Displaying items by tag: Whitney Museum

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced the two appointees who will inaugurate new curatorships within the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Both positions were established this spring through a generous gift from Daniel Brodsky, the Museum’s Chairman, and his wife Estrellita B. Brodsky, an art historian and specialist in Latin American art.

Iria Candela will become the Estrellita B. Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art in the fall, focusing on the art of 20th- and 21st-century Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. And Beatrice Galilee, the new Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design, began working at the Museum in late April. Both will work closely with the modern and contemporary curatorial team, under the leadership of Sheena Wagstaff, the Museum’s Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, on researching and developing the collection and devising the program for both the main building and the Marcel Breuer-designed building that the Met will occupy once the Whitney Museum moves downtown in 2015.

On February 21, 2013 Lichtenstein: A Retrospective will open at the Tate Modern in London. Part of the show, which features 125 paintings and sculptures, is pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923-1997) only film, a triptych titled Three Landscapes. This will be the first time the film will be viewed in Europe; since debuting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1971, the film has been exhibited once in the United States at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2011.  

The little-known film was made in 1971 during Lichtenstein’s residency at LACMA. The residency program he attended paired artists with high-tech companies in Southern California. Lichtenstein, who employed a cinematic quality in his works, was paired with Universal Film. During his time at Universal, Lichtenstein was treated to a studio tour, a visit to the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Topaz, and lessons in film techniques such as editing and special effects. Three Landscapes was the first and last time Lichtenstein experimented with film as a medium.

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective will be on view through May 27, 2013. Three Landscapes will be shown in the Tate’s Tanks gallery from March 9-12 and 14-24.

New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which is borrowing for the first time to build a new site in lower Manhattan, pared back yields after investors placed orders for more than twice the $125 million offering.

“Institutional investors have plenty of room for this name because they don’t have any credit exposure to it,” said Fred Yosca, head of fixed-income trading at BNY Mellon Capital Markets LLC in New York.

The securities, rated A, the sixth-highest grade from Standard & Poor’s, yielded 3.7 percent for $50 million of debt due July 2021, the largest portion. Morgan Stanley, the underwriter, lowered yields on three different maturities, including a 0.13 percentage point cut to 4.87 percent on the 20- year bonds, according to a person familiar with the transaction who declined to be identified because the person wasn't authorized to speak publicly on the deal.

Strong demand prompted Morgan Stanley to compress the offering period to one day from two, the person said. More than 21 investors offered a total $286 million in orders while individuals were alloted $57.5 million, the person said.

The Whitney, founded in 1931 and specializing in contemporary U.S. art, has a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for it to assume operating costs at the Whitney’s Madison Avenue building, according to the bond offering document. The Whitney expects the arrangement to be final later in the year, and last for eight years beginning in 2015, when the museum opens its downtown space.

Museum Deals

The Met and the Whitney announced their deal May 11, the day after the Museum of Modern Art agreed to buy the headquarters of the American Folk Art Museum, which is in default on bond payments.

The new location, which will be more than twice the size of the Whitney’s current space, is expected to boost the museum’s average annual attendance to 720,800 in fiscal 2016 from 392,324 a year during fiscal years 2008 to 2010, Fitch Ratings said in a June 30 report.

The Whitney will depend on gifts and contributions to pay its debt principal. Its interest-only debt burden will reach 21 percent of its expenses, said Joanne G. Ferrigan and Douglas J. Kilcommons, Fitch analysts, in the report.

The museum’s endowment totaled $185.6 million as of June 30, according to offering documents. It expects to raise $625 million from its capital campaign by 2015. As of last month, it had pledges of $411 million, or about 66 percent, the documents said. The Whitney anticipates full payment of those pledges by 2020, 11 years before the final maturity of the bonds.

"It's a great treat to be here with such a fine audience of art lovers and artists," cooed Debbie Harry, surveying the crowd at the Whitney's groundbreaking gala last week. "Downtown people, uptown people, all kinds of New Yorkers."

When Blondie's right, she's right—many of the museum's supporters, arrayed in front of her at tables that cost some $25,000 apiece, were indeed uptown people, Upper East Side people, neighbors of the museum's current location at 75th and Madison. But they were gathered downtown, in a tent surrounded by chain-link fencing and construction paraphernalia on the corner of Washington and Gansevoort—future site of the museum's Renzo Piano building, planned to open in 2015. It was different!

"It might be the most groundbreaking groundbreaking you've ever seen," said Mayor Bloomberg at the dirt ceremony Tuesday. Dancers from the Elizabeth Streb company threw themselves through plate-glass windows as Ms. Streb stood under a cylinder that sprayed sand at her head. In the audience, Renzo Piano wore safety goggles.

The mayor and various trustees then crowded around Ms. Streb to dig at her feet, for photos.

Downtown wasn't the Whitney's first choice. A previous expansion plan had the museum building off its current building at 75th, but it fell through after the Landmarks Commission wanted a change that Mr. Piano said he'd jump in a lake before making.

"I prefer here," Mr. Piano told The Observer after the ceremony Tuesday. "It's more vibrant."

The space at the base of the High Line had been considered by at least one other art institution—the Dia Foundation. For a while, the Whitney's plan was unclear—would it build a downtown annex, or make a wholesale move? After some trustee disagreement, it became clear it would be the latter—it would bet the house on downtown—and now the writing is on the wall in the meatpacking district. Or on the streetlights, anyhow, which have been embellished with fluttering banners announcing, with the mute drama of haiku, the museum's imminent arrival: "The Whitney/Ground Breaking/ The Future."

If ground breaking is in the streets, at the gala it was also in the air—and on the table. Above the diners, and the stage where Blondie performed, hung lines of teal-color shovels. Centerpieces were composed of orange construction tape.

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" Whitney director Adam Weinberg said at the gala. "I still think we'll bring in a lot of people from our East Side base. We're not even way downtown, at the bottom, we're not at the tip of Manhattan. Fourteenth Street is semi-midtown, even."

Translation: downtown, but not too downtown. Close enough that, if you build it, they'll come, even if that means—egads!—public transportation. "Sure I take the subway!" enthused Amy Phelan, Dallas Cowboys cheerleader-turned-contemporary art collector and Whitney donor, at the gala. When in New York, she lives on the U.E.S. 

The Whitney has some $212 million to raise on its $720 million building project—the gala made a $2 million dent, and they nabbed $100 million by selling the uptown townhouses bought for the aborted expansion—but this is not bad news. "They've got four years to show potential donors the building site and, as the building goes up, to show them the cavernous hall that could be named after them," said David Gordon, a former museum director and now consultant to cultural institutions. "There's something to be said for starting construction. The most important thing is to convince the doubters who said, 'It's never going to happen.'"

The cash will come from wealthy benefactors—"I hope they have a Russian oligarch hidden in a closet," one art world source joked—but where will visitors come from downtown? Shoppers at the Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney boutiques? Diners from Spice Market and Pastis? Artsy swells lodging at the Gansevoort, Soho House and Andre Balazs's Standard Hotel, which has launched its own culture program?

On May 24th the Whitney Museum of American Art will break ground on a 200,000 sqf facility, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano. Located in the Meatpacking District adjacent to the southern entrance to the High Line, the building will provide the Whitney with essential new space for its collection, exhibitions, and education and performing arts programs in one of New York’s most vibrant neighborhoods.

To celebrate this historic moment for the Museum, from May 19 to 27 they will host a series of events, programs, performances, and public art initiatives.