ANTWERP, Belgium — From the outside, it’s difficult to see the impact of the $105 million, 11-year renovation and expansion of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, one of Belgium’s most prestigious and important museums. There is no glass pyramid jutting from the sidewalk or new modernist curlicue declaring itself a new wing. The 19th-century museum’s limestone facade with its high neoclassical columns, carved busts and winged horses seems to have had just a good cleaning. When the building finally reopened on Saturday, however, the public discovered that the interior has been dramatically transformed. Where there once was one museum, visitors now find two. As well as the original museum, with a grand hall containing Peter Paul Rubens altarpieces and galleries full of works by Flemish masters, KAAN Architects , a Dutch firm, has added a modern art wing that curators here are calling “the new museum.” Its galleries, with bright white walls and white poured-resin floors, … [Read more...] about The Royal Museum With a White-Cube Gallery Inside
Transformation art gallery
Emily Fisher Landau, Art Patron Who Had Her Own Museum, Dies at 102
Emily Fisher Landau, a New Yorker who used a Lloyd’s insurance settlement from a spectacular jewel heist in her apartment to fund what would become one of America’s premier collections of contemporary art, died on March 27 in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 102. Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Candia Fisher. From 1991 to 2017, Ms. Landau opened her collection of 1,200 artworks to the public in the Fisher Landau Center for Art, a repurposed former factory in Long Island City, Queens. In 2010, she pledged almost 400 works, then worth between $50 million and $75 million, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she had long been a trustee. Ms. Landau’s trajectory into the art world began unexpectedly on a spring afternoon in 1969, while she was out at lunch. Armed burglars disguised as air conditioning repairmen broke into her apartment in the Imperial House building on the Upper East Side, bound the cook in a guest closet and opened a floor safe hidden inside another … [Read more...] about Emily Fisher Landau, Art Patron Who Had Her Own Museum, Dies at 102
Photographers Band Together to Protect Work in ‘Fair Use’ Cases
To many photographers, a federal appeals court ruling last spring that permitted Richard Prince to use someone else’s photographs in his art was akin to slapping a “Steal This” label on their work. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reasoned that as long as Mr. Prince’s work transformed the images into original art, he was not violating anyone’s copyright. But photographers are pushing back against that interpretation. Several membership and trade organizations have banded together recently to press their cause in Congress and the courts. More than half a dozen groups, including the National Press Photographers Association, Professional Photographers of America and the Picture Archive Council of America, have joined together to submit a friend of the court brief to support the photographer Patrick Cariou, after part of his case against Mr. Prince was sent back to a judge for reconsideration. That informal coalition is considering hiring a Washington … [Read more...] about Photographers Band Together to Protect Work in ‘Fair Use’ Cases
Meet Creative Pinellas’ 2023 10 Emerging Artists Grant Winners
0 Arts & Entertainment The works of the emerging artists will be on display at the Gallery at Creative Pinellas In Largo through July 16. D'Ann Lawrence White , Patch Staff Posted Reply LARGO, FL — Creative Pinellas will present a diverse exhibition of work by the 10 artists chosen for this year’s Emerging Artist Grant. This seventh annual exhibition features original work by artists awarded grants from Creative Pinellas: Troy Bernardo, Jenipher Chandley, Marie Cummings, Kathryn Cummins, Dennis DeBon, Kimberly Engel, Patrick Arthur Jackson, Aimee Jones, Amy Wolf and Agueda Zabisky. The free exhibit runs through July 16 at the Gallery at Creative Pinellas, 12211 Walsingham Road, Largo. Troy Bernardo Troy Bernardo loves spending time reading, writing, camping and drinking local craft beer. He is an English department head at an alternative online school, and lives with his wife Laura, his newborn baby Alice, … [Read more...] about Meet Creative Pinellas’ 2023 10 Emerging Artists Grant Winners
Review: Jodie Comer Makes ‘Prima Facie’ Broadway’s Most Powerful Show
More than once, Jodie Comer ’s character Tessa Ensler declares “This is me” in Suzie Miller’s searing one-woman Broadway play, Prima Facie (Golden Theatre, booking to June 18) . The declaration resonates because Tessa is in no way any kind of stereotype—of a lawyer, a young woman, or victim of rape. She is a complex me , who Comer—in an astonishingly acted monolog—makes the center of a striking piece of theater directed by Justin Martin. In London earlier this month, Comer won the Olivier Award for Best Actress for her performance, while the play won Best New Play—and both must surely be Tony Award favorites here. Bar one pause in the intermission-less 100 minutes, Killing Eve star Comer is on stage throughout, inhabiting Tessa and a gallery of other characters—including her mother, best friend, and rapist. But most stunning is her presentation of Tessa who both goes through so much, and seems so much. The play is a blunt polemic against a patriarchal legal system … [Read more...] about Review: Jodie Comer Makes ‘Prima Facie’ Broadway’s Most Powerful Show
For the Indigenous, Was This Building a Gesture of Reconciliation? Or an Empty Gift?
Near the old perfume counters on the ground floor of the Hudson’s Bay department store in Winnipeg, Canada, a trade dripping with symbolism took place. The 39th “governor” of Hudson’s Bay — North America’s oldest company and one of Canada’s most iconic — accepted from an Indigenous leader two beaver pelts and two elk hides in exchange for the building, the company’s onetime Canadian flagship . The ceremony took place a year ago when Hudson’s Bay, the company once chartered to found the colony that became part of Canada, gave away its shuttered, 600,000-square-foot, six-floor downtown building to a group of First Nations. But what seemed like an act of reconciliation has become a subject of intense debate as the building’s worth and the cost of transforming it have become clearer: Was this a real gift or an empty one? The gift of the building has focused attention on the evolving relationship between Hudson’s Bay and Indigenous people in Canada, as well as their central role … [Read more...] about For the Indigenous, Was This Building a Gesture of Reconciliation? Or an Empty Gift?
