ART MUSEUM IDEA TOOL KIT TM
PHYSICAL SPACES
This section includes the physical buildings and galleries of art museums, as well as issues of how real estate is allocated within the institutions. This section also includes how art museums present themselves to their communities by considering their outward-facing appearance, such as monuments, entrances, and other physical features made visible prior to setting foot inside.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, NY
Architect Kulapat Yantrasast, principle of the architectural firm WHY, discusses his inclusive process for designing the new galleries for collections of African, Oceanic, and Ancient American art at the Metropolitan. In the link to the presentation at the Norton Museum of Art, January 10, 2020, he also describes the earlier installation he developed for Native American Art at the Museum of Natural History, New York City, New York.
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LINKS:
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YOUTUBE LECTURE
https://www.norton.org/events/human-flourishing-and-the-arts-01-10-2020
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The Art of the
Americas Wing
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Boston, MA
The Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, over a decade in the making, offered a new paradigm for presenting the art of the United States in the context of North, Central and South America from the earliest Ancient American works in the collections dating to about 3500 B.C.E. through the third quarter of the twentieth century in all media.
LINKS:
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/arts/design/19americas.html
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https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/656451
YOUTUBE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHeZjOgFO0U
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New Entrance and
Public Plaza Pavillion
Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn, NY
In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum unveiled a new entrance and public plaza that completely transformed the approach and public access to the institution. You can find the images on the website of the architects, ennead, and the following statement of James S. Polshak, Design Partner,
“The temporal collision between past and present allowed us to celebrate change and newness, and to help the institution recast itself as an open and accessible public place and a museum for the twenty-first century.”
LINKS:
Dreamhamar,
Network Design for Architectural and Urban Planning
Hamar, Norway
During the Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellowship, I had the good fortune to audit Professor Belinda Tato’s Participatory Art and Design Course, which explored many examples of co-creating public spaces. One of the many compelling case studies presented by Professor Tato and her guests was the redesign of the City Square in Hamar, Norway. The process used to transform this space is called “Network Design.” It involves a Physical Lab, located on the Hamar City Square, an Urban Design to refine information gathered in the Lab, and an Academic Network of over 1,200 students. For more on this dynamic project and others created by the firm, the link is:
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https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/dreamhamar-project-on-stortorget-square-1.
Monument Audit
Published by the Monument Lab in Partnership with the Mellon Foundation
This $250 MM initiative provides extensive research on the “monuments and memorials—plaques, markers, and place names—commemorating people and events,” as referenced in the Overview provided by the link below: https://mellon.org/initiatives/monuments/.
During the Advanced Leadership Initiative, I had the privilege of hearing from the leaders of the Monument Lab as one of the guest presentation in a graduate seminar devoted to Monuments, co-taught by Professors Sarah Lewis and Joseph Koerner.
In thinking about how art museums present to their communities, the intentional consideration of monuments as defined above, including those markers and place names, should be given careful consideration for how they reflect IDEA goals.
