Displaying items by tag: Museum

Filling vacancies in two of the Getty Museum's most important jobs, museum director Timothy Potts has picked Jeffrey Spier, an American scholar with whom he's had a long professional connection, as its new senior curator of antiquities — the top post at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades — and an Italian museum director, Davide Gasparotto, as senior curator of paintings based at the Getty Center in Brentwood.

Gasparotto has been director of the Galleria Estense museum in Modena, Italy, for the last two years, and spent 12 years as a curator and art historian at the National Gallery of Parma.

Rome’s modern art museum, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, is planning an extension that will display contemporary works on loan from its commercial neighbour Gagosian, La Repubblica reports.

Rome’s urban planning commissioner Giovanni Caudo is working on the development of a new wing in an area that lies between the two buildings on Via Francesco Crispi and was formerly used by AMA, the capital’s waste collection agency. The projected 2265 sq. m expansion will allow the museum to exhibit more of its collection.

The American Alliance of Museums announced today that its president, Ford W. Bell, will step down at the end of May 2015, after eight years at the helm. During that time he oversaw a rebranding and restructuring of the AAM, which sets standards and advocates for museums.

Bell was vocal on a number of museum issues during his tenure, including the threatened deaccessioning of works from the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, which he forcefully rebutted.

One of the Taft Museum of Art's best-known paintings – "Europa and the Bull" by Joseph Mallord William Turner, circa 1845 – goes on display next month at the Tate Britain, one of London's foremost museums.

It will be there through Jan. 25, before traveling to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as part of the exhibition "Late Turner: Painting Set Free."

Life with Picasso was never easy, it seems, and neither was the €52 million renovation of Paris's Picasso Museum. After five years of delays and difficulties, culminating in a public quarrel and the firing of its president in May, the museum's reopening is finally set for the artist's birthday, Oct. 25. The public will get a preview of the new interiors, before the artworks are installed, on Sept 20-21. The renovation has doubled the public space, modernized outdated facilities and added a new entrance, a multimedia auditorium and a Cubist garden with geometric topiary trees.

The museum's 17th-century hôtel particulier was built in 1659 by Pierre Aubert, a financier and adviser to Louis XIV. He was also the salt tax collector, and his extravagant mansion was quickly nicknamed Hôtel Salé (salty). The majestic staircase, based on a plan by Michelangelo, is the centerpiece, with delicate ironwork banisters and a sumptuous array of sculpted garlands, cherubs and divinities.

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City is the only museum in the United States devoted exclusively to design. It was founded in 1897 by the Cooper/Hewitt family as part of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Science and Art and became a part of the Smithsonian in 1967. The institution has a collection of more than 200,000 items, houses an amazing design library, offers educational programs, and sponsors the National Design Awards. It is the foremost authority on design in the country but was long overdue for a makeover. Later this year, the museum will reopen with a new identity befitting the nation's preeminent repository of good design but their relaunch has already started online with a new website and a tailor-made typeface.

Ever walk into a museum and think, “Why’d they choose THAT?,” or, “Why did they take down my favorite cat portrait? Nobody leaves until the cat comes back.”

The Frye Art Museum staff feels your pain/strong feelings about art/need to free your inner art historian. So the Frye has launched “You Be the Curator.” Here’s how it works: Images of all 232 of the Seattle museum’s paintings are now on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr.

As part of a deal with prosecutors, the man accused of smashing a vase by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in a museum here pleaded guilty Wednesday to criminal mischief but avoided any more jail time beyond the two days he spent behind bars after his arrest.

Maximo Caminero, a 51-year-old artist from the Dominican Republic, will be on probation for 18 months and serve 100 hours of community service by teaching children how to paint. Mr. Caminero also must pay restitution of $10,000, the appraised value of the vase he dropped on the floor of the Pérez Art Museum Miami on Feb. 16 in what he said was a political act.

The court calls them “The Intervenors,” which sounds as if it could be the name of a performance art collective. If that were true, the past few weeks would have been quite a show for the group Save the Corcoran.

The scrappy group of students, staff, faculty and concerned observers dedicated to preserving the nearly 150-year-old museum as an independent institution in the face of a merger with the National Gallery of Art and George Washington University see themselves as David fighting Goliath — which makes their recent legal intervention the proverbial sling to the forehead. They won’t find out whether they’ve slain their giant until Aug. 20 at the latest, which makes this week an anxious wait.

The Van Gogh Museum has is received its millionth visitor for 2014. The lucky visitor, Mrs. van Waveren from Zwaag, received a bouquet of sunflowers an a voucher for ten gallons of decorative paint after entering the museum. 

As compared with recent years, more attendees are stopping by the Amsterdam museum, which is expecting the rate of visitors to keep rising. Last year saw a total of 1.4 million people pass through the museum’s doors.