|
THOMAS KRENS With
Special Guest Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation since 1988, presented the keynote lecture for this season’s ART Santa Fe Presents event at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Saturday, July 14, at 7:00 p.m. Krens addressed the timely topic of the intersections of art, architecture, and culture with his lecture, The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: Frank Gehry Designs a Masterpiece. Under Krens’ leadership the Guggenheim has experienced substantial growth and flowering. In the past two decades, the Guggenheim Foundation has developed an unprecedented international presence, with a network of cultural facilities and alliances with major museums around the world. However, it was the unique partnership that Krens developed with the Basque Regional Government of Spain that set off an historic “boom” in art and architecture. Designed by Frank Gehry, the museum at Bilbao, Spain quickly garnered world-wide attention as a landmark building of the 20th Century. In its first year the formerly economically depressed Basque region welcomed over 1,300,000 visitors to the new Guggenheim Bilbao. The museum’s success has led to a revitalization of the region and millions of visitors continue to visit the museum. The success of the Guggenheim Bilbao, dubbed the “Bilbao effect” is due in large part to the critically acclaimed architectural design by Frank Gehry. Mr. Gehry agreed to appear as a special guest along with Thomas Krens for this event. Gehry, the Pritzker Prize winning architect of international note, engaged Mr. Krens in a dialogue about the Guggenheim Bilbao, as well as about the newly announced monumental project underway in Abu Dhabi. Gehry’s own laurels are quite notable, including the AIA’s Gold Medal and the Americans for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. His life and work have been documented in the recent documentary film by award-winning director Sydney Pollack: Sketches of Frank Gehry.
|
2007
|
|
Philippe de Montebello, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than 25 years, chose to address only three venues in the United States during 2005; his lecture in Santa Fe, sponsored by ART Santa Fe Presents, was one of the three. Mr. de Montebello gave a carefully prepared and beautifully illustrated one-hour lecture, "Museums: Why Should We Care?"
Respected throughout the international art community and acclaimed
for his dynamic, captivating lectures, Philippe de Montebello is
uniquely positioned to speak on the state of the museum world today.
Mr. de Montebello was born in Paris, attended French schools
throughout the Baccalaureate, graduated Magna cum Laude from Harvard
University in 1958 and received an advanced degree from New York
University's Institute
of Fine Arts. He became an American citizen in 1955. With the
exception of four and a half years he spent as Director of The
Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, his career has evolved at The Metropolitan. |
2005
Philippe de Montebello |
| Robert Hughes, TIME art critic
and award-winning historian, was the guest speaker at ART Santa
Fe Presents, on Friday evening, July 11, in Santa Fe, New
Mexico. The program was produced by ART Santa Fe in conjunction
with its fifth internationalcontemporary art fair, which takes
place thatweekend. Robert Hughes is the most widely-read art critic writing in the English language. As art critic for TIME Magazine since 1970, he currently reaches a readership of 20 million people a week. His best-selling books are respected by art professionals and historians alike; The Shock of the New and American Visions have brought his ideas to a much wider audience in their incarnations as BBC and PBS series, which have become classics of educational broadcasting. He has written on a broad range of subjects within the realms of art and history; his study of Goya, to be published next fall, is eagerly anticipated in the international art community. Born in Australia, Hughes has lived in England and Italy and has been a resident of the United States since 1970, when he began his tenure as art critic for TIME Magazine. Hughes is the rare thinker and writer who can mine his enormous reservoir of knowledge for an incisive, far-reaching overview of complex and sometimes controversial topics, and can present his insights with wit and accessibility. Among his numerous awards are The Sunday Times Writer of the Year Award and the Frank Jewett Mather Award (the only art critic to win this prestigious award twice). |
2003 Robert Hughes |