Ieoh Ming Pei was a Chinese-American architect. Raised in Shanghai, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unhappy with the focus on Beaux-Arts architecture at both schools, he spent his free time researching emerging architects, especially Le Corbusier.
The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of the United States Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and funds for construction. The core collection includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Browne Widener, Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile created by Alexander Calder.
The Art Gallery of Ontario is an art museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located in the Grange Park neighbourhood of downtown Toronto, on Dundas Street West. The building complex takes up 45,000 square metres (480,000 sq ft) of physical space, making it one of the largest art museums in North America and the second-largest art museum in Toronto, after the Royal Ontario Museum. In addition to exhibition spaces, the museum also houses an artist-in-residence office and studio, dining facilities, event spaces, gift shop, library and archives, theatre and lecture hall, research centre, and a workshop.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of Asian art.
The Carnegie Museum of Art is an art museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The museum was originally known as the Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute and was formerly located at what is now the Main Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. The museum's first gallery was opened for public use on November 5, 1895. Over the years, the gallery vastly increased in size, with a new building on Forbes Avenue built in 1907. In 1963, the name was officially changed to Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute. The size of the gallery has tripled over time, and it was officially renamed in 1986 to "Carnegie Museum of Art" to indicate it clearly as one of the four Carnegie Museums.
The Tokyo National Museum or TNM is an art museum in Ueno Park in the Taitō ward of Tokyo, Japan. It is one of the four museums operated by the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, is considered the oldest national museum in Japan, is the largest art museum in Japan, and is one of the largest art museums in the world. The museum collects, preserves, and displays a comprehensive collection of artwork and cultural objects from Asia, with a focus on ancient and medieval Japanese art and Asian art along the Silk Road. There is also a large collection of Greco-Buddhist art. As of April 2023, the museum held approximately 120,000 Cultural Properties, including 89 National Treasures, 319 Horyuji Treasures, and 649 Important Cultural Properties. As of the same date, the Japanese government had designated 902 works of art and crafts as National Treasures and 10,820 works of art and crafts as Important Cultural Properties, so the museum holds about 10% of the works of art and crafts designated as National Treasures and 6% of those designated as Important Cultural Properties. The museum also holds 2,651 cultural properties deposited by individuals and organisations, of which 54 are National Treasures and 262 are Important Cultural Properties. Of these, 3,000 cultural properties are on display at one time, with each changing for between four and eight weeks. The museum also conducts research and organizes educational events related to its collection.
The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art is an art museum located on the northwest corner of the Arts Quad on the main campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Its collection includes two windows from Frank Lloyd Wright's Darwin D. Martin House, and more than 35,000 other works in the permanent collection. It was designed by architect I.M. Pei and is known for its distinctive concrete facade.
The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) is an art museum located in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Situated in Rockland, Victoria, the museum occupies a 2,474.5 square metres (26,635 sq ft) building complex; made up of the Spencer Mansion, and the Exhibition Galleries. The former building component was built in 1889, while the latter component was erected in the mid-20th century.
The Portland Museum of Art, or PMA, is the largest and oldest public art institution in Maine. Founded as the Portland Society of Art in 1882. It is located in the downtown area known as The Arts District in Portland, Maine.
Pei Cobb Freed & Partners is an American architectural firm based in New York City, founded in 1955 by I. M. Pei and other associates. The firm has received numerous awards for its work.
Wendell Castle was an American sculptor and furniture maker and an important figure in late 20th century American craft. He has been referred to as the "father of the art furniture movement" and included in the "Big 4" of modern woodworking with Wharton Esherick, George Nakashima, and Sam Maloof.
The Gateway is a 37-storey, 150 m (490 ft), skyscraper complex completed in April 1990 on Beach Road in the Downtown Core of Singapore. The two buildings are named The Gateway East and The Gateway West.
Marilyn Jane Stokstad was an American art historian, educator, and curator. A scholar of medieval and Spanish art, Stokstad was Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History Emeritus at the University of Kansas, and also served as director of the Spencer Museum of Art.
The Charles Shipman Payson Building is the most recent expansion of the Portland Museum of Art (PMA) in Portland, Maine, located on the corner of High Street and Congress Square. Henry N. Cobb designed the Payson Building, which introduced over five times more gallery space than in the adjacent, historic PMA buildings. The building opened in 1983, after Mr. Payson donated 17 Winslow Homer paintings and ten million dollars to the museum. Similar in theme to these Homer paintings, the Payson building contains a collection of contemporary paintings and short-term exhibitions created by Maine artists, focusing on regional themes.
Ernesto Pujol is a site-specific performance artist, social choreographer, and educator with an interdisciplinary practice. Pujol was born in 1957 in Havana, Cuba and spent time in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, before moving to the United States in 1979. He has lived and worked in New York since 1984. Pujol engaged in interdisciplinary pursuits, such as psychology and literature, while doing undergraduate work in humanities and visual arts at the University of Puerto Rico, in Spanish art history at the Universidad Complutense in Spain and in philosophy at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Florida. He pursued graduate work in education at the Universidad Interamericana in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in art therapy at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and in communications and media theory at Hunter College in New York City. Pujol received his MFA in interdisciplinary art practice from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Achelous and Hercules is a 1947 mural painting by Thomas Hart Benton. It depicts a bluejeans-wearing Hercules wrestling with the horns of a bull, a shape the protean river god Achelous was able to assume. The myth was one of the explanations offered by Greco-Roman mythology for the origin of the cornucopia, a symbol of agricultural abundance. Benton sets the scene during harvest time in the U.S. Midwest.
Elizabeth "Betsy" Broun is an American art historian and curator. Broun served as the Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum from 1989 to 2016, and is the longest-serving female director in the history of the Smithsonian Institution.
Sallie Casey Thayer, née Casey was a Kansas City art collector and advocate. Her diverse collection of fine and decorative art became the founding gift of the Spencer Museum of Art.
Charles "Charlie" Child Eldredge is an American art historian, educator, and curator. Eldredge is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art and Culture Emeritus at the University of Kansas. He also served as Director of the Spencer Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum during his career.
The Grand Louvre refers to the decade-long project initiated by French President François Mitterrand in 1981 of expanding and remodeling the Louvre – both the building and the museum – by moving the French Finance Ministry, which had been located in the Louvre's northern wing since 1871, to a different location. The centerpiece of the Grand Louvre is the Louvre Pyramid designed by Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, which was also the project's most controversial component. The Grand Louvre was substantially completed in the late 1990s, even though its last elements were only finalized in the 2010s.
