Displaying items by tag: tacoma art museum

A Tacoma Art Museum visitor is accused of snapping off a chunk of Chihuly art worth $120,000.

"We had an individual who came to the museum who willfully broke a work of art," said Stephanie Stebich, director of the Tacoma Art Museum.

Prosecutors said Jon Malcolm Maleak Meys walked through an exhibit on Friday and swung his arm at the glass, breaking a chunk off of the piece.

“Drei, zwei, eins!” With a rousing countdown in German, Stephanie Stebich, the executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum, led a group ribbon cutting Saturday morning that officially opened the museum’s new wing, showcasing art of the American West and doubling the museum’s gallery space.

Erivan Haub, the German grocery store magnate who donated his family’s Western art collection to TAM and paid for the new wing with a $20 million gift, beamed from a wheelchair pushed by his wife, Helga, during the celebration.

The Tacoma Art Museum is counting to the opening of its new wing and renovations of its exisitng space, now scheduled for public debut on Sunday, Nov. 16, 2014.

According to the museum's Juliana Verboort, the project’s centerpiece is the new Haub Family Galleries, showcasing the Haub Family Collection of Western American art. The collection places the museum among a select few in the United States, and the only museum in the Pacific Northwestern region, with a Western American art collection of this caliber.

Washington’s Tacoma Art Museum broke ground Thursday, September 5, 2013 on a $15.5 million expansion that will include new galleries. The 16,000-square-foot wing will house 280 works of Western art donated to the museum by German billionaires Erivan and Helga Haub. The collection, which ranks as one of the finest groupings of Western American art in the world, was accompanied by a $20 million gift from the Haubs.

The Tacoma Art Museum’s expansion, which is helmed by the Seattle-based architect Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects, is slated to reach completion by fall 2014. The institution will boast the most significant public holding of Western artworks in the Pacific Northwest. The Haubs’ bequest includes landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, sculptures by Frederic Remington and works by modernist painters including Georgia O’Keeffe. The pieces range from the 1820s to the present and span various Western art genres.