Category: visual

“[The Hood] is due to reopen on 26 January 2019 after a closure of nearly three years for an expansion and revamp by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. The $50m project expands the museum’s space by 50% to over 62,000 sq ft, adds six new galleries and renovates the museum’s original 1985 Charles Moore building.”

50 years after Eero Saarinen’s landmark was dedicated, it has a new museum, a new promenade connecting it to the city, and a new concept. “The arch … has always been beloved because it binds together two feel-good ideas that are essential to American identity: a heroic past of grit and conquest, and a triumphant future of innovation. Now, well into the 21st century, the challenge is how to disentangle and even dismantle those ideas while salvaging the arch as a cultural object. The solution, mostly effective, has been to think in terms of connection, both to the city which hosts it, and to the deeper currents of history that led to its creation.”

“A mural by Keith Haring was revealed in Amsterdam last week, some 30 years after the US artist completed the commission, which was his gift to the Dutch city. The 40-foot-tall mural was painted by Haring in 1986 while he was in town for his exhibition at [the Stedelijk Museum]. It was covered a few years later when the entire facade of the brick building, which was then the Stedelijk’s art storage depot, had weatherboarding added to improve its climate controls.”

“Five hundred years in an alcove of a Spanish church is likely to leave any statue looking a bit cracked and faded, and the 16th-century wooden figure of St. George at St. Michael’s Church in Estella, a town in northern Spain, was no exception. But after the church asked a local workshop to give the statue a makeover, the results horrified the town’s authorities, scandalized professional restorers and set social media alight with indignation.”

“To hit that level of popularity and power is a huge challenge for someone who is just 40 and has to stand in front of the empty canvas knowing that the world is paying ridiculously large sums of money at auction for them. Adrian’s response was to continue to experiment… and that is something that makes people feel like we will still be looking at this guy in 50 years.”

In stark contrast to a more compact design released last summer, the plan, designed by Shohei Shigematsu of the international architecture firm OMA, features a new building on the northwest side of the Albright-Knox campus along Iroquois Drive. Sheathed in what Shigematsu called a “translucent skin,” the transparent ziggurat of a building will allow pedestrians to see inside of its galleries and flexible event spaces. It also will contain a public atrium and café.

“Sometimes, rocks are more than crumbled pieces of the earth. Sometimes, they unveil clues about our planet’s ancient past or future. For archaeologists from the Antiquity of Southeastern Europe Research Centre at the University of Warsaw, the rocks in Shkodër, Albania, turned out to be the ruins of the 2,000-year-old lost city of Bassania.”

The first round of the widely criticized deaccessioning, with works being sold in April and May, only netted $47 million of the museum board’s $55 million goal. Now nine more works will be sold, seven of them privately and two at Sotheby’s; those works include pieces by Bierstadt and Calder as well as Qing Dynasty antiques.

“Aiming at France’s refugee crisis, the anonymous British street artist appears to have targeted Paris with at least three murals and several of his signature rats in various locations. It is the first time the artist has hit the French capital with his brand of social and political commentary.”

“Wisdom of the Earth, a sculpture considered to be one of Brancusi’s defining works, was taken off public view last week. A lawyer representing the sculpture’s private owners said that the museum could not afford insurance for the modernist masterpiece, prompting the collectors to move the work elsewhere. The Romanian Ministry of Culture, which led a campaign in 2016 to bring the sculpture back into public hands, also refused to respond to requests to foot the bill, the lawyer said.”