Hasta La Ideas

(Photo: Lawrence K. Ho for the Los Angeles Times)

• “Wow. I didn’t realize it was so…big.” Such was the gobsmacked refrain of people all across Los Angeles this weekend, as the space shuttle Endeavour battled traffic to arrive fashionably late at a party held in its honor last night at the California Science Center. “In a city whose residents are accused of disdaining public space, the orbiter’s tour led Angelenos to crowd sidewalks 10 or 12 deep as well as drawing thousands of people who live north of the 10 Freeway to boulevards south of it,” writes Christopher Hawthorne in today’s Los Angeles Times. “It packed gas stations and strip-mall parking lots with crowds.” It’s like a brain-searing Bruce Wagner subplot come true!

• In other left coast museum moves, Thomas Kren (who is not to be confused with Thomas Krens) has been appointed associate director of collections for the Getty Museum. Stepping into his previous role as senior curator of manuscripts is Elizabeth Morrison. Both have plenty of experience in their new roles. Kren, who joined the Getty Museum in 1980, has been serving as acting associate director for collections since January 2010. Morrison, who joined the manuscripts department in 1996, has served as its acting senior curator since January of this year.

• Back in New York, Johanna Burton has been appointed Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum. Beginning January 2, 2013, she will oversee all of the museum’s educational, interpretive, and theater initiatives, including the Fifth Floor Education Center and the Museum as Hub global partnership. Burton is currently director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and was formerly associate director of the Whitney Independent Study Program. She succeeds curator Eungie Joo, who has decamped to rural Brazil to serve as director of art and cultural programs at the contemporary art museum Xanadu of Inhotim.
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Big news at Gap Inc., which has tapped Rebekka Bay (pictured) as creative director and executive vice president for Gap global design. Beginning October 1, she will be responsible for product sold online and in the nearly 1,600 stores in 42 countries in which Gap operates. No pressure. News of the appointment comes more than a year after Patrick Robinson was sent packing.

Bay knows fast fashion. She conceptualized, developed, and launched COS, the “timeless modern tactile functional” brand of H&M parent Hennes & Mauritz. Since 2011, Bay has served as creative director at Copenhagen-based Bruuns Bazaar, overseeing the design of “contemporary, edited, and precise” women’s and men’s apparel. “Over the past 17 years, a passion for design and a deep understanding of what consumers want have driven Rebekka Bay’s thriving career,” said Art Peck, president of Gap’s North American division (and Bay’s new boss, along with Gap International President Stephen Sunnucks), in a statement announcing the appointment. “Her designs are timeless and covetable.” Bay will be based in New York, managing design teams there and at the 1969 office in Los Angeles, and will work closely with Pam Wallack, who leads the Gap Global Creative Center.
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Fall 2012 looks from Christopher Kane, Mary Katrantzou, and Stella McCartney.

As London designers wait in the wings for their turn on the global fashion stage, the British Fashion Council has announced the nominees for this year’s British Fashion Awards, which will be presented at a ceremony on November 27. In another across-the-pond fashion news, Net-a-porter’s Natalie Massenet has just been appointed chairman of the British Fashion Council. She’ll replace departing chairman Harold Tillman on January 1. “My experience is in merging extraordinary creative content with innovative global commerce,” said Massenet, who will retain her position as executive chairman of Net-a-porter. “From January, together with Caroline Rush [CEO of the British Fashion Council] and her team, I aim to apply these lessons to my new role, a role I take incredibly seriously.” And now for those nominees:

Emerging Talent Award – Ready-to-wear: J.W. Anderson, Michael van der Ham, Simone Rocha

Emerging Talent Award – Accessories: Dominic Jones, Jordan Askill, Sophie Hulme

Emerging Talent Award – Menswear: Agi & Sam (Agi Mdumulla and Sam Cotton), Jonathan Saunders, Lou Dalton
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• Charles L. Venable (pictured) is the newly appointed director and CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. He starts on October 8. For the past five years, Veneble has served as director and CEO of Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, where his achievements include spearheading a planned 200,000-square-foot expansion featuring a new building for modern and contemporary art designed by wHY Architecture. The “new Speed,” which will include a new art park and piazza for outdoor sculpture, is slated to open in 2015 (meanwhile, 95% of the $50 million tab has already been raised). At the IMA, the venerable Venable will succeed Maxwell Anderson, who became director of the Dallas Museum of Art in January.

• Want to explore masterpieces from the Getty without looking up from your digital device? There’s an app for that. The new J. Paul Getty Museum Highlights of the Collections app (yours for $2.99) allows you to browse through 150 of the museum’s greatest hits, from Van Gogh’s “Irises” (your aunt loves this one so much she bought the tote bag) and Bernini’s sculpture of a “Boy with a Dragon” to Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother and a recently acquired Klimt drawing (happy 150th, Gustav!). Each of the objects is accompanied by a brief commentary and can be viewed in detail through high-definition images.

• Back in Gotham, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is celebrating a new attendance record: 6.28 million people visited the Met (including the Cloisters museum and gardens) during the fiscal year that ended on June 30—662,000 of those visitors stopped by last summer’s Alexander McQueen blockbuster, which also boosted the 2011 attendance numbers because of its timing. Virtual visitors are also on the rise, with the museum reporting 44 million to its website in fiscal year 2012.
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• We’re still waiting for an opera devoted to the happenings of a few years ago at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum: secret meetings, deaccessioning schemes, legal threats, resignations, and finally, renovations! Having clarified the differences between an art museum and an ATM, the university is ready to restore the bloom to the Rose with a new director: Christopher Bedford (pictured), chief curator of exhibitions at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. He’ll begin his new role on September 15 at the ripe old age of 35. Among his top priorities: to integrate the museum’s collection into the university’s curriculum and “to commission a major work of public sculpture for the exterior of the museum that connects to ideas of social engagement and social justice,” Bedford said in a recent interview. “Those concepts are central to my thinking and to the core ideology of Brandeis, too.”

• The Rhode Island School of Design looked across the ocean to find its new dean of architecture and design. Pradeep Sharma, who starts this fall, comes to Providence from England’s Bath Spa University. As head of the Bath School of Art and Design, he managed the school’s operations, finances, facilities, assessment, academic program development, as well as the student experience, all while maintaining his own ten-year-old design management and consultancy practice. With degrees in electrical and information sciences as well as industrial design engineering—and a doctorate in management in the works—he is as enthusiastic about digital technologies as he is about hands-on studio learning. “Pradeep brings a keen interest in howthe architecture and design disciplines can work together with the fine arts and the liberal arts to inform each other’s practice,” said RISD provost Rosanne Somerson in a statement announcing his appointment.
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