Good news for film history lovers! The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the group responsible for the Oscars) has struck up a deal with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to create a film museum in its newest building, a former May Company store now known as “LACMA West.” While nothing is finalized yet, the two organizations have been developing plans for fundraising, exhibitions, designs, and more. The statement says that the Academy will have autonomy over the museum and its contents, which is good news because no one is in a better position to get historical movie memorabilia than the AMPAS. Would you plan a trip to the museum once it’s opened? We sure would.
When a living artist gets a museum exhibition whose sole purpose is to honor her life, she’s a pretty big deal. Not that Annie Lennox needs any reminder of that. Known for her vocal work both as part of the Tourists and the Eurythmics and her out-there, androgynous personal style as well as her humanitarian efforts, Lennox is a legend in our time, and certainly has been a serious influence on the pop stars of today. Accordingly, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is honoring her with an exhibit entitled The House of Annie Lennox, which opened this week and will run through February. The exhibit will feature never-before-seen photographs of Lennox’s life, as well as a selection of her well-known costumes, personal artifacts and awards. Click through to see a sneak peek of a few of the items on display and awash yourself in music history.
We’ve got MoMA, MoCA, even MoSex. Now, prepare yourself for the museum geeks only dared to dream of: MoMath. Conceived after a small mathematics museum on Long Island closed and funded in part by a generous grant from Google, New York’s MoMath is the pet project of former hedge-fund analyst Glen Whitney. Its ambitious mission is to liberate math from the “tyranny of the curriculum and the almost treadmill of standardized testing,” making numbers fun again. The museum has been in the works since 2008, with a traveling exhibition called Math Midway traversing the US for the past two years. Its board has already raised $22 million of the $30 million needed to open MoMath in Chelsea next year. Want to help them meet their goal? You can donate to MoMath here. [via UnBeige]
If we’re being honest, visiting an art museum can be a pretty anxiety-ridden experience. Don’t get us wrong, there are too many good things about museums to count, but one less frequently romanticized aspect of going to one is simply knowing how to act. Do we stand there and stroke our chins along with the solemn stalwarts? Chatter and show a detached apathy along with the hip 20-somethings? Maybe it’s just us, but finding a place for ourselves among the art objects and their admirers is actually a lot trickier than most people will let on.
So, instead of drowning in self-consciousness, we’re taking a note from a Paper Monument piece this morning by codifying some art museum behavioral dos and don’ts for the modern age, Emily Post style. We’re hoping MoMA’s gift shop will start selling these bad boys by the end of the year.
With its massive Art Project, Google employs its dominance over digital media to present a vast online archive of the world’s most enduring and beloved fine art masterpieces, along with street-view tours of the institutions that house them.
Each featured museum was given free rein in selecting the breadth and scope of its contributions, resulting in an array of ancient and modern works, cross-referenced by place and artist. The real treats are the mega-high resolution on the zoom-enabled pics, viewer’s-eye tours of impressive architecture — and the chance to play online curator yourself with priceless objects of beauty.
On name recognition alone* — not to mention a prolific career spanning roughly seven decades — Pablo Picasso is arguably the most famous artist throughout history. He is estimated to have produced a staggering 50,000+ artworks, including the auction record-breaking Boy With a Pipe, which once sold for $104 million at Sotheby’s. Picasso has two stand-alone museums dedicated to his legacy (one in Paris, one in his birthplace of Málaga, Spain) and during his lifetime collaborated with artists and thinkers on the cutting edge of literature, philosophy, dance, painting, theater, and poetry. There’s no denying that Picasso’s star still burns bright, and rightfully so, but what’s with the three — count ‘em, three! — majormuseumexhibitions hitting the East Coast this spring? And how are those aforementioned institutions saving a buck by featuring the artist?
*Fun fact: His full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso. Chew on that! Read More »
Graphic design studio Chermayeff & Geismar recently unveiled a spiffy new look for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC — one of the venerable Smithsonian art institutions and the second most attended contemporary art museum in the US.* The problem? The museum’s name is still widely unknown, even after a previous rebranding effort in 2008. (And as highlighted in the revamped logo design, it possesses two concurrent H’s in its spelling.) Take a closer look with us after the jump and examine some possible influences for the new design. Update: hear what the designer has to say.
From blueprints to renderings, budget restraints to breaking ground, the architectural review process is slow-moving beast. (Just consider the Second Avenue subway punchline.) So imagine our excitement over the highly anticipated May opening of the Pompidou-Metz after a scant three-year delay. The high profile of the museum means that Metz will have the chance to reinvent itself from a town of industry in northeastern France into a full-blown arts hub.
The idea of the expanding museum brand is nothing new — we’ve seen it thanks to franchises like the Guggenheim and the Tate, while Whitney and Louvre offspring wait in the proverbial wings. So what we can expect from the newest outpost of France’s most venerable contemporary art institution? A sneak peek at Pompidou-Metz after the jump.
Follow the process of restoring one of Vincent van Gogh’s most popular paintings, The bedroom, in the online blog Bedroom secrets: Restoration of a masterpiece. Featured in the collection of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, The bedroom was painted in 1888 when the artist was living in the Yellow House in Arles and awaiting the painter Paul Gauguin to join him there. This period is considered a turbulent time for Van Gogh—he would cut off part of his left ear late in the year—yet also a formative period for his art. Read More »
Slated to open in February 2010 is Zaha Hadid’s plan for Maxxi, the Italian national museum of 21st century art. The museum is situated in the northern outskirts of Rome, near the grounds of the 1960 Olympics and a stone’s throw away from two other architectural attractions, Renzo Piano’s music hall and Pier Luigi Nervi’s sports palace. The museum, empty of artwork until the spring, will be the main exhibition this weekend during a two-day architectural preview for the citizens of Rome, an urban center steeped in ancient history and curiously devoid of any groundbreaking contemporary architecture.
As New York Times architecture critic (and our idol) Nicolai Ouroussoff writes, Hadid’s quietly incendiary design “jolts this city back to the present like a thunderclap.” Find out why after the jump.
