art galleries

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Design

The Twist: A New Gallery in Kistefos Sculpture Park Connects Two River Banks

A sinuous new gallery and bridge reaches across the Randselva River in Jevnaker, Norway. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the aluminum-clad structure joins north and south river fronts on the campus of Kistefos Sculpture Park. 15,000 square feet of space allows visitors to explore Kistefos’s large art collection while also taking in the surrounding landscape through floor-to-ceiling windows. The Twist opened to the public on September 18th, with an exhibition featuring the work of conceptual artist Martin Creed and painter Howard Hodgkin. Kistefos Sculpture Park has  ticketed admission, which includes entry to The Twist, and is open seasonally from the end of May to mid-November. (via Design Milk)

Art Illustration

Over Fifty Artists Showcase Work Within Notebook Spreads for the 8th Annual ‘Moleskine Project’

Back for an eighth year, the annual Moleskine Project, curated by Rodrigo Luff and Spoke Art, brings together a diverse slate of artists all working within the confines of a Moleskine notebook. Featuring over fifty artists from around the world, this year’s exhibiting artists include Laura Berger (previously), Kevin Peterson (previously), and Martine Johanna. Luff describes the mission of the show as “a tribute to how artists have developed and grown by using sketchbooks to dive deeper into the personal realms that fuel their artwork. An energetic visual dialogue of imagery flows from frame to frame, forming a collective sketchbook that allows us to appreciate the radically individual approach taken by each artist.”

The Moleskine Project show opened on June 1 and runs through June 22, 2019 at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco. You can keep up with the bi-coastal gallery’s upcoming events on Instagram and Facebook.

Design

New Eco-Inspired Gallery Presents Contemporary Art Within a Vine-Covered Exhibition Space

IK LAB is a new art gallery concept in Tulum, Mexico founded by Guggenheim descendent and Tulum resident Santiago Rumney Guggenheim and designed by Jorge Eduardo Neira Sterkel. The open air exhibition space is located at Neira Sterkel’s upscale eco resort Azulik, and eschews all elements associated with the traditional white cube gallery. Instead of static walls, IK LAB contains undulating cement surfaces that meld into overhead pathways and leaf-shaped podiums. Bejuco, a vine-like plant native to the region, fills in the areas not covered by waves of cement and forms the circular openings that dot the gallery’s slatted walls and ceiling.

Guests are invited to walk barefoot through the space to get a tactile sense of the built environment’s textures. The gallery’s cement walls mute most external sounds. This allows any noise produced during contemplation to be echoed and amplified, creating ambient auditory sounds experienced in tandem with the architectural design.

IK Lab opened April 20th with their inaugural exhibition Alignments, which is comprised of work by Artur Lescher, Margo Trushina, and Tatiana Trouvé. In addition to mounting contemporary art exhibitions, the new gallery will also host an avant-garde residency program that will invite guests to interact with the unique architecture. The gallery is open to the public every day from 10 a.m. to 12 a.m. (via Dezeen)

Design

An Historic Cape Town Grain Silo Converted into 80 Cylindrical Art Galleries

Housed in what was once Cape Town’s tallest building is the newly unveiled Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), created by London-based architect Thomas Heatherwick. The institution’s 80 gallery spaces were converted from 42 historic grain silos, storage units that were once used to hold and grade maize from all over South Africa.

Heatherwick Studio (previously) transformed the tightly packed tubes into open areas of contemplation, carving out various oblong shapes to make room for large social spaces and lots of light from overhead windows. Heatherwick wished to clear out large spaces for the galleries, however, he was also careful about not eliminating the tubular structure of the building completely.

“We realised we needed to do something that your eye couldn’t instantly predict,” Heatherwick told Dezeen. “Our role was destructing rather than constructing, but trying to destruct with a confidence and an energy, and not treating the building as a shrine.”

The nearly 20,000-square-foot museum is one of many facilities that form the V&A Waterfront, a cultural center dotted with several bars and restaurants on the city’s harbor.

 

Art Design History

Artist Theaster Gates Bought a Crumbling Chicago Bank for $1 and Turned it Into a World-Class Arts Center

One might think that an abandoned 1920s bank on Chicago’s South Side, crumbling from top to bottom—the roof long collapsed, exposing the interior to snow and rain for years—would be destined for a wrecking ball. Like so many other decaying structures in the area, that was certainly the fate of the Stony Island Savings & Loan building before artist, urban planner, and Chicago resident Theaster Gates intervened.

Armed with only a vision to carry him through, Gates acquired the 20,000-square-foot bank for $1.00 from the city of Chicago and set about an unbelievable restoration. This month, amidst all the hubbub of Chicago’s Architecture Biennale, the doors were thrown open and the public was given the opportunity to walk through the new Stony Island Arts Bank. While construction is complete, several details of the bank’s history including peeling paint and damaged ceiling tiles have been preserved to physically merge the past and present.

 

The Stony Island Arts Bank is a place that proudly defies convention. A community savings and loan bank shuttered since the 1980s turned into a world-class arts center in the middle of a greatly under-resourced community most in need of bold ideas. It’s the kind of place that civic leaders propose and residents dream of, but for a thousand reasons it never seems to materialize. And yet here it is.

Gates’ idea has now manifested itself as a platform for site-specific exhibitions and commissions, artist residencies, and as a home for the Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded by the artist in 2010 that seeks specifically to foster culture and development in underinvested neighborhoods. In addition, the arts bank houses the vinyl archive of Frankie Knuckles, regarded as the “Godfather of House Music,” as well as 60,000 glass lantern slides from the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute. You can also find the personal magazine and book collection of John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines.

In a press release Gates describes the Arts Bank as “an institution of and for the South Side,” “a repository for African American culture and history, a laboratory for the next generation of black artists,” and “a space for neighborhood residents to preserve, access, reimagine and share their heritage, as well as a destination for artists, scholars, curators, and collectors to research and engage with South Side history.”

 

The building’s first exhibition is by Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga, whose installation Under the Skin introduces towering cardboard columns to the bank’s towering first-floor gallery. The facility will undoubtedly be used as a place for black artists, community members, and other individuals to experiment with and engage with the South Side, in an environment Gates refers to as a “laboratory.”

“Projects like this require belief more than they require funding,” Gates tells Fast Company. “If there’s not a kind of belief, motivation, and critical aggregation of people who believe with you in a project like this, it cannot happen. The city is starting to realize that there might be other ways of imagining upside beside ‘return on investment’ and financial gain.”

You can visit the new arts bank Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

 

Art

Torafu’s Haunted Art Gallery for Kids at the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art

In an attempt to better engage the youngest visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Torafu Architects created a special art gallery just for kids called Haunted House. On entering the exhibition a few familiar artworks appear hung in frames around a large white cube, but something is clearly amiss as everything appears to be moving.

The eyes in a portrait dart back and forth, a pair of hands emerges from Mona Lisa’s face and begins to manipulate the painting, the head of a portrait turns around in loops, and then a wave of relief as children realize this isn’t another crummy art gallery with old boring art. A secret passageway leads to the cube’s interior where almost every artwork can be manipulated or altered from behind, a place where the art can be touched and kids are free to laugh, run and play while interacting directly with some of the world’s most famous paintings. A killer idea.

You can see much more about Haunted House over on Yatzer, and see more images on Torafu’s website. Photos by Yoshitsugu Fuminari. (via Yatzer)