by Laura Feinstein Nordic countries aren’t known for their mild climates. Whether it’s the near-mythic winter darkness of the Scandinavian “polar night,” or the periods of 24-hour light that characterize the Midnight Sun, this is a region of stark contrasts. “Darkness & Light:…
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Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, currently home to exhibitions of the work of Marcel Wanders and Jeff Wall (and book your flights now for September when the Marlene Dumas retrospective will occupy a circuit of 15 rooms), has found a new director in Beatrix Ruf (pictured), the current director of the Kunsthalle Zürich. She succeeds Ann Goldstein, who was artistic director at the Stedelijk for the past four years, and will jointly lead the museum with managing director Karin van Gilst. Ruf will start her involvement with the museum immediately and take up her new role on a full-time basis in November.
As director of the Kunsthalle Zürich since 2001, Ruf initiated and oversaw the completion of an extensive reconstruction and expansion, commissioned numerous installations, and initiated projects such as the survey exhibitions of Yang Fudong and Ian Wallace, among others. In 2006, she was the curator of the successful third edition of the Tate Triennial in London. “I feel very honored, and am very moved, to be entrusted with the opportunity to be director of the Stedelijk Museum and to lead its extraordinary exhibition history and its collection into the future, together with the entire Stedelijk team,” said Ruff in a statement announcing her appointment. “Its courageous and outstanding contemporary—as well as art historical—exhibitions and world-class collection of modern and contemporary art and design were always a beacon and example in my own professional thinking and in numerous discussions with artists and colleagues. The Stedelijk Museum is a museum that shows us how to live in the present and how the future can be built on tradition.”
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Spring has—finally, allegedly—sprung in the land of polar vortices and cultural institutions are in the mood for hiring. The Addison Gallery of American Art, located on the Andover, Massachusetts campus of Phillips Academy, has found its new director in Judith Dolkart (pictured), who currently serves as deputy director of art and archival collections and chief curator at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. She’ll begin in her new role at Andover in July, succeeding Brian Allen, who last summer joined the New-York Historical Society as vice president and museum director.
Also making a move is New York-based arts writer and editor Margaret Sundell. The Drawing Center has appointed her to the post of executive editor of the Drawing Papers. Her duties will include “recruiting writers, commissioning essays, editing the Drawing Papers, and maintaining the highest standards for all published institutional texts,” according to a statement released yesterday by the Soho institution.
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Cover yourself in Jackson Pollock‘s inky drips, schlep your stuff under the cover of Warholian camouflage, and wear the creative feats of Keith Haring on your feet—all for less than the price of admission to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The institution has teamed up with Japanese fast-fashion chain Uniqlo on a line of wearables printed with images from works in the MoMA collection, including details from two of Pollock’s 1950 works on paper that have been transposed to cotton t-shirts, a tote bag covered in a collage of Basquiat drawings, and a bandanna featuring Warhol’s tomato-red can of Campbell’s soup from 1962. The Uniqlo at MoMA collection, part of the retailer’s SPRZ NY (“Surprise New York”) project, is now available at at the MoMA Store as well as Uniqlo. Nothing is over $50.
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Smile and say “neo-plasticism”! President Obama, Gemeentemuseum director Benno Tempel, Mayor of The Hague Jozias van Aartsen, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte with Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie. (Photo courtesy Gemeentemuseum Den Haag)
As the HQ of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court (among other globe-spanning, peace-making organizations), The Hague is known more for tribunals and arbitration than as a hotbed of art and design, but the Dutch city—the third largest in the Netherlands—is quite the trove of masterpieces and exquisite museums, and boasts a city hall designed by Richard Meier (and don’t even get us started on Scheveningen!). Those visiting this week for the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit got a taste of the North Sea city’s charms. President Obama found time between defcon-themed discussions to pop into the Art Deco-style home of Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, which owns the largest collection of work by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, and took in the museum’s “Mondrian & De Stijl” exhibition. Joined by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, Gemeentemuseum director Benno Tempel, and mayor of The Hague Jozias van Aartsen, Obama admired Mondrian’s final painting, Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), and, according to the museum, declared it “fabulous.”
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It was during a break in a college art history course discussion of Saussurean signifiers that we got to chatting up the dashing head teaching fellow, then in lukewarm pursuit of his Ph.D. After some good-natured banter about the arbitrariness of the sign, we ventured into more rational territory: “So, what are you writing your thesis about?” The color swiftly drained from his face and he stared at the ground before mumbling words that were only later discernible as “the sculptures of Roy Lichtenstein.” Everything turned out for the best, and the TF in question is now an associate professor at a leading research university, but to this day we can’t pass one of the Pop artist’s fiberglass houses or aluminum brushstrokes without feeling slightly queasy.
If anything can undo that association it’s the Parrish Art Museum. Next week the museum’s stunning new(ish) Herzog & de Meuron-designed home in Water Mill, New York will get its first long-term, outdoor installation in Lichtenstein’s Tokyo Brushtroke I & II (1994), part of a series of sculptures constructed mainly in the 1990s. The soaring, two-piece sculpture, made of painted and fabricated aluminum, tops out at 33 feet, taller than the museum itself: a monolevel extruded barn-as-studio made both rugged and stealth by cloudy concrete walls and a white corrugated metal roof. A temporary loan from collectors Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman, Tokyo Brushtroke I & II will sit (in a cement brace) near Montauk Highway, acting as a colorful signpost of sorts for the Parrish.
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Intrepid blue-smocked street photographer Bill Cunningham turned 85 yesterday, and the New York Historical Society marked the occasion with a press preview of an exhibit of his photographs. We dispatched writer Nancy Lazarus—via bicycle, of course—to take in the architectural riches and fashion history of New York through Cunningham’s lens. The show opens to the public today.
(All photos courtesy New York Historical Society)
While his images don’t depict biblical times, Bill Cunningham did delve back to the Civil War, Victorian era, and Gilded Age for his eight-year-long project, Facades. From 1968-1976, the New York Times photographer who documented social, architecture, and fashion trends collected over 500 outfits and shot more than 1,800 locations around New York City. Editta Sherman, his friend, neighbor and fellow photographer, served as project collaborator and frequent subject.
Cunningham donated 88 black-and-white images from his photo essay to the New York Historical Society in 1976, and 80 gelatin silver prints and enlarged images are on display through June 15. Valerie Paley, NYHS historian and vice president for scholarly programs, curated the exhibit, and she said assistant curator Lilly Tuttle, found the photos in the museum’s archives. “We have so many undiscovered treasures, and we’re delighted to rediscover them,” said Paley.
Although Cunningham wasn’t on hand for yesterday’s preview, Paley said he was enthusiastic about the exhibit and had pitched in to locate details of specific photos. Many of his quotes accompany the exhibit highlights. The display is arranged by historic era, and additional photos in the collection are projected onto the walls of the museum’s side entrance rotunda.
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New York architect Steven Holl has released two movies about the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, China, a building designed to recreate the “parallel perspectives” that are characteristic of Chinese landscape paintings.
The first of the two movies depicts a typical day at the museum, which is located at the entrance to an architectural complex within the Laoshan National Forest Park. The second is a guided tour from Steven Holl that explains how he and collaborating Chinese architect Li Hu came up with the design.
According to Holl, the building was designed as a sequence of walls that angle in different directions to confuse a visitor’s sense of perspective.
“It gives you a feeling of mystery about the space. It’s not really clear what’s parallel to what,” he says. “This had to be worked out on the site. We had to actually position these walls while standing and manipulating the space on the site, that was the only way it could be done.”
The concept to create “parallel perspectives” around the building was inspired by the Chinese artists who rejected the single-point-perspective approach of Western painters in favour of images that allow the viewer to travel between vistas.
“The first drawings were about the courtyard,” says Holl. “You can see the way the landscape is organised in these parallel perspective walls, creating conditions where there’s not really the sense of a vanishing point but there’s a kind of a sense of warping the space.”
The base of the building is a black concrete volume surrounded by walls imprinted with the texture of bamboo, while the upper section is an illuminated glass tunnel raised up on columns. It is surrounded by a landscape of fields and pools.
“This landscape comes down to an edge, but the edge isn’t quite yet the building because there’s this edge of bamboo against a freestanding wall which also creates an ante space before you get to the condition of the parallel perspective,” says Holl.
Galleries are located on all three floors of the building, creating places for displaying contemporary art and sculpture. “The condition of space isn’t exactly box-like, but it is more or less orthogonal and that gives a good background for the art,” added the architect.
Movies were produced by Spirit of Space. Photography is by Xia Zhi.
Here’s some extra information from Steven Holl Architects:
Steven Holl Architects presents two films on the Sifang Art Museum
Steven Holl Architects in collaboration with Spirit of Space has created two short films on the Sifang Art Museum, which opened in November 2013 in Nanjing, China.
The film series explores the changing perspectives as visitors move through the new Sifang Art Museum, from the lush green landscape of the Pearl Spring near Nanjing, through the Museum’s entry court and lower gallery, to its floating upper gallery. The film, A Conversation with Steven Holl, presents Steven Holl on site, as he explains the design concept for the new building.
Designed by Steven Holl with Li Hu, the Sifang Art Museum explores the shifting viewpoints, layers of space, and expanses of mist and water, which characterise the deep alternating spatial mysteries of the composition of Chinese painting. The museum is formed by a “field” of parallel perspective spaces and garden walls in black bamboo-formed concrete over which a light “figure” hovers. The straight passages on the ground level gradually turn into the winding passage of the gallery above. Suspended high in the air, the upper gallery unwraps in a clockwise turning sequence and culminates at “in-position” viewing of the city of Nanjing in the distance. This visual axis creates a link back to the great Ming Dynasty capital city.
The courtyard is paved in recycled Old Hutong bricks from the destroyed courtyards in the centre of Nanjing. Limiting the colours of the museum to black and white connects it to ancient Chinese paintings, but also gives a background to feature the colours and textures of the artwork and architecture exhibited within. Bamboo, previously growing on the site, has been used in bamboo-formed concrete, with a black penetrating stain. The museum is heated and cooled by geothermal wells, and features a storm water recycling system.
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of mystery” says Steven Holl appeared first on Dezeen.
Portuguese studio CVDB Arquitectos has created a tapestry museum with vaulted ceilings, marble walls and funnel-shaped skylights inside a twelfth-century hospital building (photos by Fernando Guerra + slideshow).
The Tapestry Museum is located on the edge of a plaza in the small Portuguese town of Arraiolos, which is famed for the embroidered wool rugs and carpets that have been in production there since the Middle Ages.
CVDB Arquitectos planned the interior of the two-storey building so that galleries on both floors surround a double-height atrium with an arched ceiling.
Square windows offer views through into the galleries on the two long sides, while a single first-floor balcony at the far end offers a vantage point where visitors can survey the space.
A local marble combining shades of grey and white covers the atrium floor and continues through the rest of the ground-level spaces, occasionally wrapping up onto the walls.
“It’s a very local material,” architect Joana Barrelas told Dezeen. “Because we were refurbishing an existing building that is itself very noble, we wanted to use a material that has the same character.”
Vaulted ceilings added during the eighteenth century were retained and repaired in the galleries and multi-purpose spaces of this floor. Each have been painted white and feature decorative mouldings.
Marble staircase treads lead up from the atrium to the larger exhibition rooms on the top floor, where the floor surface switches to Brazilian oak that has been left unpainted to display natural yellow and pinkish hues.
“It’s a different noise as you walk over the first floor, rather than the ground floor,” added studio co-founder Diogo Burnay.
The roof and first-floor ceilings were completely restructured to create a series of funnel-shaped skylights, allowing light to filter evenly through each of the galleries.
Only one room maintains the old roof construction, which comprises a row of wooden trusses topped by a long narrow skylight.
Glazed doors reveal a first-floor terrace with a marble bench. From here, guests can look out over the town or down to a small courtyard just below.
The historic exterior of the building was restored and repainted, while a new staircase was added at the rear to allow tapestries to be easily transported in and out of the building.
Photography is by Fernando Guerra.
Scroll down to read text from CVDB Arquitectos:
Tapestry Museum in Arraiolos
The Tapestry Museum in Arraiolos occupies an existent building that once was Espírito Santo Hospital. The building is located in the main square of Arraiolos (Lima de Brito Square), a small town in Alentejo, Portugal. This public space streamlines the town’s social and cultural life. It gathers the Municipality and some commercial services. The Tapestry Museum contributes to consolidate the character of the square as qualified public space, in the urban tissue of Arraiolos.
The existent building congregates a diversity of interventions and transformations registered along its history. Some of its features needed to be preserved and integrated in the rehabilitation process. The project is based on the adaptation of a contemporary architectural language to the existent building, in order to guarantee a consistent exhibition path explaining the process of making Arraiolos’ Tapestries and their history.
The rehabilitation process was developed in compliance with functional programme requirements and technology demands. The programme is organised according to a central axis which contains the access and distribution areas. The central distribution space establishes the connection between the three main public areas of the building (temporary exhibition/multipurpose room on the ground floor; exhibition area on the first floor and education services on the ground floor).
This space is considered the core of the Tapestry Museum. The architectonic features of the space rely on its double-height and vaulted ceiling. The existence of window-like openings and passages allows a diversity of visual connections through the core to the surrounding areas.
In the ground floor of the building, the vaulted ceilings were preserved. In the multipurpose room the structural system was remade with metallic beams, according to a contemporary architectonic language.
The intervention in the first-floor ceilings was more comprehensive. All the roof area was replaced by a set of ceilings shaped as “inverted funnels” with a skylight on the top. The structure of the roof was maintained only in one room, characterised by a sequence of wood trusses topped by a long skylight.
There’s a new light over the old Espírito Santo Hospital, coming from the new Tapestry Museum, a building that enhances the cultural life of Arraiolos.
Location: Lima e Brito Square, Arraiolos, Portugal
Architecture: CVDB Arquitectos – Cristina Veríssimo and Diogo Burnay with Tiago Filipe Santos
Design team: Joana Barrelas, Rodolfo Reis, Ariadna Nieto, Ângelo Branquinho, Hugo Nascimento, Inês Carrapiço, José Maria Lavena, Laura Palma e Miguel Travesso.
Structure, foundations and services: AFA Consult
Landscape: F&C Arquitectura Paisagista
Rehabilitation consultant: Prof. Arq. José Aguiar
Client: Câmara Municipal de Arraiolos
Total cost: €1.000.000,00
Gross area: 1.200,00 sqm
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features marble walls and vaulted ceilings appeared first on Dezeen.
The J. Paul Getty Trust is serious about sharing. The institution, which encompasses the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Foundation, is following its “Open Content” program that set free some 5,000 high-resolution digital images for use, modification, and publishing with a virtual library. Translation: 45 years of art books for free. Among the 250 (and counting) of the Getty’s backlist titles now available to read online or download as PDFs are the 2004 catalogue of the first-ever exhibition of Cézanne’s watercolor still lifes (“a moving examination of this most subtle and luminous of mediums and genres,” according to Getty President and CEO James Cuno), the definitive English translation of Otto Wagner’s Modern Architecture, and books on globe-spanning conservation projects. We suggest igniting your winter reading list with Kevin Salatino‘s Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe.
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