Displaying items by tag: storage

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has brought hundreds of donated antiques out of storage to offer at Manhattan auctions this fall.

In the last few weeks, the museum has sold paintings and sculptures at Doyle New York auction house, including a portrait of Thomas Sully’s daughter Ellen Wheeler that Sully painted in 1844, which went for $17,500.

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announces that it will be the recipient of a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections (SCHC) Implementation Grant will be in the amount of $250,000 outright, with an additional $50,000 in matching funds.

The SCHC grant will support PAFA's construction of a collections storage expansion project on the fifth floor of its Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building. This project will provide a brand new space for the storage and care of the museum's immense Works on Paper and Archives Collections. Construction will begin in late 2015.

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.

Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger will open a gigantic new Zurich gallery to the public in June 2015 with a solo show by Spanish painter Miquel Barceló.

Spread over 250,000 square feet, the complex is currently open by appointment only. It comprises galleries, offices, storage, as well as spaces for Bischofberger's extensive art collection. A folk art museum is also in the pipeline.

The new complex has been years in the making and radically transforms the site of a former car factory in the south east of the city.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla is planning to expand its museum space to make room for more art.

The museum’s current building is big enough to exhibit 50 to 75 works of art. Close to 4,000 pieces in its permanent collection sit in storage vaults. The proposed expansion would triple the exhibition space to 30,000 square feet.

The firm chosen to design the expansion, Selldorf Architects, is led by German-born, New York resident Annabelle Selldorf, who was in town this week to meet with museum staff and give a lecture about her work.

Leighton House, once the London home of Lord Leighton, is mounting its most ambitious exhibition since it opened as a museum in 1900. The permanent collection will go into storage to provide space to display 50 Victorian paintings belonging to the Mexican businessman Juan Antonio Pérez Simón.

Pérez Simón, who has long been in business partnership with the telecommunications tycoon and fellow art collector Carlos Slim, has been buying Victorian art since the 1980s, almost entirely at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Culture officials in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine have ordered museums to put their most valuable pieces into storage, and some institutions have closed to the public, as fighting continues between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces.

Ukraine’s culture ministry has also asked that the media refrain from “emphasising objects of cultural heritage” to avoid their being targeted, according to an 8 August statement on the ministry’s website. This comes after reports that two of the city’s museums have been damaged by artillery fire.

Paintings by postwar abstract artist Mark Rothko are highly coveted — in May one of his works sold at auction in London for $50 million. But oddly enough, Harvard University has had a handful of Rothkos — faded by sunlight and splattered with food and drink — in storage. Now, new technology has led to a potentially controversial restoration.

Retired Harvard curator and conservator Marjorie Cohn was an apprentice at the Harvard Art Museums around the time Rothko was commissioned to create wall-sized paintings for a new space at the university's Holyoke Center. When the painter arrived with his finished, rolled-up canvases in 1963, Cohn remembers the entire conservation department showed up to stretch the huge plum and crimson-colored paintings onto wooden frames.

On July 11 the British Museum unveiled its World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre (WCEC), one of the largest developments in its 260-year history. The center is a significant addition to the Museum’s estate of notable architecture.

Designed by lead architect Graham Stirk of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP), Stirk described its style as an “architectural vocabulary quite new to us . . . emotional modernity.” The Centre comprises five pavilions with a public temporary exhibitions gallery accessed through the main east entrance. The Centre as a whole, however, is a non-public “support” building. Three of the Centre’s five pavilions plug into a three-sided courtyard behind the Museum’s King Edward VII building; a fourth aligns with the King Edward street frontage; and the fifth is 68 percent below ground with a light-filled atrium. The pavilions will house world class conservation studios, science laboratories, storage, and a collections hub for loans. Stirk and RSHP architect John McElgunn led a tour for the press.

A government audit of 1,218 French museums has revealed that some 80% do not know the full contents of their collections, with many collections facing further serious hazards, Libération reported. The preliminary document, released Wednesday after eight months of research and ahead of a full report due at the end of the year, cites several shocking oversights; for example, the Louvre is critiqued for storing Classical sculptures in a subterranean chamber that could not be properly evacuated in the event of an overflow of the Seine river. Noting instances of theft, the report states that numerous collections are kept under insufficient security measures. Issues of provenance related to World War II looting continue to plague several institutions, the report adds, blaming inadequate resources for the incomplete cataloging and other issues.