Category: visual

How Awful Was It To Work For Akron Art Museum’s Ex-Director? Let His Former Employees Tell You

“Carol Murphy, whom [former director Mark] Masuoka fired in 2015 as director of external affairs, painted him as a boss who was ‘quiet,’ ‘strange’ and ‘extremely introverted’ yet also paranoid and retaliatory.” Another ex-employee says, “I was told by coworkers that Mark would sit in empty cubes and listen to the staff talk throughout the day.” By early 2019, things had gotten so bad that a basement room had become the designated place for employees to go and cry. – Akron Beacon Journal

The Extraordinary Art Of Christo and Jeanne-Claude

What he and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and collaborator, achieved was so different from the work of anyone else, and on such a huge scale—seventy-five hundred saffron-colored nylon “gates,” in Central Park; the Reichstag, in Berlin, and the Pont Neuf, in Paris, transformed by their cloth wrappings into monumental and sensuous sculptures—that it’s hard to believe it was also ephemeral. Each spectacle drew huge crowds for two weeks and then vanished forever, without a trace. – The New Yorker

Nelson-Atkins Museum Caught In Protests Controversy After Kansas City Police Use Its Grounds As Staging Area

This past Friday night, as the KCPD prepared to confront people demonstrating against police violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere, security guards on duty at the closed museum agreed to police requests to park squad cars there — and the Nelson-Atkins got some harsh criticism online when photos of those police cars hit social media. Museum director Julián Zugazagoitia says that when he found out about this after midnight, he asked the KCPD to vacate: “It is exactly the opposite of what the Nelson stands for, what the museum stands for, what we want to do as work and what we have been doing as work.” – KCUR (Kansas City)

Louvre Expects Attendance Will Be Down By 70% After Reopening

The Paris landmark, which had been the world’s most visited museum, opens its doors on July 6 following the coronavirus lockdown. But safety limitations have been placed on crowd flow, and France will continue to have travel restrictions in place; three-quarters of the Louvre’s ticket-buyers come from abroad. The museum’s director does not expect attendance to return to normal until 2023. – ARTnews