Displaying items by tag: federal government

The Detroit Institute of Arts is hosting an event to unveil a new website showcasing artworks owned by the federal government.

The Thursday event will showcase the U.S. General Services Administration's Fine Arts Collection website.

The GSA, which oversees federal buildings across the nation, owns more than 26,000 paintings, sculptures, prints and other works from the 1850s to the present. Many are displayed in federal buildings and courthouses.

President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Hermann Parzinger, has announced that Berlin's Museum of Modern Art will open no later than 2021. Speaking to the DPA, he said, "It is an ambitious goal, but I am optimistic that we can make it." Most important in reaching that goal, he suggested, was a higher level of unity among the political and cultural partners behind the project who have, at times, found themselves at odds.

In November, the project's biggest hurdle was cleared when the federal government approved a €200 million appropriation to fund the construction of the new museum (see €200 Million Appropriation Clears Way for Berlin MoMA).

Plans for a long-awaited Modern and contemporary art museum in the Belgian capital have stalled because the federal government of Belgium and the regional government of Brussels have very different visions for the project. Leading Belgian cultural figures have expressed concerns that Brussels’s equivalent of London’s Tate Modern or New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will ever be created.

Earlier this year, the president of the Brussels region (Brussels-Capital), Rudi Vervoort, told Belgian media that the regional government of Brussels planned to convert a 16,000 sq. m Art Deco building north-west of the city center, formerly owned by the French car manufacturer Citroën, into a Modern and contemporary art center.

The New York Public Library announced that it will put its original copy of the Bill of Rights on public display for the first time in decades. The document, which has been in the library’s collection since 1896, will go on view during the fall of 2014, commemorating the 225^th anniversary of the document being drafted and proposed by Congress. The Bill of Rights will go on display alternately at the New York Public Library and in Pennsylvania at the National Constitution Center.

The document was previously unable to be displayed for extensive periods of time due to preservation issues. A special case, which was constructed by the National Institute for Standards and Technology, will ensure the document’s safety while it travels. The state-of-the-art preservation device, which cost an estimated $600,000 to create, was made possible by a generous gift from Ed Wachenheim III, a Trustee of the Library, and his wife, Sue.

The document is one of at least 14 original copies of the Bill of Rights, which was sent by the First Congress of the United States to the 13 colonies, 11 of which had already become states, and to the Federal government in 1789. Four of the states, including New York and Pennsylvania, no longer have their copies of the Bill.

Beginning in 2014, the document will be displayed alternately by the Library and the Constitution Center equally for the first six year. After that, the Library will display the document 60% of the time.