museums

In another museum-related visit back to days gone by, remember the rumor that London's Design Museum was thinking about making a move to a new building? Well while you've been over here Americaning it up, there's been movement and the museum has made it official, that they will be moving to West London, into that same rumored structure named the Parabola. To help speed things along as they're planning out the new museum, all under the helm of Rem Koolhaas and his pals at OMA, they've decided they need a little help and have issued a call out to firms who can work alongside the starchitect in handling some shared work:

The Design Museum is seeking a design team, led by an architect and also comprising a structural engineer, an mechanical and electrical engineer, a construction design and management coordinator and a catering consultant to work on the museum fit-out within the Grade II*-listed building.

This work will include creating temporary and permanent exhibition spaces, education, event, catering and retail spaces, an auditorium and associated office storage, circulation, back-of-house areas, plant, and plant-related services.

Maybe one of the most high-profile gigs running in the UK right now? We're expecting they'll be swimming in proposals when the invitation closes early next month. The Design Museum itself is set to make the move as early as 2013, assuming everything goes as planned.

Remember around this time last year when billionaire Eli Broad announced he wanted to build a much, much bigger museum to house his massive modern art collection? But then, almost immediately after he said this, everything went to hell and he had to start bailing out everyone else's museums. There were some stirrings back in January about him on the hunt for a big shot starchitect to build his new art home, but since everything's been so lousy this year, that was about all we'd heard out of him about it. So here we are this year later and lo and behold, the smoke has somewhat cleared and he's back to planning. According to the LA Times, he's announced that he'll be creating a $200 million endowment to help kick start the process and wants to begin soon. And where will this new museum be located? He's apparently scrapped the initial plans to build it in Beverly Hills and, despite his saying otherwise, he decided to pit three Los Angeles towns against one another, Santa Monica, the aforementioned Hills, and a third yet-named, who will all be vying to find somewhere in their neighborhood:

Broad said that he isn't trying to play the two municipalities against each other -- and added that there is a third possible location that he declined to name. The billionaire said he hopes that by talking to several different cities he can accelerate the process of building the headquarters for his Broad Art Foundation.

Sure, it's not hunting man for sport, which most billionaire art collectors do for kicks, but it's still a lot of fun.

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:

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:

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.