Katharine Lee Reid, currently director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, is the daughter of the Cleveland’s legendary director, Sherman E. Lee, a Chinese-art scholar who ran the museum from 1958 to 1983 and built it into a leading showplace for Asian art. – New York Times
After 27 months and a £54 million modernist fix-up, the Pompidou Museum reopens. For the first time, it is possible to properly take stock of the museum’s extensive holdings from the 20th Century. – The Times (UK)
— to slice through ruins of imperial villa in Rome. – CBC
Siberia’s Krasnoyarsk Lenin Museum wasn’t exactly a cutting-edge institution under the previous regime. But its reincarnation into a modern art museum has been full of imagination. In 1998, the Council of Europe even designated it the best museum in all of Europe. – New York Times
— free to the public the first Sunday of every month. – The Art Newspaper
Think drug cartel and you probably think Colombia. Probably think Medellin, Colombia. Now Fernando Botero, Latin America’s most celebrated living artist, is putting the full force of his renown behind a wide-ranging effort to overhaul the city’s reputation and skyline, installing 79 of his paintings, drawings and sculptures he just donated to the Museo de Antioquia. – New York Times
Betty Greenwood was a secretary at Atlantic Richfield Oil, a hotline counselor and lover of tennis who died in 1992. She loved a pediment filled with colorful sculptures on the Philadelphia Art Museum, which she passed each day on her way to work. When she died in 1992 she left $1 million to “add to the sculptures in any or all of the uncompleted pediments” around the building. But the job has turned into a bigger one than anyone had anticipated. – Philadelphia Inquirer
After a quarter-century Charlie Brown says goodbye to the funnies. – Philadelphia Inquirer
Sculptor Frederick Hart died last summer after a bizarre and largely ignored career. “While still in his 20’s, Hart consciously, pointedly, aimed for the ultimate in the Western tradition of sculpture, achieved it in a single stroke, then became invisible ‘simply because people refuse to see me.'” – New York Times Magazine
— from Oxford Museum on New Year’s day may have been stolen to order. – BBC
