North Carolina Museum of Art Reopens

"Moonlight is sculpture," writer Nathaniel Hawthorne once said. If he were still alive, he may have said the same thing about the sunlight that illuminates the interior of the North Carolina Museum of Art's newest addition - the West Building.

Diffused sunlight pours over the museum's collection of European, American and African art spanning 5,000 years of history. The 127,000-square-foot addition contains 360 skylights, which cast a soft glow through the museum's 40 exhibit galleries.

"It's all composed as a palate for the artwork," said Dan Gottlieb, museum director of planning and exhibition. "It's boiled down to light and art."

The museum reopened Saturday, April 24th after being closed for seven months for construction.

A grand opening festival continues today with live music, fireworks, lectures and performances by the Carolina Ballet. The event is free.

The museum's showpiece is the new $72.3 million building and the surrounding $4.5 million courtyards, gardens and pools that were created to unify architecture and nature. The rectangular silver building is defined by a curved roofline made of vaults and coffers crafted to manipulate natural light.

"We've taken sort of an extreme tact of letting nature play its course on how you perceive the collection by letting light ebb and flow," Gottlieb said. "If you come here on a gloomy winter day, and you walk into the building, obviously there is less sky brightness outside.

"But what happens is very interesting," he said. "Your pupil dilates a little bit and compensates for that, and the spaces just glow so it feels like it's much brighter and luminous inside the building than it is outside."

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Museum director Lawrence J. Wheeler said the new building spearheads the transformation of the entire 164-acre museum complex, which includes an outdoor amphitheater, picnic areas and three miles of walking and bike trails that curve through fields, creeks and woods.

The new West Building will allow museum officials to renovate the 1983 East Building, which also is on site, and turn it into a center for temporary exhibitions, education and public programs and events. The East Building also will house the museum box office, administrative offices, a library and art storage space. Renovations to the East Building are estimated to cost $7.6 million and are scheduled to be finished in the fall.

"As a result of doing this new center for the permanent collection, we have attracted extraordinary gifts to the collection," Wheeler said. "You look around and you will see our fabulous collections punctuated by great new hallmarks."

New York architect Thomas Phifer, whose firm designed the museum, said nature inspired his team to craft a building that commands the light. Filtered skylights, white fabric curtains and a calibrated lighting system adjust for optimum protection and viewing of the works of art.

"Having the light bathe these wonderful works of art in a controlled way really celebrates the collection," Phifer said.

Anodized aluminum panels fused with tall panes of glass form the geometric shape of the building. Glass walls cover nearly 50 percent of the single-story structure. Floor-to-ceiling glass doors open to five scenic courtyards made of landscaped rock gardens and reflecting pools.

The state-of-the-art building borrows from Japanese design in its minimalism and connection to nature. Inside, white walls and white-oak floors fade into the surroundings allowing the museum's comprehensive art collection to shine.

The museum has acquired almost 200 artworks through commissions, gifts and purchases, which have been installed in the new West Building and surrounding property. The collection includes European paintings, sculpture and Egyptian art as well as Jewish ceremonial pieces.

A highlight of the archive is the display of 29 sculptures by Auguste Rodin, which museum officials said is the largest gathering of Rodin sculptures in the South.

In addition to the new building, museum staff developed new audio guides, including a cell phone tour that provides commentary by curators, educators and artists. The new space also houses Iris, a museum restaurant, which serves contemporary seasonal cuisine prepared from local ingredients. A museum store is also on site.

The project was paid for partly through public money. The state, Wake County and the city of Raleigh provided $67 million to construct the West Building and committed $6 million for the renovation of the East Building.

Linda Carlisle, the secretary of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, said North Carolina has always been committed to supporting the arts, which are an important part of the state's economy.

"This exceptional museum will benefit everyone and the opportunity to share it with so many is a great privilege for us," she said. "As the saying goes, 'Any museum can invite you to look, but a truly great museum changes the way that you see.' We hope you will agree with us that this is a very apt description of the North Carolina Museum of Art."

Source: FayOberserver.com

By: Amneris Solano

Museum for African Art in New York to Get New Home in April 2011

Elsie McCabe Thompson, President, the Museum for African Art, announced that the Museum—one of the country’s premier gateways to the arts and cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora—will reopen to the public in its major new facility in April 2011. Designed by the renowned New York City firm Robert A.M. Stern Architects, LLP, the new building is located at 1280 Fifth Avenue, at East 110th Street, in Manhattan. There it will join “Museum Mile,” linking this prestigious row of museums with Harlem, one of the country’s most important centers of historic and contemporary African-American culture. (The Museum is currently closed to the public, and is operating out of temporary quarters in Queens, New York.)

The Museum for African Art’s new home comprises four floors (one below grade) of a nineteen-story residential tower and encompasses approximately 75,000 square feet of space. With a dramatic increase in public space, the new location will make possible significant growth in the number and scope of exhibitions, public programs, and educational initiatives, enabling the Museum to serve larger audiences than previously possible.

Ms. McCabe Thompson states, “The Museum for African Art is thrilled to be in the final stages of construction before moving into its new home. The Museum is eager to assume its role as both a thriving neighborhood resource—a place where people of all ages and backgrounds can feel a sense of excitement and belonging—and an important national and international destination for art lovers and those interested in the cultures of Africa and the African Diaspora.”

New Facility

Since opening to the public in 1984, the Museum for African Art has operated from three different locations in New York City: on the Upper East Side (1984–92), in the SoHo district (1992–2002), and in Long Island City, Queens (2002 to the present). In 2002, the Museum moved to temporary quarters in Long Island City, Queens, and in late 2005 it closed its gallery space there in order to focus on developing its plans for a new, larger facility that it would own. In the meantime, it continues to present an active roster of major exhibitions and public programs at a diversity of national and international venues.

The new Museum, which faces Central Park to the west, is distinguished on its north and west facades by trapezoidal windows with bronze-finished aluminum mullions that create a dynamic allover pattern. While the Museum thus maintains a distinct identity within the larger structure, the rhythm of its façade carries upward to the residences above.

Visitors will enter the new Museum through a soaring glass atrium. This will lead to a forty-five-foot-high lobby in which curving expanses of African etimoe wood form one of the walls and the ceiling. The lobby, which provides 5,000 square feet of informal exhibition space, will contain the Museum’s ticketing and information services, and will lead to a shop and a restaurant, as well as to a 245-seat theater and a multi-media education center. A grand staircase near the east end of the lobby will lead to the galleries and other public spaces above.

The Museum’s second floor will provide some 15,000 square feet of flexible gallery space. This will typically be configured as three rotating exhibition galleries that may be installed individually or as a group.

The third floor of the Museum will house the library, offices, and a gracious event space with a roof terrace overlooking Central Park. Future plans for this floor include the Mandela Center for Memory and Dialogue, devoted to programs exploring social justice and humanitarian issues.

Space for storage, conservation, and documentation will be located on the below-grade level.

Inaugural Exhibitions

The Museum will inaugurate its new space with three special exhibitions, all of which it has organized or co-organized. El Anatsui: When Last I Wrote to You About Africa is the first career-retrospective of this important contemporary artist. It brings together the full range of Anatsui’s work, from wood trays referring to traditional symbols of the Akan people of Ghana; to early ceramics from the artist’s Broken Pots series of driftwood assemblages and his wooden sculptures carved with a chainsaw; to the luminous metal wall-hangings of recent years that have brought the artist international acclaim. Prior to its presentation at the Museum for African Art, El Anatsui: When Last I Wrote to You About Africa will be on view at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, from October 2, 2010, through January 2, 2011.

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art examines the intertwined histories of the coiled basket in Africa and the southeastern United States. The exhibition demonstrates how this object—once a simple farm tool used for processing rice—became a work of art and an important symbol of African-American identity. It comprises more than 200 objects, including baskets made in Africa and the American South, African sculptures, paintings from the Charleston Renaissance, historic photography, and new video. Organized by the Museum for African Art with the cooperation of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston and the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina, the exhibition has been on tour in the United States.

In addition to El Anatsui and Grass Roots, the Museum will present New Premises: Three Decades of Exhibitions at the Museum for African Art, which explores the evolution in the Museum’s exhibition program. In the 1990s, following a decade in which it exhibited only traditional African art, the Museum began to show the work of contemporary African artists who worked both within and outside of the continent. Drawn in part from the Museum’s own collection, and including objects from past Museum exhibitions, New Premises suggests commonalities between artworks new and old, canonical and non-canonical, questioning the existence of an impermeable boundary between contemporary and traditional African art.

Also opening in the Museum’s inaugural year is Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria, which, with support from Banco Santander, will conclude its European and U.S. tours at the Museum in late 2011. The exhibition has been co-organized by the Museum for African Art and the Fundación Marcelino Botín, in Santander, Spain, in collaboration with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments. Devoted to the extraordinary art of Ife, the ancient city-state of the Yoruba people of West Africa (in present-day southwestern Nigeria), it features more than 100 extraordinary bronze, terra-cotta, and stone sculptures, ranging in date from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, many of which have never been on display outside of Nigeria. It is currently on view at the British Museum, London, where it has received great critical acclaim.

Source: www.artdaily.com