Tag: Museum

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Entertainment

An Odissi Dancer Charts New Paths on the Met Museum

An Odissi Dancer Charts New Paths at the Met Museum

She also spent time at the Astor Chinese Garden Court, the Islamic Art Galleries and the Cloisters. Between these visits, Satpathy returned to India, where, in the quiet of her rehearsal room, she composed solos that drew on the sensations she had felt in the museum’s rooms. “The memories stayed with me,” she says.

In developing her choreographic ideas, she worked mainly virtually with a composer, Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy, and a dramaturge, Poorna Swami, both of whom pursue interests beyond the world of Indian classical music and dance. Narayanaswamy has worked extensively in the film field; and Swami has a degree in Contemporary Dance from Mount Holyoke College.

In addition to suggesting literary texts that could stimulate their imaginations, Swami also urged Satpathy to go beyond the usual rules of Odissi, a highly codified form involving a decorative use of the body, specific geometries of the stage and a transparent relationship with the music appreciates . Swami encouraged Satpathy to move in silence or against the music; to engage directly with art; allow yourself to be less than perfect.

“She’s the devil’s advocate,” Satpathy said. She was also an extra pair of eyes. “I would give her very honest feedback,” Swami said in a phone call from Austin, Texas, where she received her PhD. “I would point out things that weren’t working and ask them, ‘What are you trying to do?'”

“It was hard on the ego,” admitted Satpathy. But over time, she got used to going beyond the familiar. “Linear was my way, middle was my way, front was my way. But now I had to find a new way to justify the progression of the movement.” In her solos at the Met last May, she created intimate tableaus and paths through the gallery spaces where there was no clear front and movements not necessarily in perfect symmetry were executed.

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World News

Jane Austen Museum to Handle Ties to Slavery

Jane Austen Museum to Address Ties to Slavery

Austen’s novels are about a tight upper class of British society and are set in picturesque villages that are largely cut off from the problems of the outside world. “Jane Austen is now standing on a pedestal as an expression of something delightful, comforting, beautiful, clever,” said Paula Marantz Cohen, English professor and dean of Honors College at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Many of her fans, she said, want to enjoy her stories about a simpler time and place.

Some Austen scholars say passages in her novels “Emma” and “Mansfield Park” suggest that she supports abolitionism, others say it is unclear. Few of her letters survived. But her favorite authors – Samuel Johnson, Thomas Clarkson, and William Cowper – were abolitionists. Nevertheless, like almost all English families of all kinds in the 18th century, her family had ties to the slave trade, according to “Jane Austen: A Life”, a book by Claire Tomalin.

Addressing the issue of slavery, Sherard Cowper Coles, President of the Jane Austen Society, said, “This is England’s story and as we understand it we should relate and update it.”

But Mr Cowper Coles, a former diplomat who was Britain’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009-10, warned: “It is not fair to expect people to have awareness outside of their time. But even in our time we are aware of slavery and live with its consequences in Minneapolis and in many other places. “

Frances Brook, a tour guide in England who has taken groups to Austen sites, said she was in favor of the museum that presented more context about Austen’s time, but that it would have “woken up” to judge her for wearing cotton and taking sugar in their tea -is gone a little too far. “Like the rest of us, Austen did things in her everyday life that contradicted her broader views of the world,” said Ms. Brook, who last visited the museum in 2017.

Prof Johnson, of Princeton, said the museum’s attempt to add context to Austen’s life would not suppress readers’ enthusiasm for her.

“Just because you involve Austen in the mess of the story doesn’t mean you don’t love her,” she said.

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Health

Edward Jenner Pioneered Vaccination. Will His Museum Survive a Pandemic?

Edward Jenner Pioneered Vaccination. Will His Museum Survive a Pandemic?

BERKELEY, England – It has been named the birthplace of modern day vaccination.

More than 220 years ago, when they received the first vaccine against smallpox, people in an English village stood in front of a small wooden hut to have their arms scratched with a lancet.

The pioneering local doctor who administered the vaccine, Edward Jenner, called the humble building in his garden the “Temple of Vaccinia,” and it was from there that a public health movement developed that declared smallpox eradicated worldwide in 1980 .

But a new scourge has left this place – where the gnarled wooden walls of Dr. Jenner’s hut still stands in a house and garden museum dedicated to his legacy – and his future closed to the public on shaky ground. Although Dr. Jenner’s work has been cited repeatedly as the world headed for a coronavirus vaccine, the museum struggled to survive in its former home.

“I think the problem has been museum underfunding in this country for many, many years,” said Owen Gower, the manager of Dr. Jenner’s house, museum and garden. “Covid has really shed light on these issues, as it has with so many different problems.”

The museum is among the many independent cultural heritage sites across the UK to stand on this fringe since last year, as one of their main sources of income – visitors – was cut off when pandemic restrictions closed their doors.

Some could open for a few months in the summer and fall, others, like Dr. Jenner’s house, unable to take necessary action in a tight space with limited budgets, remained closed.

A look in the museum’s guest book reveals the final handwritten notes from February 2020. One of the surnames is accompanied by an all-too-familiar drawing of the spiked sphere of a virus, scribbled by a child’s hand.

Even before the pandemic, Dr. Jenners Museum struggling to find financial stability. Mr. Gower is the only full-time employee; A few part-time workers and dozens of volunteers keep the museum going.

“It’s always been a tough sell,” said Gower of the small museum in the sleepy country town of Berkeley, which is on a quiet lane off the beaten track in the UK.

Most visitors are local, although there are occasional medical fans who make their way from further afield into town on the River Severn north of Bristol.

The building was converted into a museum as a private home in the 1980s after centuries. The handful of rooms are filled with Mr. Jenner’s personal effects. Folding glasses, a strand of hair, lancets and medical drawings crowd into small glass showcases, while the displays on the upper floor are reminiscent of the march to eradicate smallpox.

One recent morning this month, Mr Gower was walking around the museum grounds, pondering how the pandemic has given him a new personal appreciation for the place as he sees parallels with the current vaccination campaign.

Updated

March 29, 2021, 10:36 p.m. ET

“Some people would have been very excited, hopeful, others probably a little more nervous,” he said of those who met Dr. Jenner from the 1790s onwards to scratch his lancet, a small medical blade.

Dr. Jenner’s vaccine is based on a technique called variolation, which has been practiced in Africa and Asia for centuries, and his approach was also based on local knowledge. His vaccine used samples of the milder disease, cowpox – as it had long been known in his rural community that women exposed to the disease in dairies were immune to smallpox.

The museum managed to scratch by 2020 even with the doors closed, thanks in part to a huge fundraiser at the start of the pandemic.

The UK government this month announced an increase in its Culture Restoration Fund by £ 300 million, or $ 412 million in its annual budget, and there are more immediate grants to provide critical backstops.

Most funding available, however, focuses on immediate aid rather than long-term planning, and last year’s fundraiser that saved the Jenner Museum from imminent closure made it out of the question for most programs.

With the coronavirus vaccine rollout in the UK going smoothly and the number of new infections after a winter of lockdown giving way to a summer of freedom, Mr Gower hopes he’ll soon be welcoming the first visitors to the museum again as the Albertine roses that the Crawl up the facade of the building, begin to bloom.

There are around 2,500 independent museums and heritage sites across England, often full of niche collections like the one in Dr. Jenner’s house. Last year, emergency funding kept the entire sector afloat, said Emma Chaplin, director of the Association of Independent Museums.

“Many museums spent their reserves last year when the focus was obviously on survival,” said Ms. Chaplin. But after weathering the immediate pandemic storm, the sites will need support this year and likely next year to survive, she added.

As the Jenner Museum reopens, Mr Gower is hoping to update the exhibits to include new relevant topics as the coronavirus pandemic wakes up. Mr Gower believes the museum’s namesake would have endorsed this if he had told the fuller history of vaccination around the world and highlighted the many contributions to life-saving medicine.

“We are very keen to move away from the idea that there is a hero in the history of vaccination,” said Gower, noting that Dr. Jenner’s breakthrough “was based on the work of other people”.

Mr. Gower believes that Dr. Jenner’s focus on collaboration – he never patented his vaccine, offered it for free, and taught other doctors how to do the procedure – also offers lessons for the current age. And as nations look for limited vaccine supplies and anti-vaccine campaigns take hold, the story of how we got here is more important than ever.

“He’s done remarkable things – and the number of lives saved and changed by vaccinations – it all started here,” Gower said. “But I think it’s also the idea that not only is it a thing of the past, but it also lasts.”

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Business

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, Whose Artwork Museum Promoted Ladies, Dies at 98

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, Whose Art Museum Promoted Women, Dies at 98

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay, who used her social relationships, organizational acumen, and personal collection of hundreds of works by women painters to build the country’s first museum dedicated to women in the arts, died Saturday at her Washington home. She was 98 years old.

Her death was confirmed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, which she opened in 1987 and until recently chaired it and held weekly meetings with the museum’s director at her Georgetown home.

Ms. Holladay, known to her friends as Billie, was a skilled networker from Washington who understood how to use party invitations and nonprofit committee seats to create an agenda. But where others might have used those talents to solicit clients or gain power for their own sake, she had a different goal in mind: to include women in art history who she believed had ignored their contributions for too long .

A patrician with impeccable taste and sense of decency, she rubbed her shoulders with First Ladies, had lunch with Mellons and Gettys, and supported herself in the six years it took to open the museum, housed in a former Freemason , to those associations and others in Washington’s cultural establishment temple three blocks from the White House.

Under the direction of Ms. Holladay, the museum grew to include more than 5,500 works by more than 1,000 artists with an endowment of $ 66 million and a network of support committees in 13 states and 10 countries.

“No player in the art scene has a deeper understanding of power and money and how our system works,” wrote Paul Richard, Washington Post critic, when the museum opened. “Despite her white-gloved friendliness, hardworking Billie Holladay is a warrior and a winner.”

Wilhelmina Cole was born on October 2, 1922 in Elmira, New York State. Her father, Chauncey Cole, was a businessman; Her mother, Claire Elisabeth (Strong) Cole, was a housewife. She was particularly close to her maternal grandmother, who lived across the street and owned a print by French artist Rosa Bonheur.

She moved to Washington shortly after graduating from Elmira College in 1944. She got a job as a social secretary for the Chinese embassy; For a while she worked for Madame Chiang Kai-shek, China’s first lady, who had temporarily moved to the United States to campaign for international support against the Chinese communists.

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Ms. Holladay left the embassy after Wallace Jr. was born and shortly before the fall of the Chinese government. The family moved to the suburbs of McLean, Virginia and later to Georgetown.

She worked for a while in the National Gallery and later joined several museum and non-profit bodies. She and her husband also began collecting art: their first work was a painting they bought for $ 100 at a high school art fair.

On a trip to Europe in the 1970s, the Holladays were impressed by a still life by the Flemish artist Clara Peeters from the 17th century, which they experienced in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. They saw another Peeters in Madrid working at the Museo del Prado. But at home they couldn’t mention her in her many art-historical volumes.

“If Peeters was enough to hang in two of the greatest museums in the world, how was it that we didn’t know them?” Ms. Holladay wrote in her memoir “A Museum of Our Own” (2008).

She and her husband focused on female artists and ended up collecting 500 works by 150 painters and sculptors. But buying the works was one thing; What bothered Ms. Holladay was a general lack of awareness among women artists.

At dinner parties, she asked if anyone could name five female artists since the Renaissance. She would hear the names Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. Someone could mention Helen Frankenthaler. Nobody ever turned five.

Mrs. Holladay had planned to donate her collection to a museum. But one day at lunchtime, her friend Nancy Hanks, the first woman to run the National Foundation for the Arts, suggested going further. Not everyone had the skills and connections to open their own museum, Ms. Hanks said. But Mrs. Holladay did.

She turned out to be adept – and happy – at fundraising. Her neighbor was a granddaughter of J. Paul Getty; She gave $ 1 million. Ms. Holladay’s first gala in 1983 was directed by philanthropist Rachel Lambert Mellon, known as Bunny, and fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy. While she was working to save money on buying a building, she opened her home and collection to visitors, with her family and friends serving as lecturers.

“She was the master of the possible,” said Winton Holladay, her daughter-in-law, the museum’s vice-chairwoman. “She just had this incredible confidence, and her confidence permeated everyone else.”

For the location of the museum, Ms. Holladay chose the former national headquarters of the Masons, a looming neoclassical building on New York Avenue. The neighborhood was shabby; There was an adult bookstore next door. But she reveled in the irony: a “bastion of a male secret society,” she said of the Freemasons, would now be used to promote women in the arts.

The museum opened on April 7, 1987 in the presence of Barbara Bush, then the second lady. Despite the support of the Washington establishment, the institution was immediately criticized from all sides: feminists claimed that artists were being ghettoized, while conservatives claimed that the museum politicized art.

Mrs. Holladay was unmoved. When raising funds for the museum, she pointed out that only 2 percent of the art purchased by major museums was from women. By the mid-2010s, that number had only improved slightly to 11 percent. And as the museum’s collection expanded, criticism subsided.

“She had the guts of her beliefs and knew what she wanted to do,” said Susan Fisher Sterling, the museum’s longtime director. “She would say to people, ‘You are absolutely right. It would be wonderful if women artists were treated equally. But they are not. ‘”

Categories
Business

Blanton Museum Redesign Goals to Increase Its Profile

Blanton Museum Redesign Aims to Raise Its Profile

The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin is planning a $ 35 million campus redesign under the direction of Snohetta. Architectural and landscape improvements are being made on the 200,000 square meter site of the museum, including a dramatic biomorphic canopy that redefines the entrance area and a public wall assignment by the Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera.

“It was sometimes difficult for people to find our front door and to identify us as they drove by,” said the director of the Blanton, Simone Wicha, who wants to improve the arrival feeling for the two buildings of the museum in the Spanish revival style, which blend in with the architectural overall picture of the university.

With more than $ 33 million, the museum will lay the foundation stone in February and the project is expected to complete in late 2022.

Snohetta designed 15 tall, flowering structures to bridge the terrace between the two buildings, giving the museum a more distinctive visual identity. These canopies rise on slender pillars and fan out to form broad petals. They form archways and provide shade over new seating. This ensemble will also take a one-way look at the Texas Capitol and Ellsworth Kelly’s non-non-national chapel, realized on the Blanton campus in 2018.

The Blanton invited Herrera, now 105 years old, to create a mural that is clearly visible through the arches of the facade of the gallery building – the first of several public works of art that he will commission. The museum aims to build on interest in Kelly’s Chapel, which Wicha said put the museum on the international art map and helped increase visitor numbers from around 135,000 to 200,000 a year before the pandemic broke out.

Herrera’s bold composition of 14 monumental green squares, each animated with four white diagonal spears that meet to define a smaller green square, is titled “Green How I” after a refrain in Federico García Lorca’s poem “Sleepwalking Ballad” Desire You Green ”.

“The opportunity to do something on such a large scale and in such an important place was very attractive, especially to the hidden architect in me,” wrote Herrera, who was trained as an architect in her 20s before leaving Cuba, in one E-mail. She noticed that the Blanton was a pioneer in collecting Latin American art.

Although she and Kelly were both in Paris from 1948 to 1954 and then in New York, they did not know each other. “I worked mostly in solitude for many years,” wrote Herrera, whose recognition in the art world has been achieved over the past two decades, including a retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2016. “I am proud to have been at this stage in my life our big-big projects are shown together at Blanton. “