Displaying items by tag: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Harold Koda, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has announced his retirement. WWD reported on Tuesday that he plans to enter retirement early next year. 

"If there's anything, my greatest acquisition has been getting Andrew Bolton from the [Victoria and Albert Museum] and putting together all of these incredible things that people don't see. But they are as important than the more visible aspects of our department," Koda told the trade publication. He, Bolton and their 30-person team are currently working hard on the institution's upcoming Jacqueline de Ribes exhibition.

As “China: Through the Looking Glass” comes to the end of its run, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will stay open until midnight, the New York Times reports.

The museum will be open three hours later than usual on September 4 and 5 to accommodate the steady stream of visitors to this summer’s Costume Institute show, which has already drawn more than 730,000 visitors and stands as one of the Met’s most popular shows of all time. (For comparison, the previous record-holder, the Met’s 2011 Alexander McQueen retrospective, was seen by 661, 509 people.)

Today the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York detailed its plans for the Met Breuer, the museum’s annex for modern and contemporary art, which is set to open in March 2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s former, Marcel Breuer–designed headquarters. The high modernist building will be renovated prior to the beginning of the Met’s eight-year lease and will include a “book bar,” the museum announced.

Buoyed by strong international tourism, a spate of well-attended shows and a seven-day-a-week schedule, the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 6.3 million visitors in the last year, the most since it began tracking these statistics more than 40 years ago.

The Met, which announced the figures late Monday, said it was the fourth year in a row that the museum had drawn more than 6 million visitors, keeping it in a rarefied group that includes the National Gallery and the British Museum in London, which both attracted slightly larger numbers, and the Louvre, the world’s biggest draw with more than 9 million in each of the last three years.

Although most buildings in the Near East from late antiquity and the early Islamic period (between around 500 and 1000) do not survive fully intact, the fragments that do remain help shed light on the ingenious ways that artisans transformed architectural surfaces to create sumptuous interiors and monumental façades. Three aesthetic principles that were especially important to the design of architectural ornament in the Byzantine, Sasanian, and early Islamic traditions are highlighted in the exhibition Pattern, Color, Light: Architectural Ornament in the Near East (500–1000), opening July 20 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The New Britain Museum of American Art announces the new permanent Shaker Gallery, one of only three found in U.S. art museums, alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The brainchild of Trustee and Shaker authority Steve Miller, the permanent gallery will rotate pieces from the Miller Collection in addition to gifts and loans on a regular basis, as each exhibition will “focus on” a different Shaker theme.

One of the foremost American genre painters of the 19th century, George Caleb Bingham is best known for his compelling depictions of frontier life along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on June 17, "Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River" is the first major Bingham exhibition in more than 25 years. It will bring together for the first time 16 of his iconic river paintings.

Someday, museums will run out of themes for packaging van Gogh exhibitions, and that’s fine. He’s one of those artists you just want to spend time with, no pretext needed, because he’s some kind of instant soul mate, startling, difficult, vulnerable, always willing to make so much of himself available to you.

Still, a theme, even a broad one, can be useful in directing us to aspects of an artist’s life and work we might not otherwise zero in on. Such is the case with “Van Gogh and Nature,” which opens on Sunday at the Clark Art Institute here and qualifies as one of the summer’s choice art attractions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a special display of four van Goghs and advertises it as a show.

Pairing luxurious textiles from Turkey, Iran, and Syria with richly detailed 17th-century paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters, the exhibition "A Thirst for Riches: Carpets from the East in Paintings from the West" opened June 6 at the Aga Khan Museum. Running until October 18, the exhibition features signature carpets and paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, supplemented by loans from the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto; the Leiden Collection, New York; the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Marshall and Marilyn R. Wolf Collection, Toronto.

Kelly Baum, who for past five years has served as the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum, will join the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Modern and Contemporary curatorial team.

The hiring comes at an important time, after the museum has announced plans to renovate their Modern wing and that in March of 2016 it will expand into the old Whitney Museum building. The building will be known as the Met Breuer and will focus on Modern and Contemporary exhibitions.