museums

“In a profound way, the museum experience is a critical one, which is to say it begins by seeing the object—in the case of art museums, the work of art—as in itself it really is and not as our predilections and prejudices think it to be. The opportunity to look hard and long at works of art, to have our first impressions changed and deepened, our expectations challenged and rearranged, reconciled to the works on display, is the promise of art museums. The works of art preceded us. Experiencing them, as they are, requires that we put aside our self-centeredness. And this is good, in the sense put forward by the English moral philosopher Iris Murdoch when she said, ‘Anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism is to be connected with virtue.’”

-James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, in his new book Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum (University of Chicago Press)

Create a clear, strategic approach to the way you use Facebook to market your business in our new Facebook Marketing Boot Camp. The online conference and workshop starts April 24. Learn more.

The J. Paul Getty Museum will soon likely be enjoying some stability for the first time in more than two years, with the announcement that Timothy Potts who has most recently served as the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, will be coming on board as the museum’s full-time director. The Getty’s leadership of late, has been more than a bit in flux, first with Michael Brand‘s sudden and unexpected exit at the start of 2010. David Bomford was named as his acting replacement, until he also hit the road this past December to move back to his native London, leaving still-recently-installed Getty Trust president, James Cuno, to temporarily take over the position. Fortunately for Cuno’s schedule and nerves, Potts will take over at the museum come September 1. Here’s his thoughts on joining the Getty:

I am delighted to be joining the Getty Museum at such a promising time, when its leadership, ambitions and prospects are stronger than ever. Like others in the museum world, I have for many years admired (and sometimes been frustrated by!) the quality of its collecting and the innovative way it pursues its scholarly and educational mission. It has evolved into much more than an artistic showpiece of national and international renown, however. With the Museum and its sister institutes devoted to research, conservation and philanthropy, the Getty represents a uniquely well-rounded ‘university of the arts.’ No other institution does more to collect, preserve and understand the history and materiality of art than the Getty, and I greatly look forward to working with the Museum’s outstanding staff in building on this achievement over the years ahead.

There are many ways to while away the hours between screenings at the Sundance Film Festival: skiing, shopping for ponchos, stalking Robert Redford, donning the aforementioned poncho (four-ply cashmere, vaguely Navajo-inspired) to crash the nearest “celebrity gifting suite.” But this year’s festival offered a new pastime: inspecting models and designs of the buildings proposed for Park City’s Kimball Art Center. Festivalgoers (and anyone visiting the non-profit arts center last month) were invited to weigh in on the five finalists in the design competition for its renovation and expansion project: submissions by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, Brooks + Scarpa Architects, Sparano + Mooney Architecture, Will Bruder + Partners Ltd., and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.

No word as to whether the jury was swayed by the results of the feedback it solicited, but the winner is BIG. The New York- and Copenhagen-based firm proposed “what is in essence a highly evolved log cabin.” BIG envisions a new Kimball Art Center made of massive stacked timber elements (reclaimed from train track piles from the Great Salt Lake) that enclose a spiral staircase, exhibition spaces, and a restaurant, all topped by a terrace. For the historic Kimball Art Center building, located directly adjacent to the new one, BIG proposed that it be renovated into an educational hub with a rooftop sculpture garden. Inspired by the “raw charm of Park City and the Kimball Art Center,” Ingels says that he sought to continue the town’s tradition of repurposing old industrial buildings for cultural purposes. His firm’s winning proposal looks to the construction technique of the old mines and salavaged railroad trestles “to create a raw spacious framework for the art and artists of Park City—a traditional material and technique deployed to produce a highly contemporary expression.” The project is expected to begin in mid-2013 and be completed in mid-2015.

Before planning your next trip, be sure to review the newly crowned winners of the Travel + Leisure Design Awards, which will be featured in the magazine’s March issue (on newsstands next Friday). The 2012 winners range from the Zaha Hadid-designed Sheikh Zayed Bridge in Abu Dhabi to the ultimate in travel-friendly apparel (the 1964 by Scott James blazer and Issey Miyake‘s eminently packable origami folding clothing). Many of this year’s favorites will come as no surprise, including the city-friendly Fiat 500 (best car) and Leica’s drool-worthy D-Lux 5 Titanium Set (best camera). Preston Scott Cohen‘s smart and sculptural Herta and Paul Amir Building at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art got the nod for best museum (edging out the Brad Cloepfil-designed Clyfford Still Museum, alas), and two NYC destinations—Jane’s Carousel Pavilion in Brooklyn and the Freitag Store—won for best public space and best retail space, respectively. Meanwhile, 2012 T+L Design Champion H.E. Mubarak Hamad Al Muhairi, the driving force behind Abu Dhabi’s transformation and evolution as a cultural and design capital, joins past honorees such as ubercollector Micky Wolfson, André Balazs, and Amanda Burden. Tasked with choosing “the best new examples of design” in 20 categories was a jury moderated by Chee Pearlman that included architect Billie Tsien, fashion designer Derek Lam, High Line pioneer Robert Hammond, and artist Michele Oka Doner. Keep reading for the full list of winners.
Read more

“Wendy does not play the typical architecture game of ecological apology,” say the architects of their boundary-pushing pavilion, shown here in a rendering.

Who’s tripping down the streets of the city, smilin’ at everybody she sees? Who’s reachin’ out to neutralize an airborne pollutant? Everyone knows it’s Wendy! That’s right, fans of emerging architectural talent, the spiky and proactive creation of New York-based HWKN (Hollwich Kushner) has been declared the winner of this year’s MOMA PS1 Young Architects Program, besting finalists Ammar Eloueini of AEDS Ammar Eloueini Digit-all Studio (Paris and New Orleans), Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn of UrbanLab (Chicago), and the solid Cantabrigian (Massachusetts) contingent: Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim of I|K Studio and Cameron Wu.

Now in its thirteenth year, the Young Architects Program program challenges each year’s winners to develop creative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. HWKN’s “Wendy,” which will debut in Long Island City in late June, is composed of nylon fabric treated with a nifty titania nanoparticle spray to neutralize airborne pollutants. This summer, Wendy will clean the air to an equivalent of taking 260 cars off the road. “Wendy crafts an environment—not just a space,” note the architects of their 5,000-square-foot creation. “Spikey arms reach out with micro-programs like blasts of cool air, music, water canons, and mists to create social zones throughout the courtyard.” And speaking of summery social zones, HWKN also was recently tapped to design a new entertainment complex to replace the Fire Island dance club, Pavilion, that burned down last year. The firm is collaborating with Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the project.

With Dallas awash in Shepard Fairey murals, it’s time to get ready for the next stop on your Southern U.S. street art tour! Atlanta’s High Museum of Art is now putting the finishing touches on its major KAWS exhibition. Opening next Saturday, February 18, “KAWS: Down Time” will be the beloved Brooklyn artist (né Brian Donnelly)’s largest show of new work to date and offers visitors the opportunity to watch him paint a 22-foot-high, site-specific mural in the lobby. A jazzy 24-foot-long triptych will invigorate the museum’s atrium. Meanwhile, curator Michael Rooks has marshaled an impressive gallery installation highlighted by a grid of 27 tondo paintings, like the 2011 Sponge Bob-meets-a giant flower pillow canvas that in November set a new world auction record of $188,500 for the artist at Takashi Murakami‘s “New Day: Artists for Japan” charity sale at Christie’s. The auction took place just days before the High installed KAWS’s monumental 2010 sculpture “Companion” (pictured) on its piazza. “KAWS has created a new order of American Pop,” says Rooks, who joined the High in 2010 from New York’s Haunch of Venison gallery. “His work is uncannily familiar but foreign at the same time, like in a dream, and it unites the often distant worlds of fine art and youth culture.”

“It had a great feeling of unreality. I mean, I was a designer of china; I was not in the business of killing Stalin. Imagine yourself! Most of the time I did not believe that I would have an opportunity to relate this to anybody. I really did not. There was very little probability that I would live—nobody wished me well.”

-Designer Eva Zeisel (1906-2011) in her prison memoir, published in issue 14 of A Public Space. On Thursday evening, Cooper-Hewitt director Bill Moggridge kicks off a new year of Bill’s Design Talks with a tribute to Zeisel. Joining Moggridge on stage at The Greene Space will be art critic Jed Perl (The New Republic) and the designing duo of James Klein and David Reid (KleinReid), who collaborated with Zeisel on a series of ceramics and prints. Buy tickets here.

Philip Johnson‘s Glass House will soon have a new leader manning the transparent and modern ship. Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation announced that Henry Urbach will be taking over as director of the historic architectural landmark in New Canaan, Connecticut. Urbach most recently served as curator of architecture and design at SFMOMA, having taken leave from the position last spring to work independently, which included research work at the Glass House itself. Previously, he’d also run a popular gallery in New York for nearly a decade, the eponymous Henry Urbach Architecture. It is currently planned that he will take on the roll at the Glass House on April 2, replacing its current interim director, Rena Zurofsky, who had this to say about his selection:

I met Henry last spring and was struck by his energy and enthusiasm for the site. He seems to me ideal to lead the dedicated Glass House team into even more innovative and exciting programmatic terrain, and to push restoration programs on track. I congratulate Henry, and also Estevan Rael-Galvez, Vice President of Sites at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, on his astute choice.

After surviving a very rough and tumble summer, starting around mid-October, things were began looking tough again for both the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim and the Louvre wing that was also set to go up in the Middle Eastern cultural hub, and it only got worse from there. First, there was a semi-innocuous delay on the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim there, blamed originally on some government contract disputes. Then, as more news was released about a mass of unpaid bills and the entire United Arab Emirates quickly pulling their money out of any and all cultural projects to focus instead on Arab Spring-related matters, it was sounding like both projects might be entirely abandoned. So dire did it seem that the Guggenheim was quick to ramp back up their interest in building a new arm in Helsinki (though this could have been just convenient and beneficial timing). However, it now seems like perhaps both the Guggenheim and the Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre extensions have been placed back on track and all the worry may have been for naught. Yesterday, the Abu Dhabi Tourism Development and Investment Company announced that work will soon resume on the projects, as well as the surrounding Saadiyat Cultural District in which both will call home. The only thing changed will now be the opening dates, pushed back by a number of years. The Louvre, originally set to open sometime next year, is now slated for 2015. The Guggenheim, also originally set to open in the next year or two, has been pushed back to 2017. A long time to wait, for sure, but both institutions must be breathing a sigh of relief in knowing that, at least for now, the projects haven’t been abandoned.

What started as but a rumor back in 2008, and followed by the slow progression of hiring an architect and then hunting for donations, is finally all starting to come into factual fruition for London’s Design Museum. This week the organization unveiled a first look (pdf) at what will become their new home sometime in 2014. Build upon the former home of a government-funded research institute, the new space has been designed by John Pawson and is estimated to cost somewhere in the $100 million range to develop. The move is set to not only give them “three times more space” but also put the Design Museum closer to the city’s other cultural touchstones, like the V&A, the Royal College of Art and the Serpentine Gallery. In addition to this first batch of official details, the museum has also released this quick video tour of their soon-to-be new digs: