This story was originally published in The Denver Post on September 20, 2001.
Three of the Denver Art Museum’s curatorial departments will
gain considerable exhibition space with the institution’s planned
$62.5 million addition, while galleries for the others will remain
the same size or grow slightly, Director Lewis Sharp said Wednesday.
“By the time you put in all the things it takes to operate a
building, there’s less square footage there than everyone in a
perfect world would like,” he said. “I think every department is
satisfied, and I’d even go a step further – I think they’re pretty
excited about the future layout of their program and how’s it
going to function.”
Sharp and Dan Kohl, director of museum design, provided
details to reporters Wednesday about space configurations for the
museum’s permanent collection once the 146,000-square-foot
addition is completed in 2005 and the existing 1971 building is
subsequently reconfigured.
Getting the most space in the new building – 21,000 square
feet – will be modern and contemporary art, which will be spread
among the third and floors and will displayed in some of the most
architecturally dramatic spaces. Its square footage will be about
double what it was previously.
But the departments making even bigger percentage gains in
space will be textile arts – a 710 percent increase – and
architecture, design and graphics – a 381 percent jump.
Textile arts will take over all of the seventh floor of the
existing building, designed by Gio Ponti, where it will have 8,100
square feet of galleries as well as semi-open storage space
accessible to scholars and other qualified visitors.
Museum leaders originally thought the museum’s department of
architecture, design and graphics, overseen by curator R. Craig
Miller, would be on the first floor of the new building. But the
new layout assigns it 17,800 square feet on the third floor of the
Ponti building.
“Craig’s collection has grown enormously,” Sharp said, “and
this (first floor) space either in square footage and the way it
is configured didn’t allow him to develop the type of program he
wanted.”
But the most striking change with the new layout might be
the placement of the museum’s Western art collection on the first
floor of the addition, so that those works will be the first from
the permanent collection visitors will see.
Not only did those works fit the size and configuration of
that space, Lewis said, they provided a logical link to the
existing building, where Native American art will be displayed on
the first and second floors.
“We wanted a collection,” Sharp said, “that really drew you
from this building into the Ponti building. We’re a Western city
and we have a fine Western collection. And those Western
collections have a very powerful tie to the rest of the historical
collections.”
Other changes include the museum’s African and Oceanic
collections, which previously have had only scattered
representation, but will have 6,200 square feet of space in the
new building.
The exhibition spaces for the museum’s collections of
pre-Columbian, Spanish colonial and Asian art will remain in their
current locations and remain unchanged. Painting and sculpture and
historical decorative arts will gain 10,000 square feet on the
sixth floor of the Ponti building where they currently are.
But Sharp made clear any changes to the existing building are
only projections at this time. No work will be done until after
the Daniel Libeskind-designed addition is completed, and he was
unwilling to provide a possible timetable for even beginning
fundraising.
“Ideally,” Sharp said, “we would like to see (the changes)
done some time after the Libeskind building opens, but the economy
will dictate whether there are interest and funds available to do
that. And we will just be very realistic as to whether we think it
is do-able.”
