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"PAMM’s new exhibits will reflect Miami" @miamiherald

The Perez Art Museum Miami has announced its first year’s schedule of exhibitions, all of which reflect South Florida’sinternational attitude.

By Jordan Levin

[email protected]

A major exhibition from famed Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. New shows highlighting key Cuban, Haitian and Brazilian artists. Projects by artists from Israel, Eastern Europe and the Middle East that explore migration and confrontation with authoritarianism.

After months of contentious discussion about its funding, its location and its name, the Perez Art Museum Miami is announcing the art that will fill the three-story museum in Bicentennial Park when it opens in late 2013. From overviews of art in the Americas to a miniature flotilla evoking Miami’s stream of sea-born migration, PAMM’s directors aim to simultaneously set the museum apart internationally and appeal to its home city with programming that makes a strong connection to Miami.

“You see a lot of U.S. museums with very similar programs, where you could be in Ohio or San Francisco,” says PAMM chief curator Tobias Ostrander. “We have to speak from a place and channel the specifics of that place. This is about showing the most cutting-edge art, the best quality of work that we can, but part of that is making choices about… how that will be relevant to people’s cultural traditions here and generate the most dialogue.”

The most attention-getting exhibit likely will be Ai Weiwei: According to What?, which opens in November 2013.The show, which is the first North American and first major international survey of the famous and influential dissident artist’s work, opened at Washington D.C.’s Hirschhorn Museum last fall and will travel to Indianapolis and Ontario before coming to Miami. Ai, who has collaborated with PAMM architects Herzog & de Meuron on the “Birds Nest” stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, will add new works for Miami, including a giant wall of Chinese bicycles named ‘Forever’ that were once the Communist country’s most-desired brand of transportation.

While China is a long way from South Florida, PAMM director Thom Collins says the issues reflected in Ai’s work will resonate for many in Miami. He says the same is true for an installation by Poland’s Monika Sosnowska, who deals with architecture and public space; video pieces from Israeli artist Yael Bartana, whose work deals with living in a militarized society; and Moroccan-born Bouchra Khalili, who looks at migration and identity.

“Globalization, migration, censorship in authoritarian regimes, economic change and instability, social change… these are global issues but also issues that one can address in ways that tie us directly to Miami,” says Collins. “This is a place that’s uniquely of its moment in terms of movement of populations, movement of capital, tensions about race and economic status. So how do we do shows that leverage unique aspects of Miami to speak about global issues?”

Hew Locke, a Guayanese-British artist whose installation For Those in Peril on the Sea, opening in December 2013, was commissioned by PAMM, hopes his fleet of miniature fishing boats, cargo ships and cruise liners will provoke strong feelings here.

“The migration in Miami gives this an added poignancy that it would not have in Britain,” said Locke on Thursday, inspecting the half-finished concrete walls of the gallery where his vessels will hang. “The real talk is not just about migration in a Miami context, but in a global context. Miami is part of a global family of migration, an example of a place people come looking for something better.”

Other exhibits have more direct connections to Miami and its many links to Latin America and the Caribbean. They include a show of Cuban modernist painter Amelia Pelaez del Casal, the first major U.S. retrospective of Brazilian painter Beatriz Milhazes, and shows by Edouard Duval-Carrie, the well-known Haitian painter based in Miami, and Adler Guerrier, a younger Haitian-American artist also working here. Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, an exhibit organized by three New York museums that will come to PAMM in April 2014, highlights two centuries of work related to the Caribbean.

The museum also will showcase its own collection in a large, long-running show entitled Americana, which will present work by artists from throughout the Americas, with an emphasis on those living in Miami.

Still to come is a slate of performance art, dance, music, film and video programs, to be put together by a curator who Collins says will be announced in the next month. The museum also plans to expand its education offerings, including a program to reach every third-grader in Miami-Dade schools, as well as talks and workshops with visiting artists and others.

Lindsay Pollock, editor-in-chief of Art in America, said the programming struck the right balance between international appeal and Miami-specific character that would help the museum stand out. Bartana, Locke, Khalili and Canadian Geoffrey Farmer, who has been commissioned to create a new installation for PAMM, are highly regarded in contemporary art circles, she said, while the Milhazes and Pelaez shows would be of interest to many.

“They have a lot to prove — this is a new building, and Miami is a tough city with a lot of dynamics at play,” Pollock said. “This sounds like a really interesting and dynamic mix.

“I travel to cities around the U.S. and the museums are often very homogeneous, like one big art fair. In looking to the Caribbean and Latin America, these are artists that are overlooked and underrepresented in the art world,” she said. “Highlighting Miami, Cuban, and Haitian artists is really smart, and will make the place feel specific and give them a special voice.”

How that voice will be heard in Miami remains to be seen. The museum has been criticized by some for not involving more people in the local art scene in its plans. The decision to change the name to reflect Jorge Perez’ $35 million donation of funds and artworks prompted controversy and led some board members to leave. Although art collectors Dennis and Debra Scholl recently donated 300 works to the museum, other important collectors and influential players on the Miami art scene, such as Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz and Marty Margulies, have been among the museum’s most vocal critics. And PAMM faces competition from institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and the Bass Museum on Miami Beach for funding and audiences.

Collins hopes that the museum’s offerings will ultimately overcome these issues.

“Not everyone likes every show or is interested in every exhibit,” he says. “But it’s a hallmark of contemporary art that it’s about offering people fresh experiences, and this is a town that seeks out fresh experiences all the time.”

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Temporary Contemporary: The Bass Museum Redefines Street Art

An evening many assumed would be a run of the mill art showcase turned out to be anything but, as the curators of the Bass Museum of Art had attendees marching around the building grounds, into the streets, and finally depositing the group at a gas pump. The museum's Temporary Contemporary exhibit, launched on November 2, combined high art with street art. Those hoping to see beauty in creative works had to look no further than a sidewalk window display in Walgreens or the TV above the gas station cafe. The procession began around the front of the building's courtyard just before the Beach's skyline swirled into pastel pinks and blues. Silvia Karman Cubiñá, executive director and chief curator of Bass, provided commentary for pieces scattered around the landscape as the crowd listened attentively, even in peculiar places like the Bass's parking lot where a billboard piece by L.A. artist, Ken Gonzalez Day, from his "Profile" series hangs in full view, almost as if to say, "You can't ignore this." Kevin Gonzalez DayThe piece deals with issues of art history and the way in which we perceive its subjects. "You go to a museum and see a white marble sculpture of an African woman and why is it white marble and why is there no name on it?...European American people have [their] proper names for titles," Cubiñá said of the way historical artists named and gave valor to their original works. "He's creating these; juxtaposing them in this conversation about art history...He did the research on who this African woman was and the work of art actually includes her full name...so he's almost rewriting history," Cubiñá said. Director of exhibitions, Chelsea Guerdat, led the troops onto the next wall and briefly introduced a text installation by Mexico City artist Stefan Brüggemann that reads, "This is not supposed to be here." The message is open to interpretation, as Guerdat explained Brüggemann's interest in the forms of language. Stefan BrüggemannThe throng made its way to the street view for the next surface of inked museum wall. Bryan Granger, current Knight curatorial fellow at Bass, introduced a splatter work by Puerto Rican artist Michael Linares. Although the piece itself looks hurried, it took an entire week to erect, in addition to careful preparation where Linares created the image beforehand based on how the motion of the strokes would appear. "He sees a lot of energy in the accident, in the gesture...Being in Miami, there's also this overtone of it sort of being graffiti on the side of a building so we're looking at the idea of high art versus low art of street art," Granger said.

Michael Linares

Dark approaches and everyone's left museum grounds for the Walgreens window displays across the street on Collins where Miami-based artist Cristina Lei Rodriguez introduced guests to her sculptures and installations behind the glass. Her use of plastic, paint, and resin to combine other objects and make new works with bursts of color is part of the appeal in her craft. She sets out to create a visually explorable landscape through detail. "The store front is an amazing place for contemporary art to really have a relationship with the street, with people who are walking by...For people to see art work up close in a different context and question the way that you see objects that are commercially to be bought," Rodriguez said.

Cristina Lei Rodriguez

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meet the president

The Bass Museum seeks to inspire and educate by exploring the connections between our historical collections and contemporary art. This dynamic mission offers contemporary artists the rare opportunity to explore our collection and create new installations that give the public insights into how artists mine the past to make work that addresses the human condition in the 21st century. In addition to our exhibitions, we also accomplish our mission through our educational programs. I am pleased to announce that in January 2012 we will be officially inaugurating our Creativity Center, which will feature hands-on activities for multiple age levels. Visitors will be able to drop in with their children and make art inspired by our collection and exhibitions. It will also be the location for pre-school classes, student exhibitions, and a variety of teacher workshops, art history lectures and art classes offered for older students and adults.

I encourage you to follow my twitter account as I post about the museum and a whole lot more: @GLLJunior

Sincerely, George Lindemann Jr., President Board of Directors of the Bass Museum of Art

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"Miami Art Museum donations on pace with building" @Miamiherald

Miami Art Museum officials are more than halfway to their goal of raising millions in private donations for their new waterfront home.

Seeing is believing for donors to the new Miami Art Museum now under construction alongside Biscayne Bay in downtown’s Bicentennial Park.

With elevated platforms resting atop columns, a trellis-like roof, and a grand staircase that opens onto the water’s edge, the MAM building designed by the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron has generated enthusiasm among architectural critics and museum officials alike.

Lately, MAM director Thom Collins said, that sense of excitement has spread to the museum’s benefactors.

As workers give shape to the museum’s Stiltsville-inspired design, donations to the building campaign are on pace to meet the promise made by museum trustees to raise $120 million in private funds to offset the costs of construction and future operations, he said. More than half has already been pledged.

“People don’t get on board until they see things,’’ Collins said during a recent tour of the construction site. “We’re well within $2 million of finishing the bricks and mortar fundraising.’’

Collins said he is much more relaxed these days than he was last December, when it was announced that upon completion of the building in fall 2013, MAM would be renamed the Jorge M. Perez Art Museum of Miami-Dade County, or PAMM for short, in exchange for a donation of $35 million from the Miami real estate developer.

The community response was divided among those who congratulated the museum and Perez on the generosity of his gift, and those who criticized the name change for giving one person all the credit for a museum built largely with public money approved by Miami-Dade voters in 2004.

In fact, MAM will need even more public support when the new building opens because operational costs are projected to more than double from the present $4 million a year to about $10 million. Currently, MAM relies on about $2 million a year in public funds to cover the costs of exhibitions, educational programs and staff.

Many warned that the museum’s name change would hurt future private donations, which help offset those operating costs, by sending the unintended message that the institution is taken care of.

“Bringing money in is going to be harder,’’ said Miami collector Carlos de la Cruz, who along with his wife, Rosa, runs the De la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space in the Design District. “I think that’s incontrovertible.’’

But nearly one year since the announcement, said MAM’s board chairman, Aaron Podhurst, the fundraising campaign is riding the momentum of its unmistakable landmark rising from the ground.

“Now we’re getting excitement,’’ he said, “and we’re trying to get some of the big gifts in.’’

Yet the work of fundraising for any cultural nonprofit, he added, “never stops.’’

The guaranteed maximum price for MAM’s new building is $131 million, Collins said, but the total price tag on the project, including an endowment to ensure its future operations, is about $220 million.

Public money from a general obligation bond approved by Miami-Dade voters in 2004 will pay $100 million of that cost. Museum trustees pledged to raise an additional $120 million in private donations, including $31 million to offset construction costs, $70 million for an endowment to ensure future operations, and $19 million for transitional expenses.

Collins said MAM trustees have raised about $70.5million in pledges to date, and about $33.5 million of that sum has already been paid.

The remainder will be raised in the months leading up to the museum’s scheduled opening next year — and beyond, Podhurst said.

With much of the museum’s share of construction costs already raised from private sources, Podhurst said, MAM officials are now focused on building the endowment.

“The key for the next year and a half is to get the endowment as high as we can get it,’’ he said, “so we can really do some great operational programming.’’

Museum trustees made a number of promises to ensure that the new building does not run into the same cost overruns and delays that plagued the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, which cost nearly $500 million to complete and experienced numerous delays before opening in 2006.

“After the performing arts center, I think that this community was really gun shy, as I can understand,’’ said Rose Ellen Meyerhoff Greene, vice president of the museum’s board of trustees.

But Greene said museum trustees — nearly all of whom pledged gifts to the campaign — have taken a personal interest in ensuring that the new building comes in on time and on budget.

“If you’re building your own home, you hire an architect; you hire a contractor; and then you watch every light socket put in the home,’’ she said. “That’s how we’ve treated this project.’’

Among the most important commitments made by MAM trustees was management of the building’s design and construction, which ensures that any cost overruns will be paid for by the museum and not the public.

“Those are written assurances,’’ said Michael Spring, Miami-Dade’s cultural affairs chief and one of the principal public officials overseeing the project.

Spring said museum trustees signed a contract promising to raise $120 million in private donations, though there is no timetable specified for raising the funds.

If MAM fails to meet those fundraising goals, then museum trustees and benefactors will be expected to make up the difference, Spring said.

Miami-Dade and the city of Miami, which contributed about $2.8 million in bond funds to the project plus the land for the building, exercise some oversight of the project. For instance, all project costs are paid first by MAM, then submitted for reimbursement to the county and city.

Public officials also receive updates on the project through monthly meetings with museum officials, and annual reports required for receipt of bond monies.

But much of the responsibility for the project’s success rests with museum trustees.

With their own skin at stake, Collins said, museum officials have hired teams of consultants to help manage construction costs, and to gauge future operational expenses.

“We have spreadsheets, and spreadsheets, and more spreadsheets,’’ Collins said. “We really feel confident we have a handle on it.’’

According to the museum’s projections, operating costs for the new building will more than double from the current $4 million a year to about $11 million annually.

Some of that additional operating cost may be borne by the county, which already contributes about $2 million a year to the institution. But county officials have not yet made a commitment to increase funding of the museum.

“It’s inevitable that the budgets for bigger buildings will be bigger,’’ Spring said. “We understand that, but we can make no guarantees that the county can do anything more than what we’re doing now.’’

Podhurst said MAM trustees have not yet asked the county for increased public support, but he enthuses over the opportunities for generating income in ways the museum’s current home in the Miami-Dade Cultural Center cannot.

“We expect to make a lot of money in our predictions on rentals on weddings and bar mitzvahs and parties, and all that kind of stuff, because they’re beautiful spaces,’’ he said. “It’s one of the most gorgeous spots to be on the water.’’

Still, Collins makes it clear that MAM will be looking to county leaders to increase annual support of the museum, as well.

“We have to grow funding through every revenue stream,’’ he said, “but everything has to grow: government funding, private support, earned income.’’

MAM’s fundraising campaign took an unexpected turn in December when the museum announced Perez’s donation of $35 million in cash and art.

MAM trustees voted to accept Perez’s gift and the museum’s renaming by a 46-4 vote, but the news also triggered a backlash.

Four members of the museum’s board of trustees resigned, including past president Mary Frank., who with her husband Howard Frank, chief operating officer and vice chairman of Carnival Corp., vowed to stop paying on their $1 million pledge. Carnival Corp., which had pledged $5 million to the museum, also reneged.

The Franks paid $417,791 of their pledge, MAM officials said, and Carnival Corp. paid $1.5 million.

The museum does not plan to return those gifts, said Tracy Belcher, a MAM spokeswoman.

Yet while some donors have severed ties with the museum over the change, the renaming also has helped open new doors for MAM.

“The Jorge Effect was really positive and fantastic,’’ said Collins, the museum’s director, “because he’s given us access to people we otherwise wouldn’t have talked to.’’

Ranked the 360th richest person in America by the October issue of Forbes magazine, Perez, 63, has a personal fortune estimated at $1.2 billion — and he travels among a broad circle of influential friends.

His gift to MAM, divided into $20 million cash and $15 million in art, was meant to lead by example, Podhurst said.

Perez has paid $6.5 million of the cash pledge to date, Podhurst said, and he is scheduled to pay an additional $3.5 million in January. The remainder of his cash pledge — $10 million — will be paid in installments by 2022.

The art, however, is already in hand.

Collins and MAM’s chief curator, Tobias Ostrander, recently hand picked the works from Perez’s personal collection. Those works have been appraised by Christie’s, the art auction house, and their value is greater than the pledged amount of $15 million, Podhurst said.

In a video interview posted on Forbes.com, Perez said his commitment to MAM is now closer to $40 million.

But he doesn’t mind.

“I want the best pieces to go to the museum,’’ he told Forbes.

Among the donors whom Perez brought on board for the museum’s campaign is a fellow member of the Forbes 400: Number 83, Stephen Ross, the billionaire owner of the Miami Dolphins.

Though Ross sits on the boards of some of New York’s most prestigious cultural institutions, including the Guggenheim Museum and the Lincoln Center, he had not taken an active role in MAM’s capital campaign until his longtime friend, Perez, asked.

Ross, a real estate developer who is founder and chairman of the Related Companies, said he and Perez are friends and business associates dating back to 1979.

“Knowing that’s important to him, I gave it in his honor,’’ Ross said of his gift to MAM. “Jorge told me how important it was, and asked if I would be interested in giving. It wasn’t a hard sell, if you know what I mean.’’

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/21/3060908_p3/miami-art-museum-donations-on.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/21/3060908_p2/miami-art-museum-donations-on.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/21/3060908/miami-art-museum-donations-on.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/21/3060908/miami-art-museum-donations-on.html#storylink=cpy

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"Museum Park’s vaunted plan shrinks as Miami deals with fiscal crunch" in @miamiherald

BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI Posted on Sun, Sep. 16, 2012 [email protected]

EMILY MICHOT / MIAMI HERALD STAFF

The new Miami Art Museum building is on budget and on target for a fall 2013 opening, but the long-promised park to go along with it has fallen victim to the city's financial crunch.

More than four years ago, the city of Miami eagerly embraced an ambitious scheme for the park portion of the mega-million-dollar Museum Park project on the bay in downtown Miami.

Unanimously approved by the City Commission, the plan for a $68 million, 20-acre green space was supposed to turn most of near-derelict Bicentennial Park into Miami’s version of Chicago’s celebrated Millennium Park. The vision: lure thousands of visitors with lush public gardens, a dramatic entrance on Biscayne Boulevard with rows of royal palms growing out of a shallow pool, a great lawn, glass pavilions and a sculpted mound to provide visitors sweeping vistas of water and greenery.

Well, scratch all that. At least for the foreseeable future.

Facing a daunting fiscal crunch, city administrators have drastically scaled back the long-delayed park plan to a roughly $10 million basic blueprint. City officials have put aside most of the park’s distinctive features until an undetermined future date to focus on building two key if also simplified elements: a new baywalk, and a promenade from Biscayne Boulevard to Biscayne Bay that will provide pedestrian access to the art and science museums now rising on Bicentennial’s north end.

There will still be a park with trees, sod and pathways between the promenade and the deepwater boat slip that marks the project’s southern boundary, city leaders pledge.

It just won’t be anything like the elaborate plan that the city paid the New York firm of Cooper Robertson & Partners, famed planners of Battery Park City on Manhattan’s lower tip, $4.2 million to design.

“It will be trees and open space,’’ said city Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, chairman of the Omni Community Redevelopment Agency, which is funding the bulk of the park project. “You will be able to walk around, take a nap under a tree, play soccer. But it will not have that Millennium identity.’’

‘Still the vision’

Sarnoff and city administrators, who are now weighing five bids from contractors for the baywalk and promenade, say the reduced scope of work will include some needed environmental remediation to cover contaminated soil as well as basic infrastructure so that the Cooper Robertson plan can some day be realized.

“That’s still the vision our commission has embraced, although it was a few years ago,’’ said assistant city manager Alice Bravo. “We’re putting in the bones. We’re going to have an aesthetically pleasing park that will be in harmony with the museums and over time can be enhanced further.’’

The city had previously, and quietly, discarded some costlier elements of the Cooper Robertson plan, including a planned underground parking garage and a restaurant, reducing the estimated cost to around $45 million.

But the decision to scale back the park plan much further comes as the $220 million art museum building reaches the halfway point in construction, on schedule for a fall 2013 opening. The new Miami Science Museum, due for completion by the end of 2014, broke ground in February.

The museums, which occupy about eight acres just south of the ramp to the MacArthur Causeway, have their own extensive landscaping plan by Miami’s ArquitectonicaGeo. So will a broad plaza between the two museums that is being designed by James Corner Field Operations, the New York firm that collaborated on the wildly popular High Line, the abandoned elevated rail line in lower Manhattan that was converted into a linear park.

But Miami Art Museum leaders say they’re worried about what the downsized city park will look like, and whether it will be ready in time for their grand opening, scheduled to coincide with the arrival of the international art hordes for the Art Basel/Miami Beach fair in early December 2013. They’re especially concerned about the critical promenade, without which they say the museum could not open.

Their worst fear: Having an unfinished mud pit at their doorstep just when they have the attention of the international art world. Almost as bad, they say, would be a bare-bones park that detracts from the impact of their lavish new building, designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & deMeuron.

“We remain very concerned about the quality of the overall scheme,’’ said MAM director Thom Collins. “Think about it. The park could be such an incredible amenity. This is the last parcel in that crown of downtown waterfront. It should be a real jewel. Our building is going to be beautiful. The plaza will be incredible. Our immediate landscaping will be beautiful. But what will happen south of there is in question.’’

Aside from plans for the simplified baywalk and promenade, the city has released no plans or renderings of the scaled-down green space, nor issued any descriptions of its scope. No work is apparent at the park.

Fiscal reality

Several mature trees, uprooted from the site of the Brickell CitiCentre project, were recently moved to the park by the developer, Swire Properties, and clumps of Bicentennial Park trees survive. But the center of the park space — used for special events like the Cirque du Soleil tent — remains a bare, treeless desert.

Sarnoff said the scaling down answers the city’s fiscal reality.

The Omni CRA special taxing district, which was to finance the full-fledged Cooper Robertson park, saw revenues drop significantly during the economic crash and has yet to fully recover, he said. The agency is also now on the hook to repay a $45 million loan the city took out to cover its share of the under-construction PortMiami tunnel, leaving relatively little cash for the park, he said.

The bulk of the baywalk is being financed by the Florida Inland Navigation Board, a special taxing district that pays for improvements along the state’s coastlines and financed reconstruction of the site’s seawall. The Omni CRA, meanwhile, is contributing about $5 million toward the park.

The Museum Park plan, including the new homes for the art museum and the science museum, was a cornerstone of former Mayor Manny Diaz’s efforts to revitalize downtown Miami. The museum buildings are being funded through a combination of Miami-Dade County bonds and private donations.

The park portion was included separately in the so-called mega-plan that Diaz negotiated with Miami-Dade County to simultaneously finance the PortMiami tunnel, the new Miami Marlins stadium and affordable housing in Overtown, using in part revenue generated by the Omni and Overtown CRAs. The tunnel is halfway done, the stadium is open, and the Overtown CRA is set to consider a plan to issue $50 million in bonds to subsidize several new housing developments in the historic but impoverished black neighborhood.

Some wonder if the promised park will ever materialize.

“It’s a shame, really,’’ said Science Museum director Gillian Thomas, whose building is scheduled for completion a year after the art museum is done.

Thomas said the city’s piecemeal approach is reasonable given the fiscal constraints it faces. In any case, she added, she is not a fan of some aspects of the Cooper Robertson park plan, singling out the palms-in-the-pond element.

“This approach creates a nice canvas, with quite a good frame with the waterfront and promenade,’’ Thomas said, adding: “It’s such a lovely spot. I’m sure long-term there will be a fabulous plan. Whether it’s the Cooper Robertson plan or some other plan is open for discussion.’’

Corporate support

But she said an artfully designed park along the lines of what the city originally promised is essential to the success of the broader Museum Park project, whose goal was to attract thousands of people to a stunning but sorely underused corner of downtown Miami.

A park with features such as interactive installations would likely attract numerous visitors independently of the museums, she said, just as art-filled Millennium Park, which was built over an old rail yard next to the Chicago Institute of Art and the home of the Chicago Symphony, sharply boosted tourism to that city’s downtown Loop.

Making that happen at Museum Park, however, may now require donations or corporate support, possibly through the formation of a park conservancy like that established for Central Park in New York, Thomas said.

Tax revenues are also sure to rise at the Omni CRA in coming years, especially if Malaysian casino giant Genting builds a planned resort on the site of The Miami Herald’s building, which it bought from the newspaper company.

“If you have a fabulous park, you get even more people down there,’’ Thomas said. “It would be great for the city and it would be a sensible thing to do, but they would need to find the cash.’’

© 2012 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved. http://www.miamiherald.com

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/09/15/v-print/3004878/museum-parks-vaunted-plan-shrinks.html#storylink=cpy

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"Noises Off: Silence @ the Menil Collection" in @wsj #andywarhol

By Willard Spiegelman Houston  - Updated August 28, 2012, 6:59 p.m. ET

In 1819 John Keats called his imaginary Grecian urn a "foster-child of silence and slow time" and a "sylvan historian." He put himself in a line going back to the ancients, who thought of pictures and statues as silent poems that speak volumes.

 'Lavender Disaster' (1963) by Andy Warhol - Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / ARS

Silence is now as precious and rare as slowness, or solitude, clean air and a star-filled night sky. As someone who never goes anywhere without ear plugs, and who would rather stay hungry than be forced into a noisy restaurant, I was keen to visit "Silence" at the Menil Collection here. In a variety of tones, voices and media, it reminds us of what we often want but can never have.

You won't experience silence here. That would be impossible, even in the cool, chaste chambers of Renzo Piano's exquisite building. This exhibit is really a riff on the composer John Cage's remark that "there's no such thing as silence." The show has 52 pieces. Some are metaphysical or abstract paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, René Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg and Mark Rothko, all favorites of John and Dominique de Menil, who had amassed a fabulous if quirky collection before the museum opened in 1987.

Hanging on the walls, too, are such two-dimensional works as Yves Klein's vibrant, glistening, gold-leaf "Untitled (Monogold)." Sculpture, small objects, neon-tubing and other three-dimensional works complement the pictures. The show features audio and video installations, as well as a living performance piece by Tino Sehgal in which a dancer rolls slowly along the floor of an interior room for 2½ hours, followed by another dancer who does the same thing. It certainly is silent; whether it is gripping, rather than boring, depends on a viewer's patience.

A typical museum show often moves chronologically; in a thematic show, organizers make other arrangements. "Silence" may seem random, but it has a partially recognizable plan. After entering a vestibule containing a selection of representative works, you go on to four inner rooms. The first, the most conventional and tightly arranged, is in many ways the most moving. Four Andy Warhol pieces—silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen from the mid-1960s—represent the ultimate silence, death: in this case, death by electrocution. Warhol's depictions of the electric chair at Sing Sing are beautiful, almost abstract in their swirls of color, a kind of phantom homage to Jackson Pollock. The smallest one, "Little Electric Chair," is so black that you might mistake it for a cousin to Ad Reinhardt's all-black "Abstract Painting" in another room, until you come close and see the chiseled outline of the electric chair staring right back at you.

Interspersed among the Warhols are seven silkscreens by Christian Marclay, each focusing on the single word "Silence" above the electric chair in the death chamber. "Silence" surrounds you, at least visually, on all sides.

The other rooms contain miscellaneous pieces. Some "talk" to one another; others seem more randomly placed. Dominique de Menil, a woman of austere and religious character, famously said that "only silence and love do justice to a great work of art," but one is seldom alone in a museum, where quiet contemplation is hard to achieve. Interrupting a private experience of the art are not only the voices and footsteps of other viewers but also the sounds from the audio installations, including—most boomingly—Kurt Mueller's "Cenotaph" (2011), an old jukebox into which you put a quarter and then get to hear one of 99 moments of silence, all of which are preceded by very noisy introductions. No silence comes without sound.

Two of the most compelling pieces are video installations, each within its own darkened chamber. Jacob Kirkegaard's 2006 "AION" (Greek for eternity or infinity) was shot on location in ruined spaces at Chernobyl, site of the 1986 nuclear reactor explosion. Shapes and colors move, come in and out of focus; an interior landscape is bathed in light, then dark shadows, then overwhelmed with whiteness. Static architecture changes as though it were Tai Chi, Keats's "slow time" reimagined.

If you move counterclockwise through the show, the last thing you will see is the most resonant—a return to Cage, silence's major spokesman. Sixty years ago, on Aug. 29, 1952, David Tudor sat down at a piano and performed for the first time Cage's now celebrated (or infamous, depending on one's point of view) "4'33"": a work in three movements and total silence other than the extraneous sounds within the hall. Cage himself said it could be "played" by any soloist or group of musicians.

Manon de Boer's film "Two Times 4' 33"" stars Jean-Luc Fafchamps. We see him at his piano—stern, unblinking, virtually motionless—and we hear him set and release the chess timer that marks the three movements. A plate glass window behind him gives on to wintry snow, ice and wind, whose sounds we also hear. He finishes, he stands up. An unseen audience applauds. The screen goes black.

The film resumes. It's impossible to know if he's playing the piece again or whether we are just seeing the first performance from a different angle. This time, we hear only the timer's clicks but now we watch the rapt audience of earnest, attentive young people. And we see another view to the outside: a northern European city (it's Brussels, Dec. 2, 2007), part industrial, part architectural, part natural.

To reach Mr. de Boer's installation, you walk through two heavy doors with sound-deadening panels, and two sets of heavy black draperies. You sit on a bench, with a single light above you. The chamber is dark. You are bathed in silence, except for the sounds of the jukebox outside, which penetrate into this inner sanctum whenever someone puts a quarter in the old nickelodeon.

Cage would have smiled, audibly.

Mr. Spiegelman writes about the arts for the Journal. His essay "Some Words on Silence" appeared in the April issue of The Yale Review.

[bassmuseumpres]

Bass Museum has only mummy south of Atlanta..."Mummy Dearest: Shadow of the Sphinx" in @wsj

By Barrymore Laurence Scherer August 27, 2012, 4:37 p.m. ET   Utica, N.Y. - The hills of central New York have been alive with the sounds and sights of Egypt this summer. In Cooperstown, the Glimmerglass Opera Festival featured Verdi's "Aida" and the Fenimore Art Museum exhibited costumes from Metropolitan Opera "Aida" productions of the past century. And in Utica, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Museum of Art is presenting the absorbing "Shadow of the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt and Its Influence."

Comprising roughly 150 objects, paintings, works of art, pieces of jewelry and related items from 30 lenders as well as the museum's own collections, the show underscores the fascination with a multimillennial legacy that has long made Egyptology a staple of museum culture. Moreover, it places its venerable subject within a fresh and notably accessible historical context: The exhibition isn't just about ancient Egypt but about its lively effect on fine, decorative and performing art from the Napoleonic era right through Cecil B. DeMille's brand of Egyptofantasy.

  Richard Walker - Detail of a mummy portrait mask from 332 B.C. - A.D. 395.

The first gallery, "The Burial Chamber," sets the scene with a vivid selection of antiquities concerned with the rites of death, mummification and burial central to ancient Egyptian culture.

Flanking its entrance are two Ptolemaic-period sphinx fragments of carved limestone (332-30 B.C.), their delicately sculpted features softened by the erosion of countless windblown grains of sand. Taking center stage are a wood coffin lid and its base from the Late Dynastic Period (c. 525-343 B.C.) embellished with meticulously carved and painted human and bird motifs. Its splendid condition reminds us how posterity has reaped the preservative benefits of Egypt's dry climate and the painstaking methods of ancient Egyptian craftsmen and funerary workers.

Many of the objects here would have been buried with the dead to accompany them in the afterlife—brilliantly glazed pottery; diminutive, beautifully wrought amulets and jewelry of cast and beaten gold, carved lapis-lazuli, beads of colored faience. A limestone canopic jar (c. 1070-945 B.C.), to contain the entrails removed from a body as part of mummification, resembles a small coffin with carved face and painted eyes. There's also an actual mummified head from the Roman period (c. mid-second-century B.C. to mid-first-century A.D.), its face masked in gold leaf and given painted features, to imitate the solid-gold masks of royal mummies. And striking a poignant note is a mummified cat. Whether it once enjoyed life as a sacred creature or a family pet, now its eviscerated, sausagelike body is tightly wrapped in linen, with feline features painted on the swaddled head, its two perky ears distinct.

Virtually all of the chosen artifacts embody the colors, shapes and decorative motifs from which European and, afterward, American craftsmen derived their highly imaginative Egyptian Revivals, initially sparked by 18th-century archaeological discoveries. Representing the awakening interest is a fanciful English "canopic vase" produced about 1770 by the pottery firm of Wedgwood & Bentley. Possibly inspired by elements in the "Egyptian" mantelpiece designs published in 1769 by the artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, this striking piece is essentially a bulbous neoclassical urn with a finely modeled Egyptian head pre-empting the usual pine-cone finial.

The shiploads of antiquities sent back to France during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign of 1798 incited the first Egyptian Revival craze during the Directoire and Empire periods and England's Regency. And the lure of Egypt and its surroundings fostered an enduring "Orientalist" school of painting, as European artists voyaged to Egypt and North Africa, where they produced exotic views of deserts, pyramids and street life that found a ready market back home. The show features lush Orientalist canvases by such exponents through successive decades asCharles Théodore Frère, Rudolf Ernst and Joseph Farquharson, which document their fascination with "primitive" life still extant in 19th-century Egypt. Works like Edwin Long's "Love's Labor Lost," Frederick Arthur Bridgman's "Cleopatra on the Terraces at Philae" and Gustave Doré's "Moses Before the Pharaoh" attest to those artists' mastery of romanticized, dramatic interpretations of ancient and biblical themes.

The construction of the Suez Canal and its completion in 1869 sparked a second Egyptian Revival, represented here with examples of opulent, imaginative furniture, silver, glass, lamps and other decorations in the Egyptian taste whose obelisk, pyramid and sphinx motifs lent distinctive flair to French Second Empire and High Victorian design.

Taking a spin on the stylized Egyptian scarab beetle, a massive porcelain paperweight shaped like a startled but anatomically correct beetle and a porcelain vase embellished with another beetle (replete with six legs and probing antennae) represent experimental extremes by the inventive English designer Christopher Dresser during the 1880s.

More beautiful, and more dazzling, are ancient and European scarab-inspired jewelry in the "Jewels of the Nile" gallery, the exhibition's visual climax. Among the dazzlers are a scarab brooch of fire opal and enameled gold by Marcus & Co., New York, and a Swiss gold ladies' watch. Articulated beetles-wings covering the watch face are enameled in royal blue and ablaze with 16 tiny diamonds in star-shaped settings.

The final gallery represents Egypt's hold on 19th- and 20th-century popular culture, reinvigorated by the English archaeologist Howard Carter's 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb. Film posters and other material document successive "Cleopatra" extravaganzas starring Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor; George Bernard Shaw's "Caesar and Cleopatra" starring Vivian Leigh; "The Mummy" with Boris Karloff and its 1999 remake; "The Ten Commandments," and of course "Death on the Nile." There are vaudeville posters, old souvenir postcards, souvenir pencils, toiletries and other commercial relics that once exploited Egyptian fads.

Most endearing is colorful sheet music for such Tin-Pan Alley numbers as "My Cairo Maid" (1917) and "Ilo (A Voice From Mummyland)" (1921), and the wistful tenor air "Star Light, Star Bright" from Victor Herbert's early operetta hit, "The Wizard of the Nile" (1895). It's a pity that there isn't an accompanying selection of historic recordings to let visitors hear the tuneful melodies behind those inviting covers.

For younger viewers as well as adults, videos and board games introduce aspects of Egyptian culture; bins of flash-cards explain hieroglyphics, Egyptian cats, scarabs and other motifs. There are even "scent stations," whose fragrant boxes of dried seeds and herbs invite visitors to inhale the aromas of "the spicy shores of Araby the blest." Indeed, virtually no stone has been left unturned, as it were, to make this exhibition delightful and memorable.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.