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Indepth Arts News:
"Museum Pieces: Bay Area Artists Consider the de Young"
1999-11-20 until 2000-03-12
de Young Museum
San Francisco, CA,
USA United States of America
Eighteen Bay Area artists and
collaborative teams will look closely at the de Young Museum and
reveal through a lively mix of paintings, sculpture, and video and
sound pieces the ways in which a major art institution lives and
breathes. Museum Pieces: Bay Area Artists Consider the de
Young--presented concurrently with a display of architectural
plans for the new de Young Museum building by Swiss architects
Herzog & de Meuron--provides a contem-porary art perspective on
the de Young's position within the local community and the museum
world.
Artists including noted Bay Area conceptualists David Ireland and
Tom Marioni, painter Deborah Oropallo, muralist Rigo 99 and others
have produced new and unique artworks that reveal components of
the museum's infrastructure, whether architectural,
administrative, artistic, social, or technological. Says Dr.
Steven A. Nash, Fine Arts Museums Chief Curator and Associate
Director, This engaging and provocative exhibition underscores
the importance we place on working closely with contemporary
artists, both now and when the new de Young Museum is completed.
They help us better understand our basic mission and functions.
The idea of the museum has become a touchstone for cultural shift.
Over the last year, grand new facilities debuted around the world,
exhibitions questioned the role and function of the museum, and a
range of books and articles were devoted to its changing nature.
More than many cultural institutions, the de Young Museum has the
opportunity to capitalize on this current impulse to rethink the
presentation of culture:within the next few years, the museum in
Golden Gate Park will be rebuilt both architecturally and
organizationally.
The artworks in Museum Pieces, guest curated by San
Francisco-based writer and art critic Glen Helfand, will draw upon
and address the cultural shift and rich history embodied in the
M.H. de Young Memorial Museum itself. The site's temporality and
evolving identity are manifest in its history, from its original
function as a fair pavilion in the 1894 Midwinter Exposition to an
evolving museum serving a variety of roles throughout the 20th
century, says Helfand. The impending changes, which will result
in a very different institution, also foster a sense of artistic
adventurousness that can only occur in a site that is awaiting
construction crews.
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