MFA Expansion

Status
Not open for further replies.
What would you want instead of the driveway? A glass pyramid?
 
Shepard said:
What would you want instead of the driveway? A glass pyramid?
Click to expand...
As much as I like 'Appeal to the Great spirit' it might be more fitting to place a larger piece of art in that spot. Or maybe add some landscaping, benches, bike racks, anything...

Also, wouldn't it technically be a carriageway?
 
How about a few decommissioned green line trains parked around the carriageway, with each one housing a temporary/rotating art installation designed by a local artist?
 
The entrance doesn't feel that setback from street level, especially since it's much more accessible now. Cars can drive up to it and drop people off, etc.

I wouldn't mind seeing some additional art sprinkled around the lawns.
 
The driveway would not have to be replaced if they just redeveloped the entire Huntington entrance into a stone plaza that is accessible by cars but designed for pedestrians. How many cars use that drop-off anyway?
 
bdurden said:
The driveway would not have to be replaced if they just redeveloped the entire Huntington entrance into a stone plaza that is accessible by cars but designed for pedestrians. How many cars use that drop-off anyway?
Click to expand...

hear hear!! i was griping just this to my wife last time we were entering. I was lamenting that on the one hand while I was happy they reoriented this to be the main entry, it was pathetic that the hordes of people emptying out of every outbound train were squeezed into a pathetic little sidewalk while such a large amount of real estate is given over to the one toyota camry every 10 minutes dropping someone off....

no doubt this area is designed around tour buses, but really this should be an entry plaza that is part queuing and collection area for museum goers, and partly monumental civic space for the city.... i know that a better solution could be had. It's quite similar in scale and function to the British Museum entrance, which is basically the MFA entrance made pedestrian only, all flattened to one plane, and paving over the silly median lawn (though it offers its own reconfigured silly lawns). Oh and same renovation architect.

4191323830_8397499d21_b.jpg
 
Remember when the AC yachts were in front? That was awesome.

To be completely honest, I kind of like the semi-circle driveway. I bet they could simply re-orient the sidewalks and lawn a tad bit to pronounce the pedestrian uses.
 
I'm generally in favor of any public exposure that the sport of yacht racing receives but in retrospect as awesome as it looked at the time, that exhibition was in poor taste. It was no more than blatant ego stroking on the part of Koch.
 
kennedy said:
To be completely honest, I kind of like the semi-circle driveway. I bet they could simply re-orient the sidewalks and lawn a tad bit to pronounce the pedestrian uses.
Click to expand...

I like it too. All they need to do is make it a shared space. Sidewalk and pavement on the same level with a textured pavement instead of asphalt. Right now, people are inclined to walk only on the sidewalk, instead of using the entire space available.
 
kmp1284 said:
I'm generally in favor of any public exposure that the sport of yacht racing receives but in retrospect as awesome as it looked at the time, that exhibition was in poor taste. It was no more than blatant ego stroking on the part of Koch.
Click to expand...

I was totally unaware, so all I noticed was the coolness of the yachts. But I can imagine that considering they were AC yachts, a great deal of ego was involved. How 'bout the battle of the maxi-tris with wing sails?
 
Yay for the MFA.

I think Geoff Edgers could have been nicer when writing about the facilities guys at the MFA. These guys have handled more art than just about any other person in America. They aren't just snow-shovelers. (We used them as movers once and they did an excellent job, btw.)

This is all very exciting!

For new wing, MFA rolls out a masterpiece
Moves meticulous and mighty do the trick in 11 days
By Geoff Edgers, The Boston Globe

After 10 years of effort and more than $500 million in fund-raising, the Museum of Fine Arts installed the first painting in its new Art of the Americas Wing yesterday, and it?s no ordinary work.

Thomas Sully?s 19th-century masterpiece ?The Passage of the Delaware?? is just the kind of painting the MFA hasn?t been able to display properly in the past. Why? It?s simply one of the largest in the museum?s collection. At 17 feet by 12 feet and weighing 1,000 pounds, with lively brushwork showing General George Washington on the banks of the Delaware River, the painting has been too big to put in a gallery.

This was no typical installation, either, with 19 staffers - from videographers, curators, and conservators to MFA director Malcolm Rogers - crowding around to watch as muscle-bound workers hoisted the gilded frame onto a wall.

?It?s a big, symbolic moment,?? said Rogers, who scooted down to the gallery between his lunch and a trustees meeting. ?After years of planning, seeing the first work of art in place is thrilling for me. It also relieves a lot of tension. We?re on our way.??

Yesterday marked the culmination of a painstaking 11-day process in which the painting was removed from storage, unrolled, stretched, framed, and finally hung.

When the museum?s new wing opens in November, ?The Passage of the Delaware?? will occupy a marquee spot in a gallery steps from a new glass-enclosed central courtyard. The expansion - in the works for a decade - adds 133,491 square feet to the museum?s footprint, a 28 percent increase, with galleries displaying work from North, Central, and South America.

The Sully painting will not be entirely new to many museumgoers. Until 1998, it hung in a cavernous second-floor passageway near an escalator. Then, over 14 months starting in January 2007, it underwent a meticulous restoration process - on view to the public near the Huntington Avenue entrance - by conservator Charlotte Ameringer.

The MFA also found the picture?s original frame, which had been in storage for more than a century, and restored it, covering the worn bronze paint with gold leaf and building new ornamental corners to replicate the original. In all, the museum said, the conservation work took 4,000 staff hours.

Why so much effort?

In some ways, it is the first time Sully?s painting has had a proper home. The State of North Carolina originally commissioned the 1819 work, but rejected it for being too big. A Boston gallery owner then purchased it for $500 in 1823 before selling it the same year to the now defunct New England Museum. The painting went to another since-shuttered institution, the Boston Museum, in 1841, before being given to the MFA in 1903.

The museum?s latest installation process began Feb. 8. First, MFA staffers moved the massive, rolled-up canvas out of storage into the gallery. The canvas had been wrapped up slowly, with a thin layer of paper protecting the work, and the entire roll had been covered in plastic, held by lightly tied strips of cloth.

According to Ameringer, rolling a painting flexes the paint film, but the Sully had been rolled up so many times in the last two centuries that any damage from stress had already been done.

Before they unrolled it, Ameringer and a colleague laid archival paper on the floor, part of a deliberately painstaking process.

?Conservators are people who find watch repair too fast-paced,?? said Ameringer, explaining her deliberate approach. ?There are no instantaneous results. Things don?t happen quickly.??

The next day, the MFA facilities crew - the same guys who shovel snow and unload trucks - took their positions at the end of the scroll. The men worked slowly, with Ameringer circling to check as first the gray sky, then Washington came into view, inch by inch.

On Feb. 10, Ameringer and an assistant, Sandy Kelberlau, both in their socks and wearing white gloves, delicately attached the ends of the canvas to a wooden stretcher with push pins, then used staples.

Over the next several days, the process moved gradually forward.

?I think we?re ready when you are,?? Bryan Campbell, an MFA worker wearing a Philadelphia 76ers hat and giving off the distinct aroma of his Newports, said last Friday.

With that, a group of workers lifted the painting from the floor. Ameringer held a rubber mallet, knocking in wooden pieces at each corner to stretch the canvas just enough so it wouldn?t hang loose. Within minutes, she was done and the painting left for the long weekend.

?It?s been rolled up for a while and never been in this environment,?? said Ameringer. ?I want it to adjust. It?ll either tighten or slacken up.??

All that led to yesterday?s action, when the canvas was installed in the frame and hung.

Workers moved electric lifts to each side, with one man aloft in each.

Below, other men tugged at the painting, which rested on a blanket to protect the frame, and slowly moved it into place.

It sounded as if a big couch was being hauled up a twisting staircase.

?Watch your feet, Davy!??

?I think you should be an inch over.??

?Joe, can you lean it???

As they worked, Elliot Bostwick Davis, who chairs the Art of the Americas department, moved nervously around the frame, noting that she could hear the sound of wood being strained.

Rogers walked to the back of the room, taking in the scene as the men attached the work to the wall and moved the lifts out of the way.

Rogers was impressed by the restoration, noting the brightness of the white of Washington?s horse and the clear definition of the other horses in silhouette.

Joe Morgan, a facilities staffer who led the crew, walked behind the director to take in the portrait. He was asked what he liked most about the painting. His positive review didn?t require an art-history degree.

?Nice and even,?? he said, pleased with his work.

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com
Click to expand...
 
JohnAKeith said:
I think Geoff Edgers could have been nicer when writing about the facilities guys at the MFA. These guys have handled more art than just about any other person in America. They aren't just snow-shovelers.
Click to expand...

I had the exact same reaction. This is exciting both for the MFA and the city of Boston. Edgers' rediculous one-liner about Mr. Cambell's hat and his "aroma" of cigarettes is utterly pointless. Edgers' aroma of elitism bothers me a lot more than cigarettes.

But I wholeheartedly agree: "Yay for the MFA"!
 
Wow, I never really thought paintings could weigh so much.
 
JohnAKeith said:
I think Geoff Edgers could have been nicer when writing about the facilities guys at the MFA. These guys have handled more art than just about any other person in America. They aren't just snow-shovelers. (We used them as movers once and they did an excellent job, btw.)
Click to expand...

Evidently this became a 'thing'. He wrote about it on his blog:

Newports at the MFA
Link|Comments (0) Posted by Geoff Edgers February 19, 2010 08:59 AM

I've already received some borderline hate mail after today's story on the hanging of the Sully and the comments section of Boston.com is alive with people upset that A. I mentioned that one of the MFA facilities guys smokes Newports and that B. I ended the story with a quote from Joe Morgan.

"This article could not be more pretentious if it TRIED."

"Would the reporter have made a comment if a museum executive had a piece of food in his/her teeth? Of course not."

Well, first things first. If Malcolm Rogers came downstairs wiping the tunafish from the corners of his mouth, I bet that would have been in the story. Because it would have been interesting that a museum director ran downstairs so fast to make sure he caught the hanging. As for Bryan's Newports... My favorite stories, fiction or non-fiction, have detail in them. They also show contrast. And to me, the idea of Bryan's Newports and his 76ers hat being in the same gallery as these whispering curators...that's about the contrast and detail.

But hey, perhaps when I get into my 12-year-old car or try to change the washer on the bathtub faucet, I'm harboring a deep resentment of the working class.
Click to expand...
 
the idea of Bryan's Newports and his 76ers hat being in the same gallery as these whispering curators...that's about the contrast and detail.
Click to expand...

The working class and their inferior aesthetic preferences just do not belong near such art!

(Isn't a 76ers hat actually oddly apropos to the hanging of a painting detailing the crossing of the Delaware?)
 
What Mr Edgers failed to realize is that the workman were actually artists as well.

Post-Modern performance artists to be exact.

They deliberately choose their attire (and associated odors) as a statement against the stale cultural refinement of the MfA's choice of art for the new wing.

Geoff, of course, was too dense too pick up on their subtle commentary and took them and their costumes at face value.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top