MIAMI ART MUSEUM UNVEILS NEW DESIGN; SPLITTING UP A COLLECTION
In unveiling a design today by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Miami Art Museum plans to portray the concept as an interim stage in the development of its $220 million project overlooking Biscayne Bay, writes the New York Times‘ Robin Pogrebin. The architects and Terence Riley, the museum’s director, say they want to include the public in the project, which will almost quadruple the museum’s size to 120,000 square feet. To underscore this point, the museum will put the design on view tomorrow at its current site nearby, in an exhibition titled “Work in Progress: Herzog & de Meuron’s Miami Art Museum,” which will also include about twenty models showing how the design has evolved. The current design calls for a three-story building atop an elevated platform and below a canopy that extends well beyond the gallery walls, creating a shaded veranda and plazas. The canopy is anchored by columns and trees that bring in the tropical surroundings of Bicentennial Park (to be renamed Museum Park). While the museum is formally soliciting public feedback, Riley said he nonetheless expected Miami residents to express their views through newspaper editorials, letters to the editor, and the like. He said the exhibition would illuminate the design process “from conception to schematic design, how Herzog and de Meuron got to where they are in terms of thinking through this whole project.”
Also in the New York Times_, Carol Vogel reports that collectors Nancy Goliger and Bruce Berman, in the process of divorcing, are sending about five hundred works from their collection to auction at Christie’s in New York, starting in April. The rest are being given to three Los Angeles museums: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Getty, whose donors have included the couple. Goliger and Berman’s photography collection began in 1991 when the Hollywood couple—he is chairman and chief executive of Village Roadshow Pictures, she is executive vice president of creative advertising at Paramount Pictures—commissioned emerging artists to hit the road and take pictures. It has not been determined which images will go to which museum. “I have asked the museums to give me a list of prioritized preferences,” Berman said. “Nancy and I want to give them what they want and need.” A selection from the collection—at last count some twenty-six hundred photographs—was exhibited last year at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
