museums

Buy design. Goods for sale at the new online home of the Shop at Cooper-Hewittt.

Whether you’re in the market for a hollowed-out half dollar, a megaphone-shaped iPhone speaker, a “living necklace,” a magazine designed to double as stunning wrapping paper, or a silicone-filled ostrich egg (Father’s Day gift alert!), the new Shop at Cooper-Hewitt has something for you. With its physical home in the throes of a $64 million renovation, the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum is expanding into new realms, from Governor’s Island (where on Saturday, it will open the highly anticipated “Graphic Design—Now in Production” exhibition) to cyberspace. It’s the digital realm where the museum has relaunched its famously well-curated shop, overseen by newly appointed director of retail Robert Nachman. The Cooper-Hewitt tapped Marque Creative to design the new site, which features seamless checkout, integrated member discounting, and enhanced search capabilities. “A true design destination for online consumers, the Shop offers a selection of works by established and emerging designers that will surprise, delight, and inspire,” said associate director Caroline Baumann in a statement announcing the relaunch. Plus, shop purchases are sales-tax exempt and all proceeds go to support the museum’s educational goals and mission—as if you needed more reasons to splurge on a hand-beaded Hella Jongerius bowl.

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“At the Otsuka Museum of Art in Naruto City, [Japan], a committee of six art historians determined the most important works of art in the Western world. The Otsuka Pharmaceutical Group funded the ambitious project of photographically replicating more than 1,000 works on ceramic board, in the original size, orientation, and installation position. Museum directors, curators, and artists’ descendants authenticated the works as exceptional reproductions. The museum calls attention to the authentic nature of the works with words such as ‘real’ and ‘exact,’ and by making little distinction between copy and original, claiming that the image-replications allow visitors ‘to appreciate the true artistic value of the original works.’ The introductory text reassures guests that, if the original works eventually perish in a natural disaster or expire from conservation problems, the reproductions are guaranteed to keep their ‘shape and color’ for 2,000 years.”

-Rebekah Modrak, in Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice (Routledge)

Remember those commercials featuring Zack the Legomaniac? His real-world, adult equivalents are known as LEGO Certified Professionals, a designation that only a dozen people worldwide have achieved. One of them is Adam Reed Tucker, a Chicago architect-turned-“architectural artist” that now builds exclusively with tiny plastic bricks. “Working with my hands, creating art and sculpture, the freedom to create and explore my own vision of design without computer reliance, and to share architecture with the world all made this a natural move for me,” he says. “I wanted to work on ways to inspire and motivate those familiar with architectural elements and those with no design knowledge at all.”

Tucker is to thank for the LEGO Architecture product line, launched in 2008 with kits devoted to the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. He’s also the tireless brickbuilder behind “LEGO Architecture: Towering Ambition,” on view through September 3 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Tucker’s 15 globe-spanning LEGO landmarks (including the Empire State Building, Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Fallingwater, and the Burj Khalifa) recently got some new neighbors, as the museum welcomed LEGO versions of 15 Central Park West (downsized by its original designers, Robert A.M. Stern Architects) and a couple of hometown favorites: a Metro station (ZGF Architects) and a traditional center hall colonial home (Gulick Group). Total brick count on the three models? 77,000. This weekend, Tucker returns to the museum to put the finishing touches on his LEGO White House. Stop by between noon and 4 p.m. on Saturday or Sunday to join in the architectural fun. Can’t make it to Our Nation’s Capital? Build your own LEGO White House (considerably smaller than the museum version) with this 560-piece kit. No word as to whether the gift shop also sells a LEGObama figure to place inside.

(All photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“I never thought people would want to wear clothes with monkeys and bananas on them,” said Miuccia Prada of her spring 2011 collection, a retail smash that featured madcap cotton separates printed with baroque scrolls, embroidered monkeys, and thick stripes. And the bananas? A wink at Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker. More than 70 years earlier, when Miranda was still working the carnaval circuit in her native Brazil, Elsa Schiaparelli was feeling a circus theme. The designer described her summer 1938 collection as the “most riotous and swaggering” one she had ever created, and illustrator Christian Berard immortalized the “circus parade at Schiaparelli’s” in Vogue. “Clowns, elephants, horses, decorated the prints with the words ‘Attention a la Peinture,’” said Schiaparelli of her Barnum-infused couture. “Balloons for bags, spats for gloves, ice-cream cones for hats, and trained Vasling dogs and mischievous monkeys.” The two fanciful collections meet at long last in the “Naïf Chic” gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” which opens today.

Curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton reveal the striking similarities between Schiaparelli and Prada by focusing on seven areas of aesthetic kinship, from “Ugly Chic” and “Hard Chic” to “The Classical Body” and “The Surreal Body.” That last one is the showstopper, celebrated in a final gallery of mirrors (pictured directly above) that tricks the eye into perceiving an infinity of Dali collaborations, trompe l’oeil accents, furs, feathers, and pailletes, which Prada believes are irresistible to women. (“Paillettes are a typical form of eveningwear,” the designer has said. “Because I hate eveningwear, I try to make pailletes problematic—by making them so big or so heavy, for instance, that they become problematic.”) It can be a challenge to tell a Prada from a Schiaparelli, particularly when hefty fabrics and exotic textures are involved, but as Judith Thurman writes in an essay in the masterpiece of an exhibition catalogue designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, “Prada’s citations of Schiaparelli are an exercise in sampling, not imitation. They enrich and complicate, rather than merely translate her models, and they illustrate the way that critics and artists of every generation reinvent the formal language they inherit.” Prada is neither a copycat nor someone who is interested in translating the work of the contemporary artists she collects into covetable clothing. For her, art is an entirely separate barrel of monkeys.
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• Can you believe graduation season is upon us? Pratt Institute holds its commencement—the 123rd in its history—this afternoon at Radio City Music Hall. In addition to approximately 1,300 bachelor’s and master’s degrees, honorary degrees will be awarded to artist Ai Weiwei (he’ll accept his doctorate of fine arts via video feed), architect Santiago Calatrava, patron of the arts and education Kathryn C. Chenault, and Philippe de Montebello, director emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fiske Kimball Professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Calatrava will deliver the commencement remarks.

• The Met Ball wasn’t the only black-tie event in town on Monday. Over at Avery Fisher Hall, the focus was on food, not fashion, as Alton Brown emceed the James Beard Foundation awards gala. In the restaurant design category, Bentel & Bentel triumphed for their overhaul of famed Le Bernardin, while graphic gourmand Richard Pandiscio took home the Outstanding Restaurant Graphics medal for his work for the Americano at Hotel Americano. Meanwhile, Jeff Scott‘s two-volume, 900-page Notes from a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession (Tatroux) was named best photography book.

• And speaking of kitchens, artist and kitchen semiotician Martha Rosler is preparing for her first solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and it’s a doozy. Come mid-November, she’ll transform the museum’s atrium into a giant “meta-monumental” garage sale. That’s where you come in: the general public is invited to donate items—clothes, books, records, toys, costume jewelry, artworks, mementos—for Rosler to sell. Click here for the schedule and collection locations for donations. Why not seize the opportunity to get your artwork into a MoMA show?
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Will Anna Wintour wear a zany Schiaparelli chapeau and Prada cat-eyed shades? Will Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the evening’s honorary chairs, spread his infectious laugh from one end of the red carpet to the other? Will attendees be forced to swap their bejeweled clutches for shiny new Kindles? Who will stumble in their Prada racecar shoes? Find out for yourself this evening as the Metropolitan Museum of Art webcasts the arrivals to the Costume Institute Benefit that celebrates “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.” The livestreaming fun begins here at 6:30 p.m., when Vogue-approved hosts Billy Norwich and Elettra Wiedemann will chat up gala co-chairs including Wintour, Carey Mulligan, and Miuccia Prada, along with whoever else swans past them in a sufficiently whimsical and/or impossible ensemble. Special pre-taped segments will offer a sneak peek at the exhibition, which opens to the public on Thursday, as well as the history of the gala benefit. Look hard and you might just spy Pentagram’s Abbott Miller, who designed the exquisite catalogue.

“There may be only one designer more absolute in her confidence than [Miuccia] Prada: her fellow-honoree at the Costume Institute. [Elsa] Schiaparelli did more than any of her peers to promote fashion’s status as an art, and she would no doubt have found it natural to mingle at the Met with Phidias and Vermeer. Prada’s statements about art suggest that she must find her own enshrinement somewhat ironic. Her fortune has financed an adventurous private collection, an exhibition space outside Milan, and a foundation that supports cultural experiments. In 2010, she was invited to present the Turner Prize at Tate Britain, partially in recognition of her prominence as a patron. (She wore a pair of plastic banana earrings with a stark black coat.) She has also worked with the Dutch architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas on the design of her major retail spaces, which she calls ‘epicenters,’ in New York and Los Angeles. Yet Prada insists that her vocation and her avocation are unrelated. She has refused to collaborate on limited editions of Prada merchandise with any of the art stars in her collection. (‘Anything that doesn’t sell,’ she once said dryly, ‘is a limited edition.’) In her somewhat heretical view of a profession that often hankers after transcendence, fashion design may be a creative enterprise, concerned, as art is, with culture and identity, but it isn’t what artists do.”

-Judith Thurman in “Radical Chic,” her New Yorker preview of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s imminent spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations”

Above: Elsa Schiaparelli in a 1932 portrait by George Hoyningen-Huené and Miuccia Prada photographed by Guido Harari in 1999. (Photos: Hoyningen-Huené/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive and Guido Harari/Contrasto/Redux)

Call a somnambulance. The multimedia goodness of the Sleepwalkers box.

Doug Aitken is up to his old tricks: enveloping museums in high-definition video projections that illuminate their facades and mesmerize passersby, which in the case of his latest project may include President Obama. The Los Angeles-based artist has transformed the National Mall’s Gordon Bunshaft-designed concrete donut (also known as the Hirshhorn) into a 360-degree convex-screen cinema aglow nightly through May 13 with his “SONG 1.” Meanwhile, the Seattle Art Museum recently commissioned Aitken to wrap a corner—the northwest, bien sûr—of its downtown HQ in a jumbo LED display that will debut early next year. The months between these Washingtonian works provide ample time to savor the Sleepwalkers box, an ultra-covetable multimedia remix of the public artwork that took New York by nocturnal storm in 2007.

Part deluxe commemorative edition, part DIY-spirited artist’s book, the Sleepwalkers box is a bold collaboration between Aitken, the Princeton Architectural Press, and DFA Records. The perforated cardboard cover reveals and conceals a fold-out poster of scenes from the five urban narratives (starring the likes of Donald Sutherland, Tilda Swinton, and Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power) that were projected onto the exterior of the Museum of Modern Art. Set that aside to discover a turntable-ready vinyl “picture disc,” which the strong-willed will manage to avoid framing as an art object. A book of “fragments, markings, and images” from the making of Sleepwalkers includes breathtaking full-bleed images as well as an interview in which Aitken discusses the installation with Jacques Herzog. “Your work needs an ideal architectural conservation to unfold its quality,” advises the architect.
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Michael Heizer’s “Isolated Mass/Circumflex (#2)” (1968–72), an earth sculpture embedded into the front lawn of the Menil Collection in Houston. (Photo: The Menil Collection)

In 1945, while on a business trip to New York, John de Menil picked up a souvenir—a dreamy little Cézanne watercolor sketch—and a drawing collection was born (the purplish pink mountain scene soon had good company in works by the likes of Picasso and Magritte). More than 60 years and 1,200 drawings later, the Menil Collection established the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center, “dedicated solely to the collection, exhibition, and study of modernist drawing, including the medium’s role in contemporary artistic practice.” Now the museum is adding a separate facility on its Houston campus to house the growing drawing collection, and today announced a shortlist of contenders to design it: Tatiana Bilbao (Mexico City), David Chipperfield Architects (London), Johnston Marklee (Los Angeles), and SANAA (Tokyo).

“The Menil’s campus is one of the world’s most cherished cultural landscapes. We intend to move forward with respect to what exists, preserving and nurturing its spirit as we move forward in the Menil’s tradition of commissioning exceptional architecture,” said Leslie Elkins Sasser, chair of the Menil’s architecture selection committee, in a statement issued this morning. “Each of the four firms we have selected for the short list, after months of research, travel and discussion, have the potential to achieve a remarkable addition—for our campus, for our city of Houston, and for the many visitors from around the world.” Despite his London HQ, Chipperfield may have something of a home-court advantage, as he recently created the well-received master site plan for the Menil campus. A final selection is expected in June.

If over the years you had developed a vague idea of what types of public talks and concerts the Metropolitan Museum of Art would be hosting over any given week, you’ll need to run out and get a new calendar. Yesterday, the Met announced that its annual performance and talk series will be renamed “Met Museum Presents” and would be varying fairly substantially from years prior, all due to last summer’s hiring of new Concerts & Lectures General Manager, Limor Tomer. While you’ll still see plenty of classical pieces being performed, Tomer has said that she’s interested in tying those performances together with current exhibitions, so there will be programs like composer Tan Dun performing a Chinese opera to go along with an exhibition devoted to Chinese garden imagery. In the business world, we think they call that “synergy.” The new “Met Museum Presents” will also introduce for the first time, a performing artist residency, kicking things off with DJ Spooky, the celebrated musician, artist, and writer, who will perform five times at the Met, as well as hosting “a number of panel discussions, conversations, workshops, and gallery tours for audiences.” He is set to begin the residency this October, which will run through to next June.