Displaying items by tag: Museum

Before 10 a.m. on a recent steamy morning, lines started forming up the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with visitors clutching New York City street maps waiting patiently for the doors to open.

While the museum has always been a magnet for tourists during the summer months, New Yorkers who frequent the Met should be aware that there are many new things to see in its permanent galleries. Keith Christiansen, chairman of the museum’s European paintings department, has shaken things up a bit, hanging works lent for the summer and uniting treasures that have recently returned home after traveling to exhibitions around the world.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Dance at Bougival” is on the cover of the Museum of Fine Arts’s highlights handbook for a simple reason: It’s one of the museum’s most beloved works.

It’s also one of Renoir’s greatest. Six feet high and more than 3 feet wide, it shows a handsome couple dressed in the latest summer fashions, dancing at an open-air cafe on the outskirts of Paris. The chalky pink dress of the woman — who was modeled by the trapeze artist and painter Suzanne Valadon — fans out around her feet as she twirls. The man, modeled by Renoir’s friend Paul Auguste Llhote, leans in amorously. (Llhote was a well-known seducer).

Perhaps there is no better symbol of the clout of Aspen’s art world habitués than the new Aspen Art Museum. Opening to the public August 9, following a weekend of preview parties, the museum’s latest home was designed by Pritzker prize winner Shigeru Ban, who has created a shimmering three-story building resembling a wooden crate in the center of town.  Its striking latticework façade, with a woven wooden screen covering a glass curtain wall, not only lets the light in, but affords passersby a glimpse inside. Each of its many apertures is unique, “a great metaphor for art,” Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, the museum’s director, noted as she led me on a hard hat tour the other day, pointing out the Japanese architect’s love of such materials as cardboard tubes, recycled paper and wood. “Shigeru dislikes monumental architecture, “ she said. “You won’t find any marble in here.” The museum is Ban’s first in the U.S. He is best known for his humanitarian projects designing shelters after natural disasters in such places as Japan, Rwanda and Haiti.

Paris’s Musée du Louvre has announced an anticipated thirty percent increase in its annual attendance over the next 11 years. By 2025, reports the Art Newspaper, the world’s most visited museum (see artnet News report) expects to welcome 12 million annual visitors, up from a record 9.3 million in 2013.

As reported by artnet News last week, the Louvre is among a number of French institutions considering to open its doors a full seven days a week, following the lead of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, and major museums in London and Madrid.

The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) is planning to expand, Art In America reports. As part of the expansion plans the city will lend the neighboring Convent dels Àngels to the museum for an unspecified period together with the Plaça dels Angels square, which is located between the 16th century cloister and the museum.

Although MACBA has frequently used the chapel for performances and site-specific installations, by lending the additional 21,500 square foot space to the museum on a longterm basis, the city, “Reaffirms its commitment to making Barcelona one of the world capitals in contemporary art and culture,” according to its statement.

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) is exhibiting a new installation drawn from the museum’s Native American art collection — the oldest, most comprehensive ongoing collection of its kind in the Western hemisphere.

Raven’s Many Gifts: Native Art of the Northwest Coast celebrates the rich artistic legacy of Native artists along the Pacific Northwest Coast while exploring dynamic relationships among humans, animals, ancestors and supernatural beings. Featuring nearly 30 works from the 19th century to present day, the installation includes superlative examples of works on paper, wood carvings, textiles, films, music and jewelry. Raven’s Many Gifts is on view through mid-2015.

The world’s largest museum devoted to contemporary art from Africa is under construction in Cape Town. The $50 million Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) will be housed in a disused, colonial-era industrial structure consisting of 42 towering, nine-story-tall grain silos on the waterfront in Cape Town.

“It has been my life dream to build a contemporary art museum in Africa,” Mark Coetzee, the former director of Miami’s Rubell Family Collection and executive director and chief curator of Zeitz MOCAA, told the AFP.

A handful of business are pledging almost $27 million toward the Detroit Institute of Arts’ commitment to raise $100 million as part of a “grand bargain” that will help the city emerge from bankruptcy, support pensioners and protect the museum’s art collection for the public.

The $26.8 million comprises $10 million from Roger S. Penske and Penske Corporation, $5 million from DTE Energy, $5 million from Quicken Loans and the Rock Ventures Family of Companies, $2.5 million from BCBSM, $1 million from Meijer, $1 million from Comerica Bank, $1 million from JPMorgan Chase, $800,000 from Consumers Energy and $500,000 from Delta Air Lines Foundation.

Tom Gilmore, the developer who helped wake the sleeping giant Downtown 15 years ago with his multi-building Old Bank District project, makes things happen. So his proposal for a contemporary art museum in the heart of the Historic Core should have legs—he's already working with SCI-Arc professor/architect Tom Wiscombe on designs for the Old Bank District Museum, which will occupy basements, rooftops, and mezzanines of the Hellman Building, Farmers and Merchants Bank Building, and the Old Bank Garage, all at Fourth and Main. Gilmore is also shoring up financing on the project with business partner Jerri Perrone. And art is arriving already, the Downtown News reports, with a two-and-a-half-ton sculpture that was moved from the Arts District to the roof of the Old Bank Garage a few months ago; it now anchors the home of a forthcoming sculpture garden.

When architect Jon Traficonte arrived at the Frick Art & Historical Center for the first time, he wasn't quite sure where to go.

Like a lot of first time visitors, he couldn't see the entrance to the art museum and didn't know where to check in for a tour of Clayton or how to locate the Henry Clay Frick family's former home.

Many guests toured the house or museum without being aware of the Car and Carriage Museum, the Frick Cafe or the greenhouse on the property.