Displaying items by tag: Renovations

The Joan Mitchell Center just underwent a big renovation of its Treme campus, including upgrades to its historic buildings by Jonathan Tate and a modern new 8,000-square-foot studio building by Lee Ledbetter.

The big addition to the campus is the Ledbetter-designed studio space, a striking modern structure with spare, high-ceilinged studios. They are working to attain LEED certified building, which was built with rainwater management in mind.

New York should be grateful that the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven is closed for renovations. As a result, eight canvases by the inimitable English painter George Stubbs, one of the great artists of the 18th century, have been lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Works by Stubbs are scarce in this town: The Met has one painting, and there’s a drawing at the Frick Collection. This makes “Paintings by George Stubbs From the Yale Center for British Art” a rare and thrilling treat.

The Freer Gallery of Art – the Smithsonian’s first art museum – will close for 18 months for renovations beginning Jan. 4, 2016, officials announced Wednesday.

Repairs to the 180,000-square-foot building, a National Historic Landmark, will include updating the climate control systems and installing technological upgrades to its auditorium and storage and conservation areas. In addition, some of the galleries will be returned to the original aesthetic created by architect Charles Platt.

It doesn’t look like much yet — a chain-link fence around the perimeter of the historic Sarasota High School building, an inconspicuous construction trailer tucked next to the north wall of the building — but work is underway to convert the 1926 Collegiate Gothic building into the Sarasota Museum of Art.

After nearly a decade of fundraising reached (and surpassed) its goal of $22 million in May, structural preservationists conducted a thorough investigation of “every nook and cranny” of the building’s interior, said Wendy Surkis, SMOA president. Now, work begins on the exterior, to ensure the integrity of the building’s “envelope” and to add a glass atrium to the east side of the three-story structure. Interior renovations will follow, with work to be completed in early 2016.

Major grants to fund renovations Springfield - The Springfield Museums have received two major grants to fund exterior renovations to the William Pynchon Memorial Building (formerly known as the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum).

Through $120,000 from the Cultural Facilities Fund of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and another $50,000 from The Beveridge Family Foundation, Inc., the museums will be able to repair and restore the building's slate roof, replace its gutters, rebuild its shutters and dormers, and paint the building in accordance with historical preservation standards. Renovations to the building have already commenced, with completion targeted for the spring of 2015.

The de Blasio's have redecorated historic Gracie Mansion with $65,000-worth of furniture and tchotchkes from Dumbo-based purveyor West Elm. That's right, New York's first family has opted to live amongst the same squat sofas and side tables that grace (get it?) the apartments of just about everyone who's graduated from Ikea. West Elm has donated the sum of interior goods to the Gracie Mansion Conservancy and not the de Blasios per se, so sorry all, there will be no sidewalk give-aways of stained, worn goods when the family departs.

Not everyone is on-board with the de Blasios' choice to decorate the stately manse with rather lowbrow furnishings—the Times made a note that the redecoration saw the removal of a 1690 Dutch-inspired cupboard—especially after Bloomberg's $7 million Baroque-style renovation in 2002.

While the National Gallery of Art’s East Building galleries are closed for renovations, the Modern masterpieces that usually reside within their walls have headed from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. “Modernism from the National Gallery of Art: The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection” is currently on view at the de Young Museum and presents 46 paintings and sculptures by postwar masters, including Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. The show marks the first time that the Meyerhoff Collection has been exhibited outside of the greater Washington, D.C., and Baltimore metro areas.

The exhibition is divided into three generational groupings, creating a sweeping view of American Modern art from the end of World War II through the close of the 20th century. Highlights from the show include Stella’s geometric canvas “Flin Flon IV” (1969), Johns’ haunting encaustic “Perilous Night” (1982), Lichtenstein’s Pop art gem “Painting with Statue of Liberty” (1983), and Barnett Newman’s “The Stations of a Cross” (1958-66), a series of paintings, widely considered to be the Abstract Expressionist artist’s most import work. The canvases will be displayed in their own intimate gallery so that they can be experienced as a single work, as the artist intended.

The Walters Art Museum announced Monday that it's been awarded $913,000 in grants to support renovations and exhibitions at the museum, including a special show on Islamic art scheduled to open next year.

That sum is made up of six individual donations — four from government agencies and two from private foundations — Walters spokeswoman Mona Rock said in a news release.

The bulk of the money, $500,000 will be used to support "Pearls on a String: Art and Relationship in the Islamic World," which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2015.

Boscobel House & Gardens in Garrison, New York has started renovating its iconic Federal style mansion. The project, which began with sweeping historical upgrades to the house’s entry hall, signals long-term future changes for the estate.

Boscobel was built around 1808 in Westchester County by States and Elizabeth Dyckman. The house was saved from demolition, dismantled and moved to its present site in Putnam County in the late 1950s. In 1961, Lila Acheson Wallace and her husband, DeWitt, the founders of “Reader's Digest,” restored Boscobel and opened the estate to the public. In 1977, Berry B. Tracy, then a curator with the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helmed a complete decorative renovation of Boscobel. Boscobel has long been considered one of America’s finest historic homes of the Federal Period.

The renovation to Boscobel’s grand entry hall will include outfitting the walls with new period-appropriate wallpaper, updating the floor with a new historic floorcovering, and re-painting the woodwork trim. Decisions regarding the wallpaper, floorcovering, and paint were based on extensive research performed by Boscobel’s Curator and Collection Manager, Judith Pavelock.

Boscobel’s project for the grand entry hall is slated to be completed this spring.

While renovations on the Fogg Art Museum near completion, the Harvard Art Museums, which includes the Fogg, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and four research centers, has launched a digital version of its arts publication Index Magazine. The site will include articles, interviews and behind-the-scenes news.

The digital version of Index will supplement the print publication, which is available three times a year at various locations around the Harvard University campus. Index’s online iteration will present a platform for discussions about visual culture and content updates will take place daily.