Displaying items by tag: Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now open seven days a week for the first time in over 40 years. The schedule shift occurred on Monday July 1, 2013 following the official announcement, which was made by the Met’s director and CEO, Thomas Campbell, on March 28. Opening hours will also be moved from 9:30AM to 10AM.

The goal of the increased hours of operation is to make the museum more accessible to patrons. A record 6.28 million people visited the Met last year and museum officials hope to maintain the institution’s ongoing success.

The changes also apply to the Cloisters, the Met’s museum of medieval art and architecture located in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan.  

Irina Antonova, the 91-year-old director of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts who has helmed the institution for 52 years, has been let go after just recently renewing her five-year contract. The announcement, which was made on Monday, July 1, follows a battle waged by Antonova to bring a collection of Impressionist art, which was sent to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg by Joseph Stalin, back to Moscow.

Antonova’s vision was to restore the once magnificent State Museum of New West Art in Moscow, which housed paintings by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890). Stalin shuttered the museum in 1948 after his regime deemed the collection too far removed from Soviet art. The Museum of New Western Art’s collection, which was assembled by Russian art collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, was later divided between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage Museum.

Antonova first made her campaign public in April 2013 when she appealed to Russian president Vladimir Putin during a televised call-in show. The plea sparked controversy with the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. After a heated battle, the state intervened and suggested creating an online “virtual museum” as a compromise between the two parties but Antonova refused.

Since the Pushkin’s announcement earlier this week, Antonova has been moved to the ceremonial post of the museum’s president. Marina Loshak, an established curator, will replace Antonova.

Officials at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia announced that the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas will design a freestanding addition to the institution’s existing structure. Founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, the Hermitage is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world.

Koolhaas, a Pritzker Prize winner, has designed Portugal’s Casa de Música, the Seattle Central Library and Kunsthal Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He has worked with the Hermitage for over a decade and designed the fleeting Hermitage Guggenheim in Las Vegas in the early 2000s. Koolhaas has been working with the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, since 2008 on a rearrangement of the museum’s existing interior. That project is expected to conclude in 2014 and will coincide with the museum’s 250^th anniversary.

The Hermitage’s new building will be located outside of St. Petersburg’s historic center. Contemporary architecture is banned from the area so to preserve the unity of the city’s aesthetic. The Koolhaas-designed structure will include a library, costume museum, a publishing house and various public spaces.  

The iconic colorful metal buttons that have served at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s admission tickets since 1971 are no more. Due to the rising cost of the tin-plate pins, the museum will employ a new paper ticket system that will include detachable stickers, which will serve as proof of admission. The buttons will be discontinued on Monday, July 1, the same day that the Met will switch to a seven-day-a-week schedule. It was previously closed on Mondays.

The Met’s admission buttons have become a symbol of New York City culture and a popular souvenir for tourists. Their badge’s most recent iteration features an “M” appropriated from a 16^th century woodcut based on a Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) drawing. After the Met introduced their unique admission tokens over 40 years ago, a number of institutions followed suit and they are now commonplace in museums around the world.

In addition to bringing production costs down from 3 cents per button to 1 cent per paper ticket, the new system will also be more environmentally friendly.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will regild the thirteen-foot sculpture Diana (1892-94), which resides in the its Great Stair Hall. The work, which is by the Beaux-Arts sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), once sat atop Madison Square Garden in New York City.

The undertaking was made possible by a grant from Bank of America through its Global Art Conservation Project and will be helmed by the institution’s Conservation Department and the department of American Art. The regilding is expected to take four months to complete. and will require corrosion removal, surface preparation and the laying of 180 square feet of gold leaf. This process will be followed by any adjustments necessary to improve the appearance and lighting of the sculpture. The work was significantly eroded while on view at Madison Square Garden and cleaning and repair efforts that took place before the sculpture was installed in 1932 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art added to the damage.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will document each step of the conservation and regilding process so that the public can monitor Diana’s progress.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presents 8 large-scale steel sculptures by Mark di Suvero (b. 1933) at historic Crissy Field for a free, yearlong exhibition. Organized in partnership with the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks, the exhibition kicks off an extensive program of off-site exhibitions that SFMOMA will offer while the museum is undergoing a massive renovation and expansion. The museum is slated to re-open in early 2016.

Mark di Suvero at Crissy Field spans 5 decades of the artist’s career and coincides with di Suvero’s 80^th birthday. The exhibition, which includes one never-before-seen sculpture, is the largest survey of the artist’s work ever presented on the west coast. Crissy Field offers striking views of the Golden Gate Bridge, which has long been a source of inspiration for di Suvero who immigrated to San Francisco from Shanghai as a child.

Mark di Suvero at Crissy Field will be on view through May 26, 2014.

The Nassau Museum of Art in Roslyn Harbor, New York is currently presenting the exhibition Alex Katz: Selections from the Whitney Museum of Art. The solo show consists of an array of large, striking portraits by the American artist Alex Katz (b. 1927). The exhibition is drawn from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s extensive collection of the artist’s work.  

A primarily figurative painter, Katz often portrays his friends and family, especially his wife Ada, in simple, brightly colored compositions. Because of these aesthetic predilections, he has often been associated with the Pop Art movement. Katz’s expansive oeuvre also includes numerous landscapes, particularly of New York City and Maine. Since 1951 Katz has been the subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and he has been included in nearly 500 group shows worldwide.

Alex Katz: Selections from the Whitney Museum of Art will be on view at the Nassau Museum of Art through October 13, 2013.  

Dürer, Rembrandt & Whistler: Prints from the Collection of Dr. Dorrance T. Kelly is now on view at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT. The exhibition is comprised of one of the finest local collections of Old Master prints, which was assembled by Dr. Dorrance T. Kelly. Kelly, who had primarily collected American 20^th century prints and prints by John James Audubon (1785-1851) in the past, began collecting Old Master works in recent years.

Kelly’s collection includes rare etching, woodcuts and engravings by German printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528); nearly 30 works by Rembrandt (1606-1669); sheets by Canaletto (1697-1768); and several sheets by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746-1828). The collection is rounded out by a group of etched cityscapes and figure studies by James McNeil Whistler (1834-1903).

 Dürer, Rembrandt & Whistler: Prints from the Collection of Dr. Dorrance T. Kelly will be on view at the Bruce Museum through August 18, 2013. A scholarly catalogue and educational programs complement it.

The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA has reopened its modern and contemporary art galleries following a major reinstallation. The updated galleries will be part of the Carnegie International, which is slated to open October 5, 2013. This year’s International will bring together 35 artists from 19 countries and will include a major exhibition of international art, the presentation of the museum’s collection, and a series of events organized in cooperation with the city of Pittsburgh.

Curators Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski helmed the reinstallation of the Scaife Galleries, which hold the Carnegie’s modern and contemporary art collections. Together they selected over 200 objects, many of which had been acquired through past Internationals, and redistributed them throughout 8 galleries.

Industrialist Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Museum in 1895. Determined to build a bold collection of modern art, Carnegie organized annual contemporary exhibitions and sought to educate visitors, promote international understanding of art, and attract the world to Pittsburgh. Through acquisitions made from these yearly exhibitions, Carnegie built the museum’s impressive collection. The Carnegie International became an annual occurrence in 1896 and is the oldest exhibition of international contemporary art in North America and the second oldest in the world.

Two 10^th century statues that were looted from jungle temples have been returned to Cambodia by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met announced in May 2013 that they would send the Khmer sculptures known as Kneeling Attendants back to Cambodia after being displayed in the museum’s Asian Wing for 10 years.

Hab Touch, director general at the Ministry of Culture, said, “The return of the statues is a historic event for us.” Seven Buddhist monks blessed the life-size statues during a religious ceremony attended by officials from the government and the Met at the airport. Upon their return to Cambodia, the sculptures will be put on display at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh and later kept at either the National Museum in the capital or at a museum in the northwestern city of Siem Reap.

The two statues were looted from the Koh Ker temple site in the early 1970s. At the time, Cambodia was being ravaged by a brutal civil war and looting was rampant. The works were donated piece by piece to the Met in the late 1980s and 1990s. Recent documentary research revealed that the statues were in fact looted from Cambodia.