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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
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