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Chronological Installations: Will The Tate Turn The Tide?

May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Visitors walk through the new galleries

For some time now, many museums have been reinstalling their permanent collections in new ways, moving away from a chronological progression to more thematic placements. Supposedly, thematic hangings are easier for visitors to understand -- at least that's the usual explanation for them. Now we have the Tate reversing course. Beginning today, ...visitors can experience the national collection of British art in a continuous chronological display - a walk through time from the 1500s to the present day. BP Walk through British Art will … [Read more...]

05/14/13 6:54 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Uncategorized |

Peer Review: The Best Exhibitions and Publications of 2012

May 12, 2013 by 2 Comments
InventingAbstraction

Praise from peers is often the most meaningful, as long as it's not politicized; that's why I pay attention to the awards for excellence awarded each year by the Association of Art Museum Curators. The other day, that organization gave the blue ribbon to 11 exhibitions, catalogues and articles from 2012. One exhibition "swept" in that it won two of the 11: Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925: How A Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, which was organized by Leah Dickerman with Masha Chlenova at The Museum of Modern Art, won in the Outstanding … [Read more...]

05/12/13 5:41 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Uncategorized |

Is This A Way To Run A Museum? What We Can Learn From Cincinnati

May 9, 2013 by 9 Comments
GWood-Daughters

Yesterday I attended the American Federation of Arts's panel titled "Art Museum Blockbusters: Myths, Facts, and Their Future." But I don't want to talk about blockbusters here, at least not today. I'm going to zero in on some comments made by one of the panelists, Aaron Betsky, director (for now) of the Cincinnati Art Museum (none of them are related to blockbusters, as the session wandered away from its original purpose at various times). I''m singling out Betsky not because of the recent news, or because of what he has done in the past, … [Read more...]

05/9/13 6:59 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Museums, Uncategorized |

What Color Is That Gallery? The Spring Show As Trailblazer

May 2, 2013 by 7 Comments
black

The Spring Show at the Park Avenue Armory, which started today, is a new event in the art calendar. This is its third edition, as fair organizers like to term their annual events. It is a mixed offering -- mixed in the goods on offer (paintings, furniture, silver, jewelry, flags, artifacts, etc. etc.), mixed in quality, mixed in the geographical home of the dealers, and so on. At the opening preview reception last night, I found plenty of things to enjoy and admire, as well as some that were easy to bypass. Art snobs who pass it up are … [Read more...]

05/2/13 3:32 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Uncategorized |

Teaching Technique In The Galleries

May 1, 2013 by 2 Comments
SargentGallery

Having written about the exhibition of John Singer Sargent's watercolors at the Brooklyn Museum before it opened, I was curious to see it in the flesh. I went over the weekend, and am happy to say that it lives up to expectations. One surprise -- the color of the walls behind the artworks, which was melon, verging on orange. But not the neon orange the Brooklyn Museum has used in its American art galleries. Rather, it's a soft orange that you might find in a posh apartment on Park Ave. You can get a sense of it in my picture, at left. You … [Read more...]

05/1/13 7:33 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Exhibitions, Uncategorized |

Mellon And MoMA: A New Kind Of Research Team?

April 30, 2013 by 1 Comment
Keifer-WoodenRoom

Museums conduct all kinds of research, if sometimes fitfully. Recently, I learned of a new effort, though, which might break some ground. It brings graduate students and faculty to a museum's collection. It's happening at the Museum of Modern Art and funded by the Mellon Foundation, though neither one of them has published a press release. The best information I found online was in the form of a job posting. It's for the role of "museum research project coordinator," and despite the low-end title and mostly administrative duties, it requires … [Read more...]

04/30/13 5:41 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Research, Uncategorized |

Carnegie Museum Bids To Become A “Living Laboratory”

April 17, 2013 by 1 Comment
LYNN2-235x300

Photography is big at museums of late -- more exhibitions, more dedicated curators and so on -- and today came an announcement from the Carnegie Museum of Art on the topic: With a gift from the William T. Hillman Foundation, it is launching the Hillman Photography Initiative -- "a living laboratory for exploring the rapidly changing field of photography and its impact on the world." Lynn Zelevansky (below), the museum's director, said that “The Initiative positions the museum to be a leader in a subject area with broad appeal and profound … [Read more...]

04/17/13 8:34 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Museums, Uncategorized |

On Wisconsin! And Cincinnati And Others

April 16, 2013 by 5 Comments
Museum of Wisconsin Art

It's widely recognized now that there's no one art world, no one art market -- and that perhaps is what underpins a couple of recent developments. We'll start with the news early this month that the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, WI., -- which has existed for some 20 years -- has a new building that will raise it profile and provide more space for showing art by residents of the state. Art writer Mary Louise Schumacher wrote about it in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: One of the goals of the museum’s new director and CEO, Laurie … [Read more...]

04/16/13 4:39 PM | filed under: Artists, Curatorial Matters, Uncategorized |

Different Strokes: How To Tell A True Masterpiece Nowadays?

April 11, 2013 by 9 Comments
Vermeer-WwJug

Today's Wall Street Journal carried a review of the renovated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which reopens to the public on Saturday. It's pretty much a rave, and I recommend it. But I found one passage extremely interesting and worthy of singling out and commenting on. First, here's the setup passage: The museum's director of collections, Taco Dibbits, and his curatorial staff have completely restructured the installation of the museum's holdings for the renovated building, arranging 8,000 objects from the museum's permanent collection (an … [Read more...]

04/11/13 12:17 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Uncategorized |

A Little More About SPUN

March 25, 2013 by 2 Comments
MasteroftheBlueJeans

"It's a way to activate our collections." That's one of the outtake quotes from Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, that I did not use in my article published last week in The New York Times headlined In Denver, Exhibits Interveave Genres. (Did anybody catch the importance of "interweaves" in that headline, which signified that the exhibits were about textiles?) I like Heinrich's choice of verb: activate. He was talking about SPUN, Adventures in Textiles, the museum's spin on the range of exhibitions that will be on … [Read more...]

03/25/13 6:12 PM | filed under: Curatorial Matters, Museums, Uncategorized |
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