Anila Quayyum Agha, Intersections (installation view, Grand Rapids Art Museum), 2014; image courtesy of Anila Quayyum Agha
In Michigan’s Grand Rapids Art Museum, Anila Quayyum Agha’s Intersections is installed after being named the winner of ArtPrize 2014. The installation consists of a light source inside a laser-cut wooden cube, casting shadows that evoke Islamic sacred spaces.
exterior view of the Harvard Art Museums; photo by Nic Lehoux
It has been a great few weeks—actually, a great year—for new museum buildings. It gets even better this weekend when the Harvard Art Museums will open a new building. The incredible structure, designed by Renzo Piano, unites Harvard’s three separate museums under a vast glass roof.
Palm Springs Art Museum, Architecture and Design Center; photograph by Daniel Chavkin, courtesy of Palm Springs Art Museum
This weekend, the Palm Springs Art Museum will open its new Architecture and Design Center in a restored mid-century modern building. The A+D Center is an important extension of the museum’s facilities as well as its exhibitions and programs.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton, in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris; photo courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton
On October 27, the new museum building for the Fondation Louis Vuitton will open in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. It was designed by the Los Angeles-based starchitect Frank Gehry with the patronage of the French businessman Bernard Arnault.
Ólafur Elíasson, Riverbed, 2014; installation view, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2014; photo by Anders Sune Berg
In Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ólafur Elíasson has transformed the museum’s South Wing into a rocky river landscape with a site-specific installation combining nature, architecture, and art.
In Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb of Paris, an island in the Seine is being developed into an “artistic micro-city” designed by Jean Nouvel. The project for Île Seguin will create artists’ studios, commercial gallery and auction spaces, an exhibition hall, and a conference center to transform the island into a modern cultural hub.
Guggenheim Helsinki design competition, view of Helsinki’s waterfront; image via ArchDaily
Last month, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Helsinki city officials announced an international design competition for a proposed new museum in the Finnish capital. The Guggenheim proposal has been met with disapproval in Helsinki since 2011, and there is no certainty that the design competition will gain public support for the project.
Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1906, oil on canvas, 34 3/4 x 39 3/8 inches, image via Sotheby’s
Last week in London, a Monet water lily painting sold for $54 million in Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale. The work, a 1906 Nymphéas, is one of a series completed from 1905 to 1907 at Giverny.
Richard Serra, East-West/West-East, image via Qatar Museums Authority
This spring, coinciding with his first major exhibition in the Middle East, American sculptor Richard Serra launched a public art commission in Qatar entitled East-West/West-East. Serra’s large-scale assemblies of sheet metal are famously minimal and massive, and this site-specific work in Qatar is absolutely monolithic.
LACMA campus and the La Brea Tar Pits alongside Wilshire Boulevard. Photograph by Monica Almeida, The New York Times.
We recently explored LACMA’s new campus plans – codylee.co/lacma.
In short, architect Peter Zumthor has designed a massive new pavilion to replace a dysfunctional set of older buildings. However, officials from the Page Museum identified that Zumthor’s new building could encroach upon and damage the adjacent La Brea Tar Pits, which are an active paleontological research site with important deposits of Ice Age-era fossils.
Today, revised designs show Zumthor’s amoeba-like building sparing the tar pits and instead spreading across Wilshire Boulevard. This is insane bold.