Displaying items by tag: Renzo Piano

New York's Whitney Museum of American Art may have opened the doors to its new Meatpacking home in May, but that doesn't mean the Renzo Piano-designed building has revealed all of its secrets just yet. In February, the museum will launch a new program called "Open Plan" on its fifth-floor galleries, taking advantage of the largest column-free gallery space of any of the city's museums.

When Bernard Blistène arrived at the Pompidou Center just over 30 years ago as a young curator, the massive factory-like windows of the Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano-designed museum didn’t look out onto the sun-sprinkled streets of Paris as they do today.

“It was the mid-1980s and people wanted walls,” recalls Mr. Blistène, 60 years old, who succeeded the museum’s longtime director Alfred Pacquement in 2013.

The Morgan Library & Museum, which has been without a leader since late last summer, looked West to bring back a longtime New Yorker as its new director, choosing Colin B. Bailey, who has served since 2013 as director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco but was for many years before that the chief curator at the Frick Collection.

Mr. Bailey, a well-regarded Renoir scholar, succeeds William M. Griswold, who left last year to take over the Cleveland Museum of Art. Mr. Bailey comes to the Morgan almost a decade after an expansion, designed by Renzo Piano, enlarged not only the museum’s floor plan but also its ambitions, moving it more actively into contemporary art, collaborations with other institutions and high-end acquisitions.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is nearly ready to open the doors to its brand spanking new Renzo Piano-designed building in the Meatpacking district. Out with the old, and in with the new. And that means it’s going to be rehanging its world-renowned permanent collection in 50,000-square-feet of indoor galleries, and 13,000-square-feet of outdoor exhibition space, for the inaugural exhibition “America Is Hard to See.”

Today, the museum announced the full list of artists for the show. It’s going to feature an impressive 650 artworks by a whopping 407 artists, with works dating from 1900 to the present. And that cryptic title? It’s taken from a pointy Robert Frost poem about the deception of Columbus’ discovery of America.

It's official: the Whitney Biennial is now brought to you by Tiffany & Co.

With a $5 million gift, the high-end jeweler will be the lead sponsors for the next three editions of the contemporary art survey, through 2021. News of the sponsorship comes on the eve of the opening of the Whitney Museum of American Art's new Renzo Piano–designed building at the base of the High Line.

Advance tickets went on sale Friday for the soon-to-reopen Whitney Museum of American Art, and visitors should prepare for some sticker shock. Ticket prices are now pegged at $22, up from $20 at the now-shuttered Breuer Building.

The Whitney closed its doors on the Upper East Side in October, after a blockbuster Jeff Koons retrospective. Its new location at the base of the High Line at 99 Gansevoort Street between Washington and West Streets, in a building designed by Renzo Piano, will provide the Whitney almost double the exhibition space.

When the Whitney Museum of American Art opens its new building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district on May 1, it’s the big things everyone will notice first: the sweeping views west to the Hudson River; the romantic silhouettes of Manhattan’s wooden water towers; the four outdoor terraces for presenting sculptures, performances and movie screenings; and the tiered profile of its steel-paneled facade, intentionally reminiscent of the Whitney’s Modernist, granite-clad Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, which had been the museum’s home since 1966.

Its new digs, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, also offer commodious interior spaces: 50,000 square feet of galleries, unencumbered by structural columns, and huge elevators that are themselves immersive environments, the work of the artist Richard Artschwager.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum director Anne Hawley, whose 25-year tenure began with a notorious art heist and culminated in a successful $180 million capital campaign, announced Wednesday that she plans to step down at the end of the year.

Hawley said she has been quietly weighing the decision for two years now, as the museum completed fund-raising efforts that included $114 million for the museum’s sleek 2012 expansion, designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, and an additional $50 million to fortify the museum’s endowment.

For nearly half a century, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Marcel Breuer building has dominated Madison Avenue and 75th Street.

But with the Metropolitan Museum of Art preparing to take over the space, a flurry of construction — including what may be an Apple store — could be construed as the Met effect.

In October, the Whitney closed its doors in anticipation of its move to a space designed by Renzo Piano that is scheduled to open in the meatpacking district in May.

On Sunday, November 16, the Harvard Art Museums -- comprising the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum -- reopened to the public under one state-of-the-art roof. The extensive renovation and expansion, which began in 2008, was helmed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. According to Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums, “We [wanted] to create a new kind of laboratory for the fine arts that would support our mission of teaching across disciplines, conducting research, and training museum professionals. We also wanted to strengthen the museums’ role as an integral part of Cambridge and Boston’s cultural ecosystem.”

The renovation involved transforming the landmark Georgian revival building at 32 Quincy Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which housed the Fogg and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, into an arts-centric hub for students, scholars, Harvard faculty, and the public.