Good news from the Akron Art Museum. Director Mitchell Kahan has set the time for its reopening; a major artist will do a permanent, on-site piece in honor of the event; and several works from the permanent collection never before seen by the public will go on view.
The museum, designed by the Vienna, Austria, architectural firm of Coop Himmelb(l)au, is adding 63,000 square feet and a new building to its existing 19th-century structure for a total of 84,300 square feet, will reopen its new building in May 2007.
For that opening, the museum has commissioned a new, large-scale mural by contemporary artist Sol LeWitt, who has designed a wall drawing for permanent display in the museum's new Beatrice Knapp McDowell grand lobby.
The site-specific work, created by LeWitt to refer to elements of the old and new museum buildings, will be unveiled when the museum reopens next May.
Although LeWitt calls these works ``wall drawings,'' the new mural will be done in acrylic paint and will be considered permanent.
"We sent him images of the old and the new buildings'' to go by, said Barbara Tannenbaum, AAM chief curator and head of public programs. LeWitt has combined the brick pattern on the exterior of the old building with the triangular patterns found in the new building's lobby.
``He uses his own vocabulary, but it still interprets the forms of the old and the new building,'' Tannenbaum explained. ``The other thing that he does that's just amazing is his choice of these vibrant colors, little bonbons of color next to each other in the lobby, which is glass and concrete.''
The 18-by-34-foot mural, which will be visible from High Street, also references modernism, as the design of the piece both implies and denies a sense of three-dimensionality. Additional tensions between opposites are geometry and color, old building and new, formalism and illusionism.
Add to that the artist's legendary perfectionism. LeWitt specially orders the acrylic medium he uses from only one company, said Tannenbaum. The surface must be a ``Category Five'' plaster wall -- a very smooth surface -- on top of which will go two base coats, and three more coats, all applied by hand, to get the surface LeWitt requires, she said.
"So it takes eight to 10 days just to do the preparation even before the lines are drawn on the mural,'' Tannenbaum said. ``Then one of Lewitt's assistants will come and do the infamous masking tape procedure, after which it will be 15 to 22 days to draw it out and finish it, using anywhere between four to six assistants to finish.
"It's quite an undertaking. It has to be perfect.''
The museum also owns prints and a wood sculpture, Floor Piece No. 2 (1976), by LeWitt.
As if that weren't enough, the museum has recently acquired a painting to add to its William Sommer collection, enough to warrant a Sommer section in the permanent exhibition gallery.
The new work, Landscape with Yellow Clouds, is one that Kahan had seen often when visiting the late Joe Erdelac, a Northeast Ohio car dealer and zealous collector of works by local artists.
"Every time Mitchell would visit with Joe, he would lust after this painting,'' said Kathryn Wat, AAM curator of exhibitions. ``Mitchell feels, and I concur, that it might be the best painting Sommer ever made.''
Also to be seen for the first time is an installation by Doris Salcedo that the AAM acquired in 2002, but has not displayed because of space constraints.
The work, from the Colombian artist's Atrabiliaros (Defiant) series, was created in homage to los Desaparecidos, the Disappeared Ones of Colombia's recent political upheavals.
The work is a memento mori consisting of abandoned shoes in wall niches covered by dried cow bladders. Installed in its own room, the installation refers to those disappearances, the violence of her native country and the universal themes of loss and memory.
"You walk into the room and you see in the walls these niches which are covered with a surface that looks like skin that's actually cow bladder. It's sewn to the walls with black thread,'' said Tannenbaum.
The piece has a reverential feel as well as references to minimalism and process.
The shoes in the niches originally were the shoes of the Disappeared Ones. People in Colombia who disappeared were often never found again. It is widely assumed that they were killed, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Every once in a while there would be a pile of clothes found, along with the shoes, disposed of by the authorities, and someone would say, `Oh, those are the shoes that Marta was wearing when she went to that party,' '' Tannenbaum recounted. ``So (shoes) became a symbol and had a very strong memorial aspect.
"Eventually, she began using other shoes, but this installation is from the most important early part of the series, 1992-1997.''
The museum had been offered parts of works before, but never an entire room, Tannenbaum said. Four walls will be built on which to install the work.
Another work going on view for the first time is a painting by Emilio Sanchez Perrier, a Spanish artist, born in Seville in the mid-19th century.
The painting, The River Guadaira, was done in what is today Alcala de Guadaira, a province 10 kilometers southeast of Seville, once called Alcala de los Panaderos (Alcala of the bakers) and known for its bread and the windmills along the river where the flour was ground.
"When the painting was first unwrapped, I just went `Ohhh!' '' said Wat, describing her reaction to the brilliant photographic exactitude of the painting, which has recently been cleaned and restored to its original state.
"At first I couldn't find a single thing about him anywhere,'' she said. ``Then fortunately, a museum in Albuquerque did a show about Spanish painters and he was featured very prominently. Now there's a lot more information about him out there, so I had to make room in our galleries for this work.
"It's painted on panel, so it has that beautiful glassy surface, and of course the astounding minutiae for which he is now once again famous,'' she said.
The new museum is the first public building in the United States designed by Coop Himmelb(l)au, which is internationally recognized for its unique approach to contemporary architecture and innovative engineering.
The Vienna firm has been much in the international news lately.
On Thursday, it will break ground on its newest project, a natural history museum, La Musee des Confluences in Lyon, France. On Friday, Wolf D. Prix, a founder and principle of the firm, will receive the Fellowship medal of American Institute of Architects.
On the same day, the Coop Himmelb(l)au exhibition, Wolf Prix/SKY-Arc, will open at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Prix will participate in the panel discussion, ``Who says what Architecture is?'' The exhibit is on view through July 23. |
