​PITTSFIELD, MASS.- Executive Director Van Shields is retiring from the Berkshire Museum. Dr. David Ellis will become interim Executive Director, as the museum undertakes a national search for Shield’s successor. 

“We are grateful for Van’s leadership and vision, especially through a challenging time,” said Elizabeth McGraw, President of the Museum’s Board of Trustees. “Van helped chart a course to secure the museum’s future, true to our mission and responsible to our community. We wish our friend well in his retirement.” 

​Students—as both learners and curators—are leading the way at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, which is due to reopen on 26 January 2019 after a closure of nearly three years for an expansion and revamp by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. The $50m project expands the museum’s space by 50% to over 62,000 sq ft, adds six new galleries and renovates the museum’s original 1985 Charles Moore building (which was “not healthy”, Williams says, revealing rust and mould in the renovation process). “The museum is the largest classroom on campus,” says the director, John Stomberg.
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The museum had been studying needs for expansion for almost 20 years, says the deputy director, Juliette Bianco. She points to the inadequate classroom space—which had been carved out of previous storage space and could only accommodate fewer than 20 students—as a major factor in the expansion. This project triples spaces for classes, which include a range of disciplines across the university; museum education has shifted from “teaching about art, to teaching with art”, Stomberg says. The spaces are designed for “object-based learning”, so students—thanks to on-site storage—will be able to easily access and work directly with objects in the encyclopaedic collection of over 65,000 works.

​The School of Fine Arts will relocate its Master of Fine Arts program in Arts Administration to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the nation, further expanding UConn’s presence in the capital city since the opening of the new Hartford Campus last year.

Under a five-year agreement approved at today’s Board of Trustees meeting, the Wadsworth will provide 1,100 square feet of work space for students, a seminar room, and faculty offices for use by the three-year graduate program in Arts Administration.

“All of our students undertake intensive internships and hands-on research with arts institutions in Hartford. This partnership is mutually beneficial,” says Anne D’Alleva, dean of the School of Fine Arts. “We have national caliber arts institutions in Hartford. Our students will benefit from engaging with them. The arts institutions will benefit from working with bright, motivated, and dedicated graduate students.”

​The Berkshire Museum of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, has announced it will sell off nine additional works from its collection. Last month, the museum failed to meet its goal of raising $55m for a major renovation through the controversial sale of 13 works at Sotheby’s New York, coming in short at $43m. The deaccessioning was allowed as part of an agreement with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office that kept one of the most valuable pieces, Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950) by Norman Rockwell, on public view. It was acquired by George Lucas for his soon to be built museum in Los Angeles, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

Just days after the Berkshire Museum announced that it will sell nine more works from its collection through Sotheby’s, the director who led that deaccessioning effort, which has so far brought in $47 million through the sale of 13 works and has been criticized vigorously by professional groups, said that he will retire.

Van Shields, the director of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts institution, said in a statement to the press, “Working with a board of dedicated and smart volunteers, along with community partners who share our belief in the museum’s power to transform lives, we have charted a course that will well serve the museum and this community.”

​In April, the Baltimore Museum of Art announced a controversial decision to deaccession works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Franz Kline in hopes of using the proceeds to add pieces by women and persons of color to its collection. Those works hit the auction block at Sotheby’s auction house in New York in May, and today the museum named seven new acquisitions made with money gained from those sales.
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Among the new holdings are an abstracted vision of September 11, 2001, by Jack Whitten, who witnessed that fateful day from his studio and painted it using his chipped acrylic tile method, and a painting by Amy Sherald, of two people on a plain watching a rocket launch into space. (Sherald, who is a board member at the BMA, recused herself from the decision to acquire her work, according to a museum spokesperson.) The other purchases include a video work by Isaac Julien, a painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a sculpture by Wangechi Mutu, and two film pieces by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley.

​After being nearly deaccessioned by Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada— a move that generated considerable controversy—Marc Chagall’s dreamy 1929 depiction of Paris’s Eiffel Tower will once again hang on the museum’s walls, starting this Saturday (23 June).

“There was a strong desire from the public to see The Eiffel Tower, so we thought it would be a good opportunity to show the painting in context,” a spokeswoman for the gallery explains in an e-mail. It will hang near Chagall’s earlier work, Memories of Childhood (1924), with other European and American paintings and sculptures from the first part of the 20th century.

There’s no doubt the do-it-yourself mentality of punk rock runs through the DNA of Shepard Fairey’s work.

With his retrospective exhibition “Salad Days, 1989-1999,” which arrives this weekend at the Cranbrook Art Museum, the iconic contemporary artist looks back on how the anti-authoritarian attitudes associated with skateboarding and the punk rock that provided the sport's soundtrack influenced his work.
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The DIY approach is evident throughout the exhibition, which was produced with the assistance of Detroit contemporary art gallery Library Street Collective and spotlights the punk aesthetics, philosophies and low-tech production methods used in the first decade of Fairey’s 30-year career.

​For a coffin, the Farnese Sarcophagus has had quite a life — beginning around 225 AD.

“It was likely quarried in western Turkey,” senior objects conservator Holly Salmon explained, steps away from the marble hunk of history. “It ends up in Rome. It goes into a tomb hundreds of years later.”

Salmon and her colleague Jessica Chloros have been cleaning, restoring and analyzing the Roman-sculpted sarcophagus — which in Latin means "flesh eater" — for months. And they’re learning a ton.

“This piece continues to surprise us,” Chloros said. The conservators discovered traces of a rare pigment known as "Egyptian blue" on its surface.

BALTIMORE -- WBFF -- Baltimore now has more free access to art after the Walters Art Museum celebrated the opening of the One West Mount Vernon Place on Saturday.

Mayor Pugh and Maryland’s First Lady Yumi Hogan spoke, helped cut a ribbon, and toured One West along with hundreds more as part of the day’s events.

One West, also known as the Hackerman House, is a 19th century mansion which sits next to the Walters. It's been revamped over the past few years with a $10.4 million transformation.