![]() ![]() But everyone on hand for the media tour - from the architect to the docents, from the education center crew to the staff of the new café - radiated a sense of pride and investment in the accomplishment. Whether CMA’s new wing can live up to the heady expectations surrounding it has yet to be seen, of course. Pace/Columbus really did change some people’s sense of who they were and where they lived, and it’s a testament to the role that cultural institutions, including commercial ones, can play.” ![]() “As we look forward to a new program with the Columbus Museum’s expansion, it’s also timely to reacquaint our audience with the history of contemporary art in the city. At the same time, I’ve met several people in Columbus who never imagined that Pace was ever anywhere else,” says Cann. “Many people don’t know that Pace was ever in Columbus. CMA Curator of Contemporary Art Tyler Cann confessed to having a soft spot for the Samaras works that will be on display, in particular the installation of his 1966–2007 piece “Doorway.” In the new special exhibition gallery, Keeping Pace: Eva Glimcher and Pace/Columbusresuscitates the little-known heyday of Pace Gallery in Columbus, featuring an eye-popping array of exhibition posters that reveal Columbus as an unlikely port of circulation for some of the most cutting-edge contemporary artists of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as works by six artists who showed there: Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, Lucas Samaras, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. Tyler Cann and Nannette Maciejunes next to Lucas Samaras’s “Doorway” (click to enlarge) “I love that there are no load-bearing walls, because that means you can completely reconfigure the space.” “I think one of the themes that we kept returning to in this building was the flexibility that generations of curators and directors, and the community, could have,” she says. Still, the 10-year process of creating the new wing has clearly taught Maciejunes to always consider the long-term: the artist-spec walls were built over permanent ons, to enable future changes to the space. ![]() The media preview was not, perhaps, the best moment to reflect quietly on the work, but the design of the space will clearly facilitate intimate contemplation. The gallery is low-lit and hushed as a catacomb, adding to the gravitas of the massive barrel balanced atop a fibrous tightrope. The dedicated space is a 1,400-square-foot gallery with custom walls that bow inwards, creating the immersive and somewhat oppressive environment that Chin had specified as the ideal conditions for showing the piece. When it came to deciding what pieces the community would want to see pretty much available in a permanent way, ‘Spirit’ became one of those touchstones.” So, you’ve got to get those people to be attached and keep coming back again, and those are the people who become attached to objects in the collection - they ask you where they are and why they’re not up. Our audience is two things: it’s regional tourism, primarily people who have come here for different reasons, and then people who live within about a two-hour driving distance. “I always talk about how the sweet spot for us is really the return visitor. ‘Nocturne Navigator’ has been down a long time,” says Maciejunes. “There were pieces that were beloved that needed to come down for awhile. ![]() Mel Chin’s “Spirit” in its new custom gallery space These include Mel Chin’s “Spirit” (1992) - an examination of the unsteady relationship between agriculture, industry, and nature in America, embodied by a massive shipping barrel balanced on a rope made of native grasses - and the commission “Nocturne Navigator” (1998) by Alison Saar, a piece that commemorates the spirit of northern-bound former slaves with a figure wearing a voluminous skirt, through which points of light emulate the stars that provided the means of navigation towards freedom. Inside, there are features and surprises for newcomers and CMA loyalists alike, including special galleries custom-made for some of the institution’s touchstone works. A number of the new wing’s features embody CMA’s vision for, in Borgiorno’s words, “a meeting point between art, the public, and the physical city” - including a soaring atrium entryway and gathering space that Maciejunes predicts “will be a new hub around which everything circulates in the building” cinematic facades that offer tantalizing views into the second-floor galleries from the streets that bookend the museum and pre-patinated bronze cladding that nods to the weathered copper of the original 1931 building, which housed CMA’s collection until it was relegated to administrative space. ![]()
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