Category Archives: Director’s Desk

Director’s Desk: Pérez Art Museum Miami

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Perez Museum Miami_DK

(Left) Exterior of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Right) Bicycle installation by artist Ai Wei Wei. Photos: Dorothy Kosinski

Earlier this month we were in Miami for the Art Basel Miami Beach fair and enjoyed our visit to the new  Pérez Art Museum Miami. These photos reveal how the  Herzog & de Meuron building addresses the waterfront and how it incorporates native plantings and gracious outdoor spaces so appropriate for the Miami climate. The bicycle installation (pictured at right above) is, of course, by Ai Wei Wei, in the same exhibition we enjoyed at the Hirshhorn earlier this  year. My Pérez museum colleagues were brave, indeed, to open even with lots of building details still being completed and with the ongoing construction of the nearby science center causing major inconveniences. I look forward to visiting again when the museum and adjacent buildings are complete. It is a huge addition to the city’s  cultural landscape.

Director’s Desk: Participatory Art and New Acquisitions

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Curator at Large Klaus Ottmann engages with Roter Gesang (Red Song) by Franz Erhard Walther. Photo: Dorothy Kosinski

Curator at Large Klaus Ottmann demonstrates the participatory qualities of a Franz Erhard Walther sculpture, Roter Gesang (Red Song), at an Arts Committee meeting this week. Walther (born in Fulda, Germany in 1939) produces minimalist sculptures, often in brilliant primary colors, out of ordinary heavy canvas, that seem like soft versions of minimalist compositions. This will look brilliant near our Rothko Room.  It also harmonizes with another new acquisition, Wolfgang Laib’s wax room, in which the visitor enters to appreciate the beautiful aroma, the rich surface, and the embracing small space. Our acquisitions meeting was a heady affair with the approval of many new works from photographs by Eugène Atget, to a painting by Al Held, a painting by Walter Dahn,  and works by Helen Torr, to mention only a few.

Director’s Desk: Dispatch from Berlin

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While in Berlin to meet with an important collector, I had some time to explore in the city. Klein aber fein is how the Germans might describe this wonderful one-room exhibition (pictured below) of five massive lithographs shown at Buchmann Galerie, all by Richard Serra and done in Paris around 1990. The prints have such incredibly rich texture. It is hard to imagine the enormous litho stones he must have used to make these prints. This exquisite one-room show makes me reflect on the power of our intimate projects at the Phillips, of course.

Photos: Dorothy Kosinksi

Photos: Dorothy Kosinski

I visited galleries on Auguststrasse and discovered this elegant, sober, brick building from ca. 1930, designed by the Jewish architect Alexander Beer, an example of Neue Sachlichkeit architecture. It was built as a Jewish girls’ school. Beer died in 1944 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944. During the last several years the building was restituted to the Jewish community and is filled with art spaces and a lively cafe…like the neighboring structures in this former East Berlin area that is being totally revitalized.