museums

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), which is currently exhibiting the ICP's Richard Avedon restrospective as well as a survey of photos from its own collection, is housed in a glorious 1927 Beaux-Arts building that recently underwent a seven-year renovation and reinstallation. Architecture buff Jim Garrett decided to pay tribute to the Paul Philippe Cret-designed museum by recreating it in LEGOs. He describes his "brickitecture" DIA as "selectively scaled down" (a scale model would be about three times wider and longer) but didn't sacrifice detail. For dramatic effect, a Thomas Crown Affair-style art heist is in progress on the roof. Garrett's other creations include LEGO versions of the Detroit Public Library and the Sphinx, as well as an eleven-foot tall model of Detroit's Penobscot Building.

Previously on UnBeige:

Saving Detroit's Soul, One Funk Karaoke Contest at a Time

LEGO Makes Child's Play of Frank Lloyd Wright Icons

Neiman Marcus Offers Life-Size LEGO Likenesses for $60K

While architects may be facing only a 50% chance at finding a regular paying gig these days, fortunately in New York there are a couple of charitable arms out there trying to help out. The L Magazine profiles the work of The Bronx Museum of Arts and the MoMA, both of which are trying to open their doors up to architects who likely haven't been having the best couple of years. The Bronx decided to run an exhibition featuring architects' ideas for redesigning the Grand Concourse that runs through the borough, while the MoMA has opened up space at P.S.1 for research projects concerning "flood problems as a result of global warming" for the NY area. So while it's not like the museum industry has faired much better since the economy's fall, but it's nice to see one group trying to help another, despite these trying times.

You're familiar with the recently buzzed about blog, Letters of Note, right? It's a fun site, run by Shaun Usher, who created it as "an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos." It features things like famous people writing to other famous people about famous things, historically important documents of all sorts, and pieces of writing made funny in hindsight. That latter category wound up sharing with the world a bit of an embarrassment for the Museum of Modern Art late last week, when the site published a rejection letter they had sent to Andy Warhol in the mid-1950s. The museum was turning down the now-famous artist as he tried to donate a piece from his "Shoes" series. Although the letter has appeared in books and elsewhere on the internet, the growing popularity of Letters of Note brought it out in the limelight again, which led to the museum having to shrug if off and once again regret this long-ago decision. But what can you do, right?

In a kind of cultural patrimony twist on "You break it, you own it," the Metropolitan Museum of Art today returned to Egypt an ancient Egyptian granite relief fragment that was identified by museum staff as part of a large shrine. The fragment, which has never been on public display at the Met, was on loan to the museum from a collector who claims to have purchased it in the 1970s. It is inscribed with the name of Amenemhat I, who ruled Egypt from 1991 B.C. to 1962 B.C.

Putting the pieces together was Dorothea Arnold, chairman of the museum's Egyptian art department, who matched the fragment with a photo of a red granite naos, a shrine used to house a statue of a deity, that was missing a corner of its base. The chipped naos in question is located in the Ptah Temple of the Karnak complex, near Luxor. "The fragment on loan to us looked like it might fit this larger work. With my colleague Adela Oppenheim, we found a publication which set out the inscription on the naos in Karnak and we compared that inscription with the inscription on the fragment—the pieces fit together perfectly," said Arnold in a statement issued by the museum. "We decided that, in these circumstances, the appropriate thing to do was to alert the Egyptian authorities and to make arrangements with the owner so that we could return the fragment to Egypt." And if we know Zahi Hawass, he'll be waiting at the Cairo airport with balloons and a cake.

While the MoMA's new tower might now be going up, everything else seems to be falling apart. Daniel Libeskind's Denver Art Museum is finally getting fixed for leaks and Populous' less than a year old Yankee Stadium is starting to crack (as was its team last night -- sorry, this writer couldn't resist). Now just to the north, in Amherst, Massachusetts, another bit of architectural calamity. Homestead, the house Emily Dickinson liked to be reclusive in, suffered a blow this week when part of its ceiling collapsed. The house is part of the larger Emily Dickinson Museum, which has since closed in order to evaluate the damage and see what can be done to get it fixed. Here's a bit:

The ceiling that fell is not original to the house, [executive director Jane H. Ward] explained -- the plaster was laid over wire mesh, not lath -- and was probably installed in the 1960s, when the house was privately owned. For once, an overflowing tub was not to blame. "It appears that the plaster just detached itself from the wall," Ms. Ward said, "but we won't really know the extent of the damage until the inspection is completed."

Spanning the globe, or at least the continent, we bring you news of freshly appointed directors at two esteemed art institutions. Klaus Biesenbach, he of the consummate curatorial skill and ultra-minimalist apartment, has been named director of P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, part of New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) since 2000. He succeeds P.S.1 founding director Alanna Heiss, who retired last year. Biesenbach, currently chief curator of media and performance art at MoMA and chief curatorial advisor at P.S.1, takes office as director in January, when he will also become MoMA's chief curator at large. In the meantime, Biesenbach is busy putting the finishing touches on the 2010 MoMA retrospective of the work of Marina Abramovic and co-organizing the New York installation of the touring exhibition "William Kentridge: Five Themes," opening at MoMA in February.

Over in Seattle, Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, former director of the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, is the new director of the Frye Art Museum, which was established in the 1950s as a private foundation and museum. Its founding collection focuses on late 19th and early 20th century European art with an emphasis on artists associated with the Munich Secession. Last year, Birnie Danzker curated the museum's 2009 "Munich Secession and America" show, which taught us the word Künstlergenossenschaft. Bringing things full circle, she served as exhibition director of "The Short Century" and shown at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and...P.S.1.

Print may be dying, but paper endures, whether cut, burned, shredded, scribbled on, or sculpted into elaborate art installations. The Museum of Arts & Design tears into the topic with "Slash: Paper Under the Knife," the third exhibition in its Materials and Process series. On view through April 4 of next year, the exhibition explores the creative possibilities of paper through the works of paper-loving artists such as Olafur Eliasson, who in 2006 reproduced a cross-section of his house (at a scale of 85:1) on 900 sheets of laser-cut paper in a sort of anti-pop-up book, and Kara Walker, whose painstaking paper cut-outs explore themes of race, gender, and the shadier side of American history.

(Photos: Stefan Bagnoli)

Occupying one corner of the gallery is Pietro Ruffo's "Youth of the Hills" (2008), a six-foot-long tank that is studded with nails and covered in cut paper and Hebrew prayer script. More politically-charged paper sure to please the design crowd is the work of Sangeeta Sandrasegar, whose cut-outs insert war imagery into the distinctive shapes of iconic chairs designed by the likes of Marcel Breuer and Charles and Ray Eames. "The chair and image provoke constructs of looking/seeing: as bystander, spectator, onlooker, observer, and as such the range of power/powerlessness these positions convey," writes Sandrasegar on his blog. "Additionally, between the depicted image of war and the chair template lie other gulfs of of contrast: between first and third worlds, the safe worlds in which designer furniture exists, and the unsafe worlds in which bombs and raids exist, creation and destruction, wealth and poverty."

Previously on UnBeige:

Battered Books, Tattered Covers: The Photos of Cara Barer and Abelardo Morell

If you'd heard about the recent flooding in the Philippines, which took its toll in human lives and destroying whole towns, it's likely that the last thing on your mind would be shoes. But for those of you who were thinking about footwear, you can rest easy in knowing that the majority of Imelda Marcos' shoes were saved from destruction thanks to some quick thinking by the staff at the Marikina Shoe Museum ("Home of the World's Largest Shoe"), which was the recipient of "more than 800 pairs donated by the former first lady," who were able to move the collection out of harms way. When the water started coming in, "the staff quickly moved the collection to the top shelves of display cabinets and only around 100 got wet." So breathe easy, shoe fetishists (and the ghost of Imelda Marcos), the mother of all collections has been saved.

If you were to wander into Philadelphia's city limits this week, it's likely that you would have heard the renewed talk over the controversial 2002 decision to relocate the bulk of Albert Barnes' massive art collection, now housed at the famed Barnes Foundation in the suburbs, to a new facility in central Philadelphia. Since all of that was announced, a legal battle has taken place to try and get it stopped, the president of the Foundation resigned in protest, and constant reminders from those against the move that Barnes himself had stated in his will that "the collection be kept 'in exactly the places they are.'" But things have sat still for a few years now, up until this week, when it all reved up again with the release of the proposed designs for the Barnes collection's new home, as crafted by the New York-based architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. In reaction, starchitect and native-Philadelphian Robert Venturi still despises the whole concept of the move and decided to write a usually-very-strange type letter for someone working in his particular field: asking that the state not put the money into building the new museum and put it to better use elsewhere (PDF). Over at the NY Times, resident critic Nicolai Ouroussoff doesn't think it much better, claiming the new building seems designed out of guilt. He says "the result is a convoluted design. Almost every detail seems to ache from the strain of trying to preserve the spirit of the original building in a very different context." However, it isn't all bad. The Philadelphia Inquirer's architecture critic, Inga Saffron, thinks Williams and Tsien have done an admirable job in creating something that's approachable, pays homage to the original, and will finally bring the collection into a more functional setting. "The architecture is that good," Saffon says. So a smattering of differing opinions. How will it play out when construction on the new building begins in the coming weeks and the collection finally makes the jump in 2012? Who knows. If you plan to sit down and just wait it out to see what goes on, here's something to help pass the time between then and now. It's a discussion with the architects on the new building (click "continued..." to watch video).

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Here's hoping that Umberto Eco, the Louvre's latest guest curator, has a taste for Royales with cheese. In what only sounds like a headline from The Onion, McDonald's will open a restaurant and a coffee shop inside the Louvre next month. According to a report in The Daily Telegraph:

"The Louvre welcomes the fact that the entirety of visitors and customers, French or foreign, can enjoy such a rich and varied restaurant offer, whether in the museum area or gallery," the museum said in a statement.

The McDonald's would represent the "American segment" of a new "food court," and would be situated "among (other) world cuisines and coffee shops," it wrote.

It added that the franchise owner "has taken the utmost care in ensuring the quality of the project, both in culinary and aesthetic terms."

Lest you envision museum-goers munching McNuggets while admiring the work of Michelangelo, we should point out that the establishments will be located in the Louvre-adjacent underground mall known as the the Carrousel du Louvre. Still, many are outraged at the planned location of France's 1,142nd McDonald's. "This is the last straw," an unnamed art historian working at the Louvre told the Telegraph. "This is the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy, and very unpleasant odors in the context of a museum." Others invoked the 'ol slippery slope—or should we say pente savonneuse. "Today McDonald's, tomorrow low-cost clothes shops," said art blogger Didier Rykner. Too late. The Carrousel du Louvre's current tenants include ESPRIT and Tie Rack.