Hasta La Ideas

The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University continues its pace toward becoming a real, full-fledged institution with two new announcements this week. First, following the hiring of their first director, Michael Rush, last summer, they’ve now landed Alison Gass as their new curator of contemporary art. Gass, who was picked last year by the NY Times‘ as one of nine up and coming curators, has worked in New York for the Jewish Museum, the MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum, and most recently on the other coast as an assistant curator at the SFMOMA. Second in the new news, the Broad recently announced its first two debut exhibitions:

The Broad/MSU’s inaugural exhibitions, curated by founding director Michael Rush, include “Global Groove 1973/2012,” which will use Nam June Paik’s seminal 1973 video “Global Groove” as a jumping off point to explore current trends in international video art, and “In Search of Time,” which will investigate artists’ expressions of time and memory by creating dialogues among works by artists including Josef Albers, Romare Bearden, Damien Hirst, Toba Khadoori, Andy Warhol, Eadweard Muybridge and Sam Jury, among others.

The Broad Museum, in its nifty new Zaha Hadid-designed building, is set to open on April 21st of next year.

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In the throes of a massive renovation, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is a hive of design news. Today the institution announced that it has raised the $54 million required for the overhaul, a collaboration between design architect Gluckman Mayner Architects and executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle that will increase Cooper-Hewitt’s exhibition space by 60 percent (to approximately 16,000 square feet), as well as reconfigure conservation and collection-storage facilities. Meanwhile, much progress has already been made: renovation is complete on the museum’s two townhouses, which house the—new and improved!—National Design Library, the master’s program in the history of decorative arts and design, and administrative offices. Now comes the main event: renovating the Carnegie Mansion, a task that entails historic preservation (including restoring the exterior masonry and freshening up the wrought-iron fence) and is aiming for LEED certification. When the museum reopens in 2013, visitors will discover a spectacular, new third-floor gallery where the library used to be, as well as expanded and restored galleries on first and second floors.

“It is thrilling to see our vision for Cooper-Hewitt’s redesign becoming a reality,” said Bill Moggridge, director of the museum, in a statement issued today. “Restoring and transforming the Carnegie Mansion and elevating and expanding the museum’s online user experience will broadly increase access to the museum’s rich resources, scholarship, and collections.” Renovation on the digital front will be masterminded by Aussie tech guru Seb Chan, the newly appointed director of digital and emerging media. He comes to Cooper-Hewitt from the the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, where he brought the museum’s collection online, integrated digital content production into everyday practices, and pioneered the use of mobile devices, QR codes, and iPads to deliver gallery experiences. Chan names “increasing public access while communicating the important role of design in building a better world” as among his top priorities for Cooper-Hewitt. Tonight mediabistro.com founder and hostess with the mostest Laurel Touby opens her home for a party to welcome Chan and toast to successful expansion in the physical and virtual worlds.

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There’s to be some new blood at New York’s High Line soon. It’s been announced that Cecilia Alemani has been appointed the new curator and director of the High Line Art Program, taking over from Lauren Ross, who left the position at the start of the summer after having taken a job at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa. Alemani had previously worked as an independent curator and writer, working with organizations like the Tate Modern, the MCA in Chicago, and the MoMA and its P.S.1, to name just a few. Most recently she was found guest curating for Performa 11 and collaborating on the Frieze Art Fair in London. Here’s a bit from the announcement:

“After an extensive search, it is clear that Cecilia is the best candidate to lead High Line Art. Cecilia is a thoughtful, forward-thinking curator who will bring an innovative approach to structuring the public art program on the High Line,” said Donald R. Mullen, Jr., the founding supporter of High Line Art and Board member of Friends of the High Line. “I have often said that the High Line is the new museum mile. High Line Art celebrates the park’s role in connecting two neighborhoods that make up the cultural hub of New York City, with the more than 400 galleries and cultural organizations that populate the streets below the park. Cecilia’s curatorial leadership will elevate High Line Art to new level in New York City and the international art world.

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For those, of which there were many, who either regularly disagreed with, or outright despised, one of the country’s most high profile architecture critics, the NY Times‘ Nicolai Ouroussoff, their red letter day finally came at the end of June, when he left the paper to pursue writing books. Now it’s come time to judge the new guy: Michael Kimmelman. As we told you back in early July, upon his hiring, Kimmelman was an internal transfer at the paper, moving both from its “Abroad” section (he’d also previously worked reviewing music and was the Times‘ lead art critic for a stint) and from Berlin, where he’d been living since 2007, to take on the new post. Yesterday marked both his first review for the paper in the new position (a look at a new housing project being built in the South Bronx), as well as penning a short introduction for himself for the Arts Beat blog. Here’s a bit from that:

…I’m interested in urbanism, city planning, housing and social affairs, the environment and health, politics and culture — in all the ways we live, in other words, and not just in how buildings look or who designs them, although those things are inseparable from the rest. The influence on architecture of social scientists and medical experts now investigating how actually to quantify the success and failure of buildings, to establish criteria of proof, an increasingly important word, in terms of, say, the claims of green and healthy sites, seems no less urgent than Zaha Hadid’s or Norman Foster’s latest undertaking. Who uses works of architecture, and how, and who benefits from them and who doesn’t, also matters, obviously, and from Colombia to Coney Island, Dubai to Detroit, ways of rethinking these issues have already begun to reshape thinking in architecture schools and offices and beyond.

It’s early days, for sure, but we’re certain there’s already lots of speculation on how he’ll differ from his predecessor. Tangentially related, the NY Observer made note that Kimmelman’s first review made the front of the Times‘ homepage, something very rare for architecture criticism, and something they wonder might be a sign of either lending more importance to the subject or was just a on-off passing mention because they have someone new steering the ship.

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