BY ASHLEY MASSENGILL
As the Detroit Institute of
Art Renovations are coming to its closing stages at the end of this
year, the DIA gets a new look.
When the buildings project
began, its intention was to make improvements to the aging structure
of the museum and improve services for museum visitors.
During this course, it became
aware that more things than they thought would need to be fixed.
This road blocker created an
opportunity to look upon the museum and its purpose and the end
result produced new plans for the museum.
Reinstallation planning is
being conducted by teams of curators, educators and other museum
professionals who get advice from experts around the world.
The goal is to help visitors
draw connections across cultures and eras. Galleries will be
arranged in a variety of ways: thematically, culturally, or
chronologically.
French teacher Elisabeth Smith
took last year’s French 3 and French 4 students to the DIA.
With the museum under
construction, they had to pull art from different areas that were
being worked on and display them in some other sort of way.
Smith and the French classes
saw how the museum was set up differently than normal.
"Things were grouped from all
of the different areas, whether the Native American, the Medieval or
the Modern, all of the different stuff they pulled things together
into themes. So for instance where they had art and spirituality,
they had art that dealt with spiritual themes and topics," said
Smith.
Beside the fact that art was
not in the normal format, Smith thought the format was appealing.
"It was interesting to see all
of those different things kind of mixed up, it was like a fresh
perspective," said Smith.
One of the new additions will
be the Education Center, which will include a large space for
classes and lectures, offices for studio staff, and The Walter Gibbs
Learning Center, which will feature exhibitions based on the DIA’s
collections.
Some of the major physical
changes are a 31,383 square-foot addition with three stories and a
full basement, new façade on the north and south wings and the
conversion of the north court into new gallery space and improved
visitor amenities.
The DIA also has a team
developing new hands on activities, including touch-screens, flip
labels, hand-held computers and self-guided audio tours. These will
replace traditional labels.
Senior Tiffany Anthony reports
seeing that "there was a lot of plastic setting everything off, you
couldn’t really go by it and you couldn’t see very much."
The CaféDIA was opened in
December of 2003.
This includes dining space of
250 and the menu ranging from salad bars to sandwiches to hot
entrees. The Café can be separated into three separate areas for
private meetings or as a single large event space.
All in all there will be
35,190 square feet of additional gallery space with the project cost
of $158.2 million.
This is actually the museum’s
third renovation since its construction in 1885.
The original museum was called
The Detroit Museum of Art located on Jefferson Avenue.
Due to the expanding
collection of art, the museum moved the site to Woodward Avenue in
1927.
After World War II the gallery
grew so much that they added two more wings.
The south wing is named after
Edsel and Eleanor Ford for their support of the project opened in
1966.
The north wing, dedicated in
1971, was named after former Detroit mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh.
In the meantime, the DIA still
remains open with a full schedule of programs and exhibitions.
"This expansion will help them
be able to demonstrate a lot more because there are a lot of things
in storage we don’t know about," said Smith.
