COVENTRY.- The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum has had the honour of being officially named the Best Family Friendly Museum in the Whole of Britain in the prestigious Guardian Family Friendly Museum award run by Kids in Museums*. The national award rewards museums that offer the very best family friendly environments, events, collection displays, accessibility and fun for children of all ages and their carers to enjoy and engage with culture. The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry beat off stiff competition from 100’s of other nominated museums across Britain to scoop the top prize. Since its re-opening in October 2008, the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum has strived to create an environment where the entire family have been welcomed. Through FREE events, exhibitions, learning resources, FREE on-line activities and facilitator-led activities, the museum has welcomed over 500,000 visitors through its doors including thousan
Museum of Monaco Launches Centenary Celebrations with Major Exhibition by Damien Hirst
MONACO.- The Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, which this year celebrates its centenary, opens its galleries to contemporary art for the first time, to present a major exhibition of works by celebrated British artist Damien Hirst. CORNUCOPIA is the title of the exhibition, which spans the last 15 years of the artist’s career and comprises over 60 key works, including early paintings and sculptures. The exhibition is presented with the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Gathering together an exceptional ensemble of works, displayed throughout the museum in the company of the existing and remarkable collection of sea creatures and marine fauna, the exhibition stages a conversation between the past and the present, between art and science. The dialogue between the museum’s collection of specimens and aquariums and the artist’s work allows the viewer to consider each discipline in a new light. Art and sc
Large Selection of Old Master, American and European Prints at Swann Galleries
NEW YORK, NY.- On Tuesday, April 27, Swann Galleries will offer a large selection of Old Master Through Modern Prints at auction, beginning with nearly 150 desirable Old Master Prints, followed by sections devoted to 19th-century prints, American prints, and European prints. Of special note among the Old Masters are works by Albrecht Dürer, including “The Prodigal Son”, engraving, circa 1496 (estimate $15,000 to $20,000); “The Four Horsemen”, woodcut from “The Apocalypse”, 1498, in unusually good condition ($20,000 to $30,000); and “Virgin and Child Seated by the Wall”, engraving, 1514 ($15,000 to $20,000). Highlights among more than 60 etchings by Rembrandt are the very scarce “The Flight into Egypt: Altered from Seghers”, circa 1653 ($40,000 to $60,000); a strong impression of the postage-stamp sized “Self Portrait with Curly Hair and White Collar”: Bust, circa 1630 ($30,000 to $50,000); an early impression of “Christ
Coincidences at the End of 18th and 19th Centuries Analyzed
MEXICO CITY.- Historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists from different Mexican academic institutions gathered at the seminar “Fin de siglos: ¿fin de ciclos?” (“End of Centuries: End of Cycles?”), coinciding that by the end of the last centuries (18th, 19th and 20th) several historical aspects have repeated in a cyclic way; these aspects were analyzed with the objective of defining the present historical moment, to determine if we are “entering another end of cycle”. Specialists compared facts considered characteristic of the end of 18th and 19th centuries, which apparently repeat every 100 years as historical cycles, and observed how these facts, expressed in revolutions, opened the following centuries. According to Leticia Reina from the National Institute of Anthropology and History Direction of Historical Studies, coordinator of the academic encounter, one of the most characteristic coincidences is modernity, in which a spectacular economic
Andrew Blauvelt to Lead New Audience Engagement Division at the Walker
MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- Walker Art Center director Olga Viso has appointed Walker design director and curator Andrew Blauvelt to the executive-level position of Chief of Audience Engagement and Communications effective July 1, 2010. In his new administrative role, Blauvelt will oversee a new division comprised of the departments of Design, Editorial and Photography; Education and Community Programs; Marketing and Public Relations; and New Media Initiatives. Focused on enhancing and expanding the Walker’s audience engagement and communications efforts, this innovative clustering of museum departments and activities helps realize a core part of the institution’s two-pronged mission focused on catalyzing the creative expressions of artists and actively engaging audiences. “Andrew is uniquely suited to lead this effort at the Walker,” said Viso. “He brings an unparalleled set of diverse skills and and
Artists Spend Two Months at the Mattress Factory to Create Works
PITTSBURGH, PA.- The Mattress Factory opened “Nothing is Impossible”, an exhibition with new and context specific work by artists Karl Burke, Rhona Byrne, Brian Griffiths, Bea McMahon and Dennis McNulty. Based in Dublin and London, each of the artists has been invited to spend a period of two months in Pittsburgh to develop work for this project. “Nothing is Impossible” is the first in a series of exhibitions and performances Mark Garry and Georgina Jackson will produce during their two-year curatorial residency with the museum. The exhibition will run through August 8, 2010. If we can believe that nothing is impossible and that anything can happen, how would we live differently? What could we envision? Where could we be? What implications are there if we banish contemporary
First Solo Exhibition by Walt Cassidy at Invisible Exports
NEW YORK, NY.- Walt Cassidy’s works are a personal alphabet—each piece charting a private topography of history, experience, emotion, and thought. “The Protective Motif” is a survey of that inner landscape, rendered in a visual language both intimate and arcane. Ranging from ink drawings and wall sculptures to photographs, the work testifies, with remarkable emotive force, that the most demanding affective experience is often the private one, and that our most urgent expressive imperative is to render it sensibly—to make outer order from inner chaos. The works in “The Protective Motif” compose a meta-narrative across medium and are rooted in childhood exercises, learned from his father, an industrial psychologist. These physical meditations were used to ground the neurological electricity of the brain, by doing such things as burying ones hands in soil (modeled on the analeptic structure of the lightning rod). The
Twelve New Artists Exhibit at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire
CHAUMONT-SUR-LOIRE.- Echoing the 2010 Garden Festival on the theme of “body and soul”, the French artists, Anne and Patrick Poirier, are offering eight poetic installations that link nature and memory closely together. Using a very wide variety of materials and media, such as marble and granite, light and sound, they will be presenting their work in the “Stables”, as well as in the Château itself and the Grounds of the Domaine. The roundabout in the “Stables” will thus be transformed into an elegant “aviary”, a small chapel “capella in the clearing” will come to life in one of the groves in the grounds and a 3-tonne monumental eye made of marble, “The Eye of Forgetfulness” will be placed at the bottom of a natural ice-house, a cave open to the skies in the Valley of Mists. Five more works are being created in the Domaine’s artistic spaces that are both unexpected and very refi
New Exhibition by American Artist Erick Swenson at James Cohan Gallery
NEW YORK, NY.- James Cohan Gallery presents a new exhibition by American artist Erick Swenson, opening April 1st and running through May 1st, 2010. This is the artist’s third exhibition at the gallery. The centerpiece is a new large-scale sculpture, “Ne Plus Ultra” (2010), on view with a selection of other works dating from 2001 to the present. With striking verisimilitude, Swenson’s uncanny dioramic sculptures, inspired by the artist’s childhood passion for the taxidermy animals at the natural history museum, are populated by mythical animals; these hybrid creatures are strangely familiar and yet appear to come from an entirely different realm. On view in the main gallery is the recent work “Ne Plus Ultra”, an elaboration on Swenson’s earlier sculpture of the same name; a depiction of a decomposing animal head with a scrimshaw
Rock Band Devo Gives Red Cone Hat to Ohio Museum
COLUMBUS, OH (AP).- The oddball rock group Devo has donated one of the red conical hats from its hit video “Whip It” to an Ohio museum. The Ohio Historical Society says it has received a small collection of artifacts from the band and its official archivist. The items include stickers, T-shirts, costumes and a flower pot-style hat worn in the band’s memorable 1980 video. Three of the band’s founding members grew up in Akron and met at Kent State University in the 1970s. The group’s name came from a theory the human race is in a process of devolution, which members read about in an anti-Darwinism pamphlet. The band most recently performed in Ohio in 2008 for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. An annual DEVOtional convention is held in Cleveland.