A masterpiece unveiled


The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum opens Nov. 29 with six diverse exhibits, including Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which will begin its six-museum tour at FIU.

 

By Grant Smith

After five years of construction and preparation and several eventful months of curating, the new Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum will open Nov. 29.

The 46,000-square-foot museum will debut with six diverse exhibits. The largest exhibition collection, Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, is beginning its six-museum tour at FIU. The coup was made possible thanks to FIU’s relationship with the Smithsonian Institution, which dates back several years. In 2001, the Frost Art Museum became the only visual arts museum in South Florida to become an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution and eligible to show one of the institute’s collections.

Carol Damian, museum director and chief curator, planned the arrangement of FIU’s permanent collection and worked alongside Smithsonian Curator Virginia Mecklenberg to arrange Modern Masters, which Mecklenberg described as a look into the dark past of World War II.


Getting ready for opening day – FIU Frost Art Museum from Florida International University on Vimeo

“It’s abstraction in the mid 20th century in the United States, so it’s the years during World War II,” said Mecklenburg. “The artists really were struggling with heavier work in the atomic age.” She picked out artists who discovered their identity during the late 1940s and 1950s.

‘We didn’t have any idea what was going to happen’

The duo had more than 10,000 square feet on the second and third floors to utilize. Installing art in a new museum is always challenging, said Damian, because the space has never been worked with before.

Damian and Mecklenberg made floor plans of the museum and built several Maquettes with miniature scaled models of all the paintings. Damian referred to this trial-and-error period as a rehearsal for the opening night.

“[We wanted] to see the way things work, to see how long it’s going to take to install a major show,” said Damian. “We didn’t have any idea what was going to happen in a place like this.”

“My first thought was, we need big pictures, things that don’t look like little dark postage stamps,” said Mecklenberg, recalling her first impression of the exhibition space. “The ceilings are very high. The spaces are big and really quite grand.”

The museum’s spacious galleries are a result of its unique lighting system, which uses only natural light. Bronze petals hang from the ceiling, filtering out all UV light and controlling the color and light level of each gallery in order to protect the art from harmful direct sunlight. The petals themselves look like another art installation, but their technology is a first of its kind in Florida and a key component to the museum’s top-tier status.

Looking forward to Nov. 29

Docents, or student volunteers, will be there to give tours to visitors and explain these and other features unique to the new museum.

Said docent Adam Fontha ’12, “I hope to inspire passion [in] the people who come to this museum.”

If Fontha isn’t available during your visit, the sheer magnificence of the space should inspire passion.

“There has never been a show like this in South Florida because there has never been a space like this,” said Damian. “It’s going to attract not only the students and university community, but it’s going to bring the Miami, South Florida and Art Basel community here as well. We can say, ‘Come here and you can see Fraz Klein, Hanz Hoffman or Larry Rivers.’ When does that happen?”

The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. It is closed on Monday.

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