Culture Chronicle

National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts to Renovate Galleries ArtDaily.org - June 23, 2010

The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts today announced plans to renovate its exhibition galleries and create a new visitor center and a School studio gallery. The renovations will modernize the existing galleries, provide visitors with more meaningful and educational experiences, and institute a new, dynamic environment for student and faculty review, discussion and exhibition.

The renovated galleries will for the first time in over 100 years provide space dedicated to the semi-permanent exhibition of notable works from the Academy's collection of over 7,000 paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures by American artists and architects. Additional galleries will present rotating thematic and single artist exhibitions of works from the 19th through 21st centuries. The Academy will continue to hold its Annual and Invitational survey exhibitions following the renovations.

The renovations will take place between July 2010 and September 2011 and are funded by recent bequests from Eleanor D. Popper, a former student of the School of Fine Arts, and author Geoffrey Wagner in memory of his wife, Colleen Browning Wagner, an American realist painter and National Academician (NA). A building committee, headed by architect Bruce Fowle, NA, of FXFOWLE Architects, Vice President of the Academy, will oversee the renovations, which will be designed by the architecture firm of Bade Stageberg Cox. For the full article, click here