This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] /-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\ Share the spirit with a gift from Starbucks. Our coffee brewers & espresso machines at special holiday prices. http://www.starbucks.com/shop/subcategory.asp?catalogFname=Starbucks&categoryFname=SaleFClearance&ci=274 \----------------------------------------------------------/ From Virginia to Louisiana, a Building Boom for Museums December 18, 2001 By STEPHEN KINZER MOBILE, Ala. - On the shore of a shaded pond a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico construction machinery roars and screeches in a din that is now familiar across the southeastern United States. This is the sound of art museums being built. Here it is a new building for the Mobile Museum of Art, which is to cost $15 million and open next year. Across this region, which has long felt culturally overshadowed by other parts of the country, an extraordinary building boom is under way. New art museums, or large additions to existing ones, are being planned, built and opened in more than a dozen cities. In Florida the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach is raising $20 million for a new wing, only a few years after raising $30 million to double its size and add to its endowment. Museums in Tampa, Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale have also begun building campaigns. Two major projects are under way in North Carolina and two more in Georgia, with projected costs totaling over $150 million. Museums in Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi are also part of the boom, along with others on the borders of the region, in Louisiana and Virginia. This boom is based partly on the desire of many Southerners to bring more fine art to their communities. Although some museums here have superior collections that are languishing in storage for lack of display space, directors of some others are still uncertain what they will hang on their new walls. In many cities business leaders are supporting these projects in the hope that they will draw tourists and attract more talented work forces. The economic prosperity of the 1980's and 90's made many of these business figures rich, and they have contributed millions of dollars to museum fund-raising campaigns. Museum directors, acutely aware that donors want to use museums as tools for economic development, are competing with one another to produce the most striking buildings. Several have hired renowned architects and asked them to come up with buildings so unusual that they may become tourist attractions in their own right. "There's a kind of breaking out of the shell of that inferiority complex we might have had," said Joseph B. Schenk, director of the Mobile Museum of Art. "We're behind the curve of museums in New England or the upper Midwest or California. But during the 1990's people here realized they were doing well enough to begin concentrating on quality-of-life issues. There was also a fair amount of reverse migration from the North, which brought with it not just people and ideas but also art collections." Frank Gehry, the architect whose dazzling Guggenheim Museum turned the dreary Spanish port of Bilbao into a worldwide tourist destination, is designing a new museum in Biloxi, Miss. It is to house the work of a single artist, George E. Ohr, a Biloxi potter and sculptor who died in 1918. A local arts patron and former mayor, Jerry OKeefe, and his family have donated $1 million to the museum building fund and raised another $7 million. The Ohr-OKeefe Museum is scheduled to be completed in 2004 at a cost of $16 million. "We see the Gehry building as something that can bring us to a whole new level of tourism," said Marjorie Grady, the museum's executive director. "Our conservative projection is for 100,000 visitors in the first year, and it could easily be much more." In Savannah, Ga., Moshe Safdie, designer of the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, has been chosen to design a new building for the Telfair Museum of Art. He had to revise his design in the face of local criticism, but a new version has now been accepted, and the $18 million building is to open in 2004. Some promoters of this wave of new construction wonder whether there is enough outstanding art in the South to fill these museums, or enough money to buy it. Diane Lesko, executive director of the Telfair Museum, said she shared that concern. "I would hope every new building is being built for reason, to fill a need, and not just for vanity," she said. "If you do it just to pull out works in storage that are not first or even second tier, you're not going to make it. People may come once to see the building and the display of the collection, but that's it." Major museum building projects in North Carolina include the new Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, set to open in 2003 at a cost of $15 million. It will be affiliated with Duke University, and half the cost was donated by a Duke graduate, Raymond Nasher. The project involves the construction of five buildings around a 10,000-square-foot atrium, and Mr. Nasher has said he hoped it would become one of the most important university museums in the world. The Nasher Museum is being designed by Rafael Viñoly, designer of the new Kimmel Center for the Arts in Philadelphia. Mr. Viñoly has also been chosen to design another project in the South, a $46 million expansion of the Tampa Museum of Art that will quadruple its exhibition space and serve as the anchor for a new waterfront cultural district. Less than 50 miles southeast of Durham, in Raleigh, an even more ambitious museum project is unfolding. The North Carolina Museum of Art there has begun a campaign aimed at raising $89 million for a campus of exhibition halls that will provide 180,000 square feet of new space. "We Southern folks take a while to catch up, but we're catching up now," the museum director, Lawrence J. Wheeler, said in an interview. "The South has changed. It's more cosmopolitan than it used to be. There's a definite growth in the number of people who appreciate art, as well as in the number of patrons and the available resources. "At the same time you have a real shift in the perception of what art museums can be," he added. "People realize that they're not just culturally and economically beneficial, but that they can become very important centers of community life." Taking note of what he called a tendency among Southerners to value tradition and history and to turn their backs on the creations of their own times or recent history, Mr. Wheeler said: "People with money have always preferred the familiar, things that had history written on them. They've loved old houses, old silver, decorative arts, furniture, old rugs and pictures - that sort of thing. You had to look hard to find collections of contemporary art. But that's also changing. We've had a lot of contemporary-art exhibitions, and they've become more and more popular. I don't worry about whether there will be audiences for the new." With competition among museums a clear though intangible factor in the current building surge, it is not surprising that the North Carolina Museum of Art bills itself as "the Southeast's premier visual arts museum," while the High Museum of Art in Atlanta stakes the same claim, calling itself "the leading art museum in the Southeast." The High Museum, which opened in 1983 with an award-winning design by Richard Meier, could not stand still with so much construction across the region, and it has begun raising an estimated $100 million for renovating its building, constructing a new wing and strengthening its endowment. "We may be at another in a series of rebirths of the South, asserting a higher level of cultural aspiration after having achieved a higher level of economic success," said Michael Shapiro, director of the High. "It's what occurred in other, older cities beginning in the late 19th century." "One thing that may evolve from it is alternative exhibition pathways," Mr. Shapiro said. "The traditional trajectory is New York to Chicago to Los Angeles or maybe San Francisco. Now there might be one from Atlanta to Houston to some place like Denver or Seattle or Phoenix." Like other arts administrators who are overseeing expansion projects in the Southeast, Mr. Shapiro said his financing has remained secure since the shocks of Sept. 11. "Our plans are moving ahead absolutely on track," he said, "and in fact we have received some of our largest donations since Sept. 11." Many of these projects are being planned and built with unusually strong emphasis on education. Museums seek to offer libraries with computer stations, interactive exhibits, and rooms full of hands-on activities to engage young people. One new Southern institution, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, is built around an educational complex and a series of empty galleries. Working on the assumption that it is now prohibitively expensive for new museums to build world- class collections, the Frist does not plan to bid for art at auction. Instead it will concentrate on serving as a kunsthalle, a site where shows from other places are presented. The Frist, which opened in April, is housed in a lovingly restored former post office, complete with handsome corridors and Art Deco details. Most of the $45 million cost was donated by a wealthy local family, one of whose most prominent members is the United States Senator Bill Frist. As its first show the Frist presented a collection of European masterworks from the Art Gallery of Ontario that included paintings by artists ranging from Rembrandt and Tintoretto to Picasso and Dufy. It is now displaying treasures of medieval and Byzantine art from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and illuminated manuscripts from collections in Philadelphia. "We want to provide a space for people to come and see some of the very finest art that exists in the world, but that's only part of it," said Chase Rynd, director of the Frist. "We're going to seize on to each exhibition to educate people about that moment or medium or historical period. We hope to inspire a whole generation of people who are not familiar with the visual arts." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/18/arts/design/18MUSE.html?ex=1009667414&ei=1&en=5ce4d5b2274263ac HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson Racer at [log in to unmask] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [log in to unmask] Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). 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