together collectors, gallerists, designers, and curators, Design Miami/Basel celebrates design culture and commerce through museum-quality exhibitions, educational lectures, and commissions from the world’s top emerging and established designers and architects. The marketplace portion of the fair features celebrated design galleries from around the world exhibiting furniture, lighting, and objets d’art. Offerings range from 18th- and 19th-century antiques to early Modernist objects and contemporary design.

Despite initial reports that the Chicago Design Museum had found a permanent location in the Loop, it's "a bit more short term than we hoped," according to its chairman.

Started in 2012 as an art gallery set up on a moving six-car Blue Line train, the museum is now eyeing a permanent location, possibly in the Loop's Block 37 development, where it is setting up for the second summer in a row, said co-founder and chairman Tanner Woodford.

In honor of NYCxDesign, the MoMA Design Store is launching a new collection in partnership with Kickstarter. MoMA will be retailing 24 new designs from 20 designers from all over the world, beginning May 13th through June 16th.

With 24 new products made by 20 international designers, the Kickstarter@MoMAStore line spans all categories. From robots to wall hooks, toy cars to clocks, each of the products was conceptualized, funded and created with the community support of Kickstarter.

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.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art is reconsidering its decision to tear down the American Folk Art Museum’s former home on West 53^rd Street in Manhattan. The famed institution received a wave of backlash after they announced that they would raze the building as part of its upcoming expansion.

On Thursday, May 9, 2013 MoMA officials announced that they have hired the New York-based architecture firm Scofidio + Renfro to helm the museum’s upcoming redesign and will consider plans that include the incorporation of the monumental building rather than its demolition. MoMA decided to level the Folk Art Museum’s former home because officials felt that its appearance did not mesh with their sleek, glass aesthetic. The structure, which is next door to MoMA, is also slightly set back from the museum’s main building making logistical issues problematic.

The Folk Art Museum erected the structure in 2001 and it quickly became a Midtown landmark thanks to its distinct design and sculptural bronze façade. However, in 2011, after a spate of financial troubles, the Folk Art Museum decided to move to a smaller location and MoMA purchased the building. After MoMA made the shocking announcement in April, many architects and designers, including the Architectural League of New York, voiced their opposition to the demolition plan.