Displaying items by tag: expansions

The Delaware College of Art and Design in downtown Wilmington is making small expansions that could later trigger bigger and more significant projects for the two-year school.

Next to DCAD, developer Buccini/Pollin Group is putting up a $6 million, five-story apartment building at 606 N. Market St. DCAD, which is known for its majors in photography, illustration, fine arts, animation, interior design and graphic design, will occupy the first floor of that building.

DCAD President Stuart Baron said the school will house sculpture studios there.

Douglas Hyland, who has led the New Britain Museum of American Art through two major expansions, tripled its collections and more than doubled its endowment, will retire as the museum's director after its new addition is complete next fall.

Hyland, 65, announced his decision Wednesday at a meeting of the museum's board of trustees.

"Everything I envisioned for this museum has been accomplished," Hyland said. "The collections have grown, the attendance is at 100,000. This is the best year of our history."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced that on January 18, 2013, the number of visitors to the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia hit the one million mark. The renovated galleries, which reopened to the public on November 1, 2011, draw approximately 2,550 patrons each day.

The Met’s Islamic Art collection, which is comprised of over 1,200 works and spans 1,300 years, is considered one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind. The holdings are presented in 15 different galleries, the result of an eight-year project that included renovations, expansions, and reinstallations.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, said, “Since these galleries reopened in their new configuration just over a year ago, we have been truly gratified by the exceptional interest that our visitors – both local and international – have taken in this newly conceived presentation of Islamic art.”

To commemorate the Met’s milestone, the one-millionth visitor to the Islamic art galleries received a catalogue of the collection.

The Louvre, Centre Pompidou, and Musee d’Orsay all reported record attendance numbers for 2012. Recent expansions, newly unveiled renovations, and impressive exhibitions are responsible for beckoning troves of visitors from across the world to the Parisian institutions.

The Louvre, which is the most-visited museum in the world, summons bigger crowds each year. 2012 marked the largest attendance figures ever recorded for the institution with nearly 10 million visitors this year. Expanded Islamic art galleries and a spate of well-received temporary exhibitions were of particular interest to visitors. In fact, they helped boost attendance 29-percent from 2011. Exhibition highlights at the Louvre in 2012 included a show devoted to Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and the birth of American Landscape painting, the presentation of Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452-1519) masterwork, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and an exhibition of Raphael’s (1483-1520) later works, which he produced in Rome.

The Centre Pompidou, which specialized in modern and contemporary art, welcomed over 3.8 million visitors in 2012, a 6-percent increase from 2011. The Centre Pompidou held three major retrospectives this year, which helped raise visitor numbers. An exhibition devoted to Henri Matisse (1869-1954) titled Matisse, Paires et séries brought 495,000 visitors; a Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) retrospective brought 425,000; and a show of Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí’s (1904-1989) works has seen approximately 6,700 visitors per day since it opened on November 21.

After attendance figures declined from 2008 to 2010, it appears that the Impressionist institution, the Musée d’Orsay, has bounced back with 3.6 million visitors this year. A 15-percent increase from last year, the boosted attendance numbers were likely the result of the reopening of renovated gallery spaces and a major Edgar Degas (1834-1917) exhibition, which brought 480,000 visitors. The current exhibition, Impressionism and Fashion, is expected to see 500,000 guests before closing on January 21, 2013.