|
Designing Oakland
Through September 22
Oakland might be poised to become the new heart of Pittsburgh. And yet the
very success of the neighborhood as a center for culture, education, health
care, and technology makes it a challenging place to work or live. Rapid
growth and popularity have put a strain on the infrastructure, and
coordination of development efforts has proven elusive. This exhibition
examines selected aspects of Oakland's built environment and considers some
of the many recent ideas for addressing these challenges. Visitors will
have an opportunity to learn about both urban planning (what goes where and
how it functions) and design (how everything looks), and to consider how
the pieces of a plan fit together, from Carnegie Mellon University’s Master
Plan to small houses or coffee shops.
Designing Oakland is the Heinz
Architectural Center’s first exhibition on city design. By drawing on
collections of old photographs, postcards, historic maps, and books, the
exhibition will provide historical context and reveal the thinking behind
the decisions made in the early 20th century. More recent plans, from the
1950s and later, that include architectural drawings and models, as well as
explanatory text, will suggest the wide array of ideas that have been
proposed for Oakland and will help visitors envision how the area might
look in ten years.
Support for this
exhibition has been provided by the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation,
Inc. and the Alexander C. & Tillie S. Speyer Foundation.
The programs of the
Heinz Architectural Center are made possible through the generosity of the
Drue Heinz Trust.
Scaife
Galleries to Undergo Renovations
This summer visitors to Carnegie Museum of Art will, as
usual, see many works of art…but in a lot less space. The Scaife galleries have closed for
updating and renovations, and many works will be moved into the Heinz
galleries.
“By using natural light, Edward Larrabee Barnes, the
architect who designed the Scaife Wing, created remarkable environments for
viewing works of art,” says Christopher Rauhoff, director of exhibitions
for Carnegie Museum of Art. In 1974,
however, when the galleries opened, standards for art conservation were
very different from what they are now. New technologies and a better understanding
of lighting and ventilation have made it possible to maintain better
conditions for preserving the works of art.
When the renovation is complete, visitors may see no
difference. “It is important that we maintain the integrity of Barnes’
original design,” Rauhoff says. The
galleries will, however, feel different and even sound different. A vapor barrier
installed between the interior and exterior walls will help maintain
relative humidity between 45% and 55% (a welcome
improvement during Pittsburgh’s long winters), and ductwork will reduce the
sound of air rushing into the ventilation space behind the walls.
Since the current gallery is
too bright for conservation standards, new skylights will filter some of
the sunlight. However the clerestory
lighting will still carry out Barnes’ ingenious design. “The sunlight enters through glass,
bounces into a cove that makes a light well, and then onto paintings,” says
Rauhoff. “That is why it is such a
diffuse, even light.”
During the period when exhibition space is limited,
museum curators are taking the opportunity to be creative in this
temporary, but challenging situation.
“This was a chance to look at the collection in a different way,”
explains Louise Lippincott, curator of Fine Arts. “We’re going to hang paintings almost
floor to ceiling, salon style, with objects on platforms in the center of
the Heinz galleries.” Comprising more than 500 works, Panopticon: An Art Spectacular will contain treasures as well
as oddities from the museum’s basement.
This exhibition will be discussed in greater detail in a future
issue of CARNEGIE magazine.
Forum:
Hello, My Name Is…
June 29
through September 29
This eclectic group
of works by eleven emerging international artists, ranging in age from 26
to 42, demonstrates that contemporary notions of portraiture can extend
beyond an artist’s likeness to explore wide-ranging areas of autobiography,
fantasy, and ethnic as well as genetic identity.
In The Hispanic
Project and The Seniors Project, Nikki
S. Lee explores issues of identity by photographing herself adopting the
appearance and behaviors of a segment of society that is not her own. Beth Campbell, in her drawing series My Potential Future Based on Present
Circumstances, begins with a single event in her life and charts a web
of potential consequences that might ensue from different choices she might
make.
Maurizio Cattelan’s Spermini
consists of 150 painted, miniature, rubber masks of his own face, each
one slightly different from the next.
These three artists, with their eclectic approaches to
self-revelation, are joined in the exhibition by John Bock, Edgar Bryan,
Trisha Donnelly, Roe Ethridge, Saul Fletcher, Jim Lambie, Zak Smith, and
Susan Smith-Pinelo.
This exhibition is the first collaboration between Laura
Hoptman, curator, and Elizabeth Thomas, assistant curator, of the Museum of
Arts department of contemporary art.
Founder-Patrons Day Celebration, Thursday, November 7
Carnegie Museum of Art will celebrate the annual
Founder-Patrons Day with a black-tie gala dinner and exhibition preview on
Thursday, November 7. The featured
exhibition will be Out of the
Ordinary: The Architecture and Design of Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown
and Associates, which opens to the public on November 9 at the Heinz
Architectural Center.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown have been partners
in one of the most influential architectural design and planning firms of
the last half-century. The evening
begins with cocktails at 6:00 and dinner at 7:30 in the Hall of Sculpture.
To receive an invitation, call (412) 578-2552.
New to the
Collection
Paul Feely
American, 1910-1966
Alya, 1964
oil-based enamel on canvas
A. W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund
A native of Iowa, who had his first one-man show at the age of 17, Paul
Feeley cannot be slotted easily into any one artistic “ism,” says Laura
Hoptman, curator of contemporary art.
“Alya, our new
acquisition, is an example of Feeley’s blend of abstraction that married
biomorphic form to a kinesthetic sense of color. The clean-edged shapes in this work were
painted using a stencil and are clearly related to the hard-edged
abstractions of Kenneth Noland or Frank Stella,” she explains.
Feeley resisted the dominance of abstract expressionism
in the 1950s and ’60s and claimed to have learned from Jackson Pollock to
escape “traditional taste.” His
formal vocabulary was influenced by Mediterranean cultures—Moorish tiles
and Greek Sculpture, and his use of color evokes the quality of
Mediterranean light.
|
