Displaying items by tag: Museum of Arts and Design

On April 28, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) unveils a major exhibition examining the contributions and the legacy of women working in the applied arts during the mid 20th century, a time when curatorial attention and prestige were lavished on
 their male counterparts and those working in the fine arts. Installed on two floors of the museum, “Pathmakers: Women in Art, Craft, and Design, Midcentury and Today” showcases works by three dozen artists associated with craft centers such as the Bauhaus in Germany and later, the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.

Shannon Stratton has been named chief curator at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). Stratton will assume the new role in June, succeeding MAD’s retiring chief curator, Lowery Stokes Sims. “Shannon brings a bold curatorial vision to MAD, combining energetic new thinking with leadership skills honed over twelve years as the founder of a non-profit art space,” Chairman Lewis Kruger said in a statement, referring to Stratton’s work as the executive director of Threewalls, a contemporary art organization in Chicago.

Pier Sixty was at least a bit calmer last night than the name of the evening’s main event would suggest. The MAD Gala was a lively scene, but more notable for the refinement of its revelers than any chaotic debauchery on their behalf.

But that’s fitting, after all, since the Museum of Arts and Design has recently sought to bring a more cohesive unity to the two wide-ranging charges to which the institution owes its name. Director Glenn Adamson, who has now been with the institution for just over a year, has worked to bridge the arts and design elements of MAD’s programming with a renewed focus on craft, and craftspeople. One need look no further than the museum’s current survey of emerging designers and craftspeople from Latin America to find his vision put in place.

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York is celebrating the legacy of its founder Aileen Osborn Webb with the exhibition “What Would Mrs. Webb Do? A Founder’s Vision.” Featuring a variety of objects created over the past sixty years, the show highlights Webb’s advocacy of American craft and explores how she championed the skilled maker as integral to America’s future.

A patron and philanthropist, Webb pioneered an understanding of craftsmanship and the handmade as a creative driving force behind art and design. In addition to founding MAD (originally the Museum of Contemporary Crafts) in 1956, Webb helped launch a number of crafts-related institutions, including the American Craft Council, the School of American Craftsmen, and the World Crafts Council.

New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (formerly the American Craft Museum) is currently hosting its inaugural “NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial,” an exhibition that highlights the city’s vast and varied creative communities. The first show to be organized under the leadership of the museum’s new Director Glenn Adamson, “NYC Makers” spotlights the work of 100 artisans, artists, and designers, living and working in New York City. The roster runs the gamut from famous creative figures such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and multimedia artist/singer-songwriter Yoko Ono to furniture designers, fashion designers, and architects.

The goal of the exhibition is to further the museum’s ongoing commitment to craftsmanship across all creative fields, promoting not only makers who exhibit their work in a museum setting, but also those who operate behind the scenes or on a more practical level. Makers featured in the exhibition were nominated by a pool of over 300 New York City-based cultural leaders, including curators, choreographers, academics, and journalists. Finalists were hand-picked by a jury led by Adamson and exhibition curator Jake Yuzna, the museum’s Director of Public Programs, based on their mastery of their respective craft.

The Museum of Arts and Design in New York has appointed Dr. Glenn Adamson as the new Nanette L. Laitman Director. Adamson, who previously worked at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, will succeed Holly Hotchner, who stepped down at the end of April. Adamson will assume his role at the Museum of Arts and Design on October 15, 2013.

Adamson helmed the V&A’s Research Department, which oversees, evaluates and supports the development of museum projects. In this role, Adamson helped bring major exhibitions to fruition, managed partnerships with other institutions and led academic fundraising. He also contributed to the museum’s publications, educational programs, media outreach and commercial activities. Before joining the V&A in 2005, Adamson served as Curator for the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which collects and promotes research within the field of decorative arts.  

An advocate for the reconsideration of craft as an inescapable cultural force rather than an unassuming art classification, Adamson has had a profound effect on makers as well as craft historians and theorists. He has published a number of books on the subject and is founding co-editor of the academic, peer-reviewed Journal of Modern Craft.

Adamson said, “I am honored to have been selected to serve as the next director of MAD…I look forward to building on the museum’s recent successes and to working with the museum’s visionary board and senior leadership to enhance and extend MAD’s potential.”

Thanks to a generous gift from longtime museum donors, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art added 37 new pieces, including vessel forms and sculpture, to their permanent glass collection. The acquisition includes works by notable glass artists such as Michael Glancy (b. 1950), Klaus Moje (b. 1936), Ann Warff Wolff (b. 1937), and Richard Marquis (b. 1945).

LACMA’s glass art collection, which focuses on studio glass from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s, contains more than 100 objects, most of which came from Greenberg and Steinhauser who started donating to the institution in 1984. The museum’s relationship with the couple is so strong that earlier this year Greenberg and Steinhauser invited LACMA officials to handpick works from their personal collection for the museum. Besides their substantial glass gift, Greenberg and Steinhauser made a monetary donation to LACMA to go towards educational programs about glass.

Greenberg and Steinhauser’s collection boasts 400 to 500 works and is considered among the top five studio glass collections in the United States. The couple began avidly collecting in the mid-1970s and slowed down around the mid-1990s when sculpture and nontraditional forms became more prominent than the vessel art they adored. The duo has since taken to collecting contemporary photography.

In celebration of the studio glass movement’s 50^th anniversary, Greenberg and Steinhauser decided to disperse most of their collection to a number of institutions across the country. The couple will keep 15 to 20 sentimental pieces for themselves and the rest of their works will go to LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the Corning Museum of Glass. Greenberg also hopes to donate works to the Smithsonian, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, the Mint Museum, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the Racine Art Museum, although arrangements with those institutions still need to be made.

Hand-made objects, long subservient to an artificial hierarchy of the arts established in the Renaissance, underwent a paradigm shift in the postwar period, defined here as 1945 to 1969, and became an assertive form of artistic expression. Craftspeople found affirmation in the creations of Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi, who roamed freely across media and disciplines without regard for superficial divisions. The changed status of craft was not widely accepted by the fine arts world, but the altered relationship was nevertheless made plain by those who appropriated craft-based materials and techniques into aspects of postwar art, and by craftspeople whose work addressed such fine-arts concerns as process, form, and content (Fig. 1).