Salon Highlights Art, Architecture, Film

The third in a series of monthly Hillside Salons of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 17 from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, 125 West Bay Rd., Amherst. It will feature one of the museum’s architects, Kevin Chrobak of Juster Pope Frazier, Northampton.

Chrobak will discuss how an architect uses tools such as sunlight, building orientation, vistas, natural materials and imagination to create a space that fits the building owner’s and users’ needs. The architect will also talk about how this collaborative process contributed to his plans for churches, apartment buildings and offices in the local area. The salon’s format allows each artist 20 seconds per slide to show 20 views of his or her work, a total of only about six and a half minutes per person. After these, the gathering is open to discussion.

Hillside Salons are held on the third Tuesday of each month. Space is limited; for more information or to request a reservation, call (413) 545-4336, or e-mail: Hillside@umass.edu.

In addition to Chrobak, other artists to be featured:

Daniel Schrade of Hampshire College. For about 10 years, Schrade has been integrating text and word fragments into painting on canvas and paper. “In 2003, I started to add figurative personages into my paintings, often as elements that occupy the liminal spaces between fore-and background,” he notes. Motifs are repeated and worked out in varied forms in series so they become “a kind of very personal cultural archive” that includes the “Afronaut” and “Brother Beethoven” figures.

Stephen Petegorsky of Florence. The photographer says he has been drawn to photograph animals for as long as he has been making pictures. Petegorsky is inspired in part by museum dioramas, creating more personal ones by using diverse backgrounds. His other portfolios include landscapes, an ongoing project based in a prosthetics clinic in Nicaragua, and “Gold Leaf,” a work about time, memory, change and mortality.

Kate Geis of Northampton. This Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker is perhaps best known for her feature-length film Riversense, that describes a way of life through the eyes of several whitewater paddlers drawn to dangerous water for different reasons. Geis has also produced television programs including the 1995 Billboard Music Awards, the Second Annual Saturday Night Live Mother’s Day Special and the All-Star Fiesta at Ford’s Theater.

Michael Mazur of Leverett. The owner of Earthworks, a garden design and construction company, Mazur has spent 25 years building gardens throughout New England which include sculpture, artistic bouldering, stone walls and flatwork. Mazur’s work is on display at the Boston Flower show each spring.

The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Renewed

The Charles Engelhard Court, the grand, light-filled pavilion that has long served as the formal entrance to The Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing, is open again after two years of construction and renovation.

Twelve of the Met's historic interiors, mostly from the colonial period, located on three floors of the wing's historic core have been reordered, renovated, and reinterpreted.

The popular American Wing Café will also reopen in its previous location on the park side of the court.

The opening of the galleries marks the completion of the second part (begun in May 2007) of a project to reconfigure, renovate, or upgrade nearly every section of The American Wing by 2011.

Morrison Heckscher, the Lawrence A. Fleischman chairman of The American Wing, described the project as "architecture in the cause of art."

"The goal of the comprehensive renovation of The American Wing is to present the Museum's superlative collections in the clearest and most logical, as well as most beautiful, manner possible. Toward that end, we have called upon the building itself -in the use of clear glass for walls and parapets and even a new public elevator, for example - to provide visual access to all facets of the collections."

The American Wing's collections of ceramics, glass, silver, and pewter will be installed in the balcony galleries in an integrated chronological sequence, beginning with the colonial period on the east side and continuing into the 20th century on the west, overlooking Central Park.

Among the highlights of the silver display will be the work of such familiar names as Paul Revere, Jr., and Tiffany & Company. A newly constructed mezzanine-level balcony, accessible via a staircase in the northwest corner, will be devoted almost entirely to the display of a major recent acquisition - 250 examples of American art pottery crafted between 1876 and 1956, a promised gift of Robert A. Ellison Jr. - that has never before been publicly seen.

Stained-glass windows of the same period, by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), William Gray Purcell (1880–1965) and George Grant Elmslie (1869–1952), and George Washington Maher (1864–1926) that incorporate large amounts of clear glass will also be installed nearby, with Central Park visible through them.

The Metropolitan Museum gratefully acknowledges the following lead contributors to the project: Margaret and Raymond J. Horowitz, Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang, Mr. and Mrs. Richard L. Chilton, Jr., The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, Juliana and Peter Terian, Jan and Warren Adelson, Max and Heidi Berry, Ambassador and Mrs. W. L. Lyons Brown, Joyce Berger Cowin, Jane and Maurice Cunniffe, Barbara G. Fleischman and Martha J. Fleischman, Peggy N. and Roger G. Gerry Charitable Trust, The Henry Luce Foundation, Elizabeth and Richard Miller, Oceanic Heritage Foundation, Doris and Stanley Tananbaum, and Barrie and Deedee Wigmore.

For more about corporate support of the museum, as well as entertaining programs and planned giving, call the development office at (212) 570-3956, or e-mail development@metmuseum.org.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is located at 1000 Fifth Avenue in New York City.