Metamuseum

Joseph Breck, first director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1914-1917), in the Renaissance Room, MIA, c. 1917

In 1913, museum trustees commissioned Joseph Breck, a decorative arts curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to purchase works in Europe for a “series of period rooms.” Breck—by then the MIA’s first director—is shown here by a cassone and paintings from the period in the museum’s Renaissance Room shortly after completion of the MIA building by McKim, Mead and White in 1915.

The period room vision would be carried further in the years to come, with gallery installations prominently featuring Gothic, Renaissance, and other period architectural fragments, and in 1919 the museum created a period room category, adding its first entire room, the Tudor Room (installed in 1923). The MIA has continued to collect and display period rooms ever since, with the latest being the Frankfurt Kitchen (1926-30), installed in 2006.

Jennifer Komar Olivarez

Associate Curator, Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
http://artsmia.org/

Mariska Karasz, 1898-1960
United States, born Hungary
Danubian, 1957
Linen, embroidery thread, cotton fabric; assembled, embroidered
35 1/2 x 59 1/2 in. (90.2 x 151.1 cm)
Purchased by the American Craft Council, 1958

Following the Second World War, Jazz Age New York fashion designer Mariska Karasz turned to embroidered wall hangings and became an advocate for the revival of needlework in America.  She remained inspired throughout her life by her native land of Hungary, referring in this example of her late work to the major river coursing through the country.  Danubian was one of a diverse group of seven works acquired in 1958, the inaugural year of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (today the Museum of Arts and Design).  The first year’s acquisitions, all created in the 1950s, reflect the emerging studio craft movement in America.

Lyndsay Bratton

Curatorial Fellow
Museum of Arts and Design
http://www.madmuseum.org/

WPA Promotional Brochure for the founding of the Walker Art Center, 1939

Under the Works Projects Administration (WPA) program, the US federal government supplied funds to local communities to establish art centers across the country.  The Walker Art Center was the largest of the WPA art centers when it opened in January 1940. This brochure was created as a prospectus to transform the Walker Galleries, a private museum founded by lumber baron Thomas Barlow Walker, into a community art center. Headed by Daniel Defenbacher, an architect by training, the Walker included galleries displaying its founder’s collection, special temporary exhibitions, and the Walker Art School. 

Andrew Blauvelt 

Chief of Communications and Audience Engagement
Curator of Architecture and Design
Walker Art Center
http://www.walkerart.org/

 

Photograph of the Founding Ladies of the Oregon Ceramic Studio, (now Museum of Contemporary Craft), Front row: Anne Chalmers, Mabel Simpson, Winifred Newberry; Middle row: Elaine Pirofsky, Barbara Weber, Margaret Gordon, Ella Meisner, Maurine Roberts, Irma Sears, Minnie Johnston; Back row: Phebe Hayslip, Bernice Church; (not pictured: Edna Barnes, Lydia Herrick Hodge, and Mary Ireland), c. 1937

Collection of Museum of Contemporary Craft

Founded in 1937 as the Oregon Ceramic Studio, the Museum of Contemporary Craft is the oldest continuously-running craft institution in the United States. Created by a group of dynamic volunteers led by Lydia Herrick Hodge, the Studio was created to provide support for regional artists in financial distress because of the Depression. In response to this need, the founders created a place where innovative exhibitions, a sales gallery, education programs for children and the largest kiln on the West Coast came together in a single, volunteer-run organization.

Also, for further reference, MoCC has launched a Tumblr project in conjunction with an exhibition - Object Focus: The Bowl. You can follow this via  
http://www.objectfocusbowl.tumblr.com/

Sarah Margolis-Pineo

Associate Curator
Museum of Contemporary Craft
http://www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/

 

Tiffany and Company (1837 – present)
Pitcher
1875
Silver, copper
8 ¼ x 4 3/16 x 3 ¾ inches
Gift of Gideon F.T. Reed, 77.61

Created only one year before the MFA, Boston opened its doors, this Tiffany and Company mixed metal pitcher was made for and exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876.  Gifted to the museum in 1877, it is the first acquisition of a decorative arts object into the permanent collection.  Melding “Art, Industry, and Education,” the three key components of the museum’s founding mission, this pitcher helped establish a robust interest in contemporary design objects at the MFA during those first early years. 

Emily Zilber

Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
http://www.mfa.org/

 

Racine Art Museum
Photography: Christopher Barrett, Hedrich Blessing, Chicago, IL

Celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2013, the Racine Art Museum is a distinctive presence in the downtown Racine community. Designed by award winning Chicago-based architects Brininstool + Lynch, the RAM building is a Modernist structure softened with light and a sensitive handling of architectural proportions. The museum incorporates sustainable elements such as recycled rubber flooring, and includes Japanese-inspired design, such as the exterior with its translucent acrylic cladding that illuminates at night.

Lena Vigna

Curator of Exhibitions
Racine Art Museum
http://www.ramart.org/

 

Laurie Herrick
Three Giraffes, c. 1970
Wool, linen, cotton
72 x 32 inches
Collection of Museum of Contemporary Craft, Gift of Ken Shores

Broken into differently-colored sections, Laurie Herrick’s Three Giraffes uses a grid structure and the pattern-building capabilities of weaving to combine a contemporary pattern with a handcraft process. Herrick’s work is unusual in the way it breaks the typically single plane of two-dimensional Op Art by dividing the piece into three contiguous sections. Herrick began to explore Op Art through weaving in the late 1960s—an investigation that continued through the 1970s.

Also, for further reference, MoCC has launched a Tumblr project in conjunction with an exhibition - Object Focus: The Bowl. You can follow this via http://www.objectfocusbowl.tumblr.com/

Sarah Margolis-Pineo

Associate Curator
Museum of Contemporary Craft
http://www.museumofcontemporarycraft.org/

Sopheap Pich, b. 1971
Cambodia
Jayavarman VII, 2011
Rattan, plywood, burlap, glass, beeswax, charcoal, spray paint
66 x 36 1/2 x 22 1/2 in. (168 x 92 x 57 cm)
Museum purchase with funds provided by Alan and Marcia Docter, 2012

Jayavarman VII was a 12^th and 13^th-century Buddhist king of the Khmer Empire who remains highly revered today in Cambodia.  Sopheap Pich’s choice of a shield-like form in this wall-relief sculpture reflects the king’s name—“Jaya” (victorious) and “varman” (warrior).  Time plays an integral role in Pich’s work, both symbolically and literally, as he explores historical subjects through a meditative and lengthy process of weaving thin strips of rattan into reliefs and three-dimensional stand-alone sculptures. 

Lyndsay Bratton

Curatorial Fellow
Museum of Arts and Design
http://www.madmuseum.org/

 

Helena Hernmark, Swedish, active United States, born 1941, Glimpse, 1974, Wool, linen; weft-faced with discontinuous weft patterning, The Adele Roller Fund and gift of Mr. and Mrs. Myron T. Kerr, Jr., 97.74

Swedish-born Helena Hernmark works in the traditional art of tapestry weaving, but she has honed a unique approach to imagery, which she calls “superrealism.” Interpreting a snapshot of something ordinary at unexpected dimensions, usually through tremendous magnification, her work jolts the viewer into a new frame of reference.

Hernmarck’s technique, which involves weaving bundles of threads of different thicknesses and hues, known as “butterflies,” into the tapestry, imbues her works with varied texture and complexity of color. Inspired by an aerial photo by William Garnett, which Hernmarck clipped from a 1967 article in Life magazine, Glimpse sees the architectural dimensions of a town shrink when viewed from above.

Jennifer Komar Olivarez

Associate Curator, Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
http://artsmia.org/

Installation view of Goshka Macuga’s Lost Forty, Walker Art Center, 2011
From the Walker Art Center exhibition Goshka Macuga: It Broke from Within 

Artist Goshka Macuga used the history of the Walker Art Center—from its founder, lumber baron T. B. Walker, to the Herzog & de Meuron-designed building expansion in 2005—to prompt a larger examination of the relationship between civic institutions and the communities that they serve. The exhibition Goshka Macuga: It Broke from Within was composed of a number of different elements, all of them the product of the artist’s research at the Walker in April 2010. The centerpiece of the installation was Macuga’s 48-foot woven tapestry based on a photographic collage, which brings together images and elements the artist culled from the Walker’s archives against the backdrop of the Lost Forty—a parcel of land in northern Minnesota spared from the aggressive lumber industry in the 19th century due to a surveying error, making it one of the few old-growth forests remaining in the state.

Andrew Blauvelt 

Chief of Communications and Audience Engagement,
Curator of Architecture and Design
Walker Art Center
http://www.walkerart.org/

Tom Dixon
British, born Tunisia, 1959
Fresh Fat Chair
2004
Extruded PETG plastic
Manufactured by Tom Dixon, UK
29 in. x 22 in. x 24 in.
Collection Denver Art Museum
Funds contributed by Design Council of the Denver Art Museum, 2011.429

The Fresh Fat chair challenges the common notion that plastic is an unrefined material meant only for mass-produced goods. The process of manufacturing plastic furniture typically involves injecting the material into a mold, but for this chair, Tom Dixon chose to hand-direct the machine-extruded string of plastic directly from the nozzle rather like icing a cake. This process requires impressive speed and accuracy, as the plastic has to remain molten while being worked. The result is an intricately handcrafted, three-dimensional scribble.

Darrin Alfred

Associate Curator of Architecture, Design and Graphics
Denver Art Museum
http://www.denverartmuseum.org/