In Santander, about 60 miles west of Bilbao on Spain’s north coast, the new Centro Botín opened on Friday, June 23. The waterfront arts center was designed by Renzo Piano as a new regional museum along with the redevelopment of an urban park.

Unlike the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Centre Pompidou Málaga (Spain’s most notable and most recent museum projects, respectively) Centro Botín was completely privately funded. It was commissioned by the Botín family, whose Banco Santander is the largest bank in Spain. The Fundación Botín funded the center’s €80 million construction cost and will provide an annual budget of €12.5 million.

Centro Botín is Renzo Piano’s first building in Spain. The 10,285 square-meter structure is comprised of two wings. The west building contains 2,500 square meters of galleries on two floors, and the east building contains classrooms, an auditorium, restaurant, shop, and rooftop terrace. The two wings are separated in the middle and raised up above the ground to extend views from the nearby Jardines de Pereda to the bay.

About €16 million of the construction cost was to redevelop the park adjacent to the museum. The building site was formerly a parking lot, separating the Jardines de Pareda from Santander Bay. By moving a road and a parking structure underground, the project doubled the size of the park, tripled the amount of green space, and reconnected the city to the bay. The park also gained an amphitheater, which functions as an open-air cinema with a screen on the museum’s west façade.

Centro Botín is characteristic of other Renzo Piano museum buildings (he has designed more than 25 to date) with natural light and a carefully balanced relationship to the surrounding environment. The exterior is clad with 270,000 ceramic plates that reflect the colors of the sea and sky. Inside, ventilation systems and lighting tracks are exposed, and full-height windows provide views of the bay.

Before Centro Botín opened, it gave memberships for unlimited free admission to about 80,000 locals and announced a schedule of free programs in the park and amphitheater. The museum was inaugurated by King Felipe VI of Spain, and also opened a permanent sculpture installation in the Jardines by the Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias.

While Centro Botín is a major cultural development, it does not aim to replicate the “Bilbao effect” of mass tourism and blockbuster exhibitions. Its primary missions are research, training, and dissemination. It has a research partnership with Yale University, and the exhibitions program has a particular focus on researching and cataloguing Spanish drawings from the 16^th century. One of the museum’s inaugural exhibitions was a group of 80 drawings by Francisco de Goya on loan from the Prado. In addition to changing exhibitions, the center will show works from the collection of the Fundación Botín.

The post Centro Botín appeared first on .

The Centre Pompidou, France’s national museum of modern art, has opened a satellite location in Málaga, Spain. It is the museum’s first location outside of France, and it opened in the same week as an outpost of the State Russian Museum in Málaga. Together, the two satellite museums are expected to attract 400,000 visitors to the Andalusian city that has become established as a cultural destination.

Málaga is a coastal city of about 570,000 and is popularly known as the birthplace of Pablo Picasso. The city has about 30 museums including the Museo Picasso, which has a collection of 285 works from the artist’s family, and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC), a contemporary kunsthalle museum, which both opened in 2003. The Museo Carmen Thyssen, a private collection of 19^th century Spanish paintings that was previously in Madrid’s Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, opened in 2011.

Francisco de la Torre, Málaga’s mayor since 2000, is credited for much of the city’s cultural expansion. Notwithstanding a debt of €600 million, Málaga has invested €100 million in arts and cultural developments in the past decade. The city has budgeted €4.2 million for the Pompidou this year, including an initial fee of €2.1 million and operational support that will total €5 million over a five-year term. The budget for the Russian museum, which has a ten-year agreement, is €3.7 million, including €500,000 for building renovations and €400,000 for exhibitions.

The Centre Pompidou Málaga is in a retrofitted building known as El Cubo. The harbor-front site was commissioned by the city and designed by the Spanish firm L35 as a commercial and cultural center. The project was completed in 2013, and a €6.7 million renovation converted it into 6,000 square meters of gallery space for the Pompidou with a large cube-shaped skylight as its most recognizable feature.

The State Russian Museum is in a 1927 building that was originally a tobacco factory. Part of the old factory became an automobile museum in 2010, and another 2,300 square meters will host exhibitions loaned from St. Petersburg for the next decade.

The CAC is similarly in a 1939 industrial building that has been repurposed. The Museo Picasso and the Museo Carmen Thyssen are each in palaces that date to the 16^th century. Málaga’s new museums in historic buildings are a notable contrast to Bilbao’s Guggenheim.

The Centre Pompidou Málaga is only the most recent development of the museum beyond Paris under initiatives to decentralize the national collections. Under the leadership of Alain Seban, whose term as President ended this month, the Pompidou launched a program of temporary museums to show its collection of more than 100,000 works.

The museum opened its first satellite in Metz, about 170 miles east of Paris, in 2010 with a €69 million building designed by Shigeru Ban.

From 2011 to 2013, the Pompidou hosted pop-up museums in six French cities that were attended by more than 275,000 visitors. Libourne, which hosted a pop-up in 2011, and Maubeuge, near the Belgian border, have each submitted proposals for satellite museums. Speculation about additional venues indicates Mexico and Brazil as frontrunners, but it is unknown whether Seban’s successor, Serge Lasvignes, will continue the Pompidou’s expansion concept.

The post Centre Pompidou Málaga appeared first on .

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.

ArtPrize began in Grand Rapids in 2009. It was launched by Rick DeVos, the venture capitalist and eldest grandchild of the billionaire co-founder of Amway, and it is the world’s largest art competition with prizes totaling $560,000. ArtPrize is open to any artist, with no selection committee or curators, and prizes are awarded by both an expert jury and a public vote. This year’s event included 1,537 entries and counted 398,714 votes.

Anila Quayyum Agha, a Pakistani-American artist who is an associate professor at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, won the public grand prize as well as half of the juried grand prize. Her installation, Intersections, is created from a laser-cut wooden cube that contains a single light bulb. The cube’s intricate patterns are from the Alhambra, the 11th-century Moorish palace in Granada, Spain. When illuminated from within, the 6.5-foot box casts an intricate pattern of shadows and light onto the gallery’s walls, ceiling, and floor. The geometries create a wondrous experience separate from the object itself. Interpretations following shadow and light, internal and external, and public and private spaces are appreciable.

The Grand Rapids Art Museum has curated post-ArtPrize exhibitions since 2012. This year’s “ArtPrize Encore” includes eleven works in a range of media that will be on rotating exhibition until next year’s ArtPrize. Intersections is on view through January 25.

We recommend Hyperallergic’s interview with the artist:
ArtPrize Winner Anila Quayyum Agha Talks Sacred Spaces and Religion

The post Anila Quayyum Agha, Intersections appeared first on .