VMFA hosts public forum about digital imaging sign

VMFA invites Museum District, Fan District, and Boulevard Associations

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has heard both negative and positive comments from the community about the digital imaging sign that is planned for the museum’s front yard on Boulevard. I have invited neighborhood association members to a public forum at 6:00pm on Tuesday, January 11, in the Reynolds Lecture Hall to view our plans first-hand and to share comments with the museum leadership.

I have also invited Richard Sliwoski, Director of the Department of General Services, the state agency which staffs the board of Art and Architecture Review. Brian Olinger, AARB former chair, will also be present. As you know, our process has always been to share the Museum’s plans with the community after approval from our state oversight boards.

As with the parking deck and the many particulars associated with the McGlothlin wing, we want to share the details of our plans. We will look to our neighbors for input on the planned sign at VMFA.

Thank you for your continued engagement and support, and we look forward to the dialogue on January 11.

Sincerely,

Alex Nyerges
Director

Tourists voice need for VMFA sign

We received the following unsolicited email recently:

My wife and I recently visited the VMFA and were thoroughly
impressed. What a beautiful campus! Such gorgeous galleries
and collections!

We have visited most of the grandest art museums in the US
and the VMFA is up there with the best of them, including
the Met Museum in our hometown of New York City, LACMA in
Los Angeles and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

About the only fault we found in Richmond was the lack of
signage. We arrived there on a Thursday night after driving
for hours and it was very dark. The museum had no signs, no
lights, no directions... we mistook the Historical Society
for the VMFA, then passed by the museum itself without
noticing it. We could not find parking either... it was
difficult! But once we were inside the campus, the beauty
and richness of the museum was immensely rewarding.

The next morning, sipping on coffee at a local store in
Richmond, I read in a local paper that the VMFA plans on
putting a big sign on North Boulevard and some neighbors
oppose the measure. What a coincidence! Of course, and as
you can imagine, I say, "go for it"! The museum is among the
best in the nation, but it is harder to find than most...
this situation sure does need to change. We welcome that
"big bright sign".

My best and thank you for a beautiful museum!

High Def Sign at VMFA

You may have heard that we are planning an electronic sign in front of VMFA. Richmonders have watched the careful construction of this world-class museum for the past four years, and have witnessed its metamorphosis into the vital and welcoming museum that it is today. The Art and Architecture Review Board, the state authority which has approved all phases of VMFA’s design, indicated that this contemporary sign is in keeping with the architecture of the McGlothlin wing. Constructed of stainless steel and glass, it echoes our new building materials, and will include a high-resolution digital graphics panel. Some neighbors have expressed concern about this plan; others have assured us of their confidence.

VMFA will carefully manage this information source and moderate its intensity so that it serves as a contemporary and attractive medium to indicate the beautiful art inside VMFA. The sign will be perpendicular to the street so that it is visible primarily to motorists. A green solution to ongoing information needs, it will be tastefully and respectfully executed in accordance with our high aesthetic values.

- Suzanne Hall

Mon Oncle: Both a Scathing Critique and Fanciful Delight

Friday Films is presenting yet another movie milestone this week at 6:30. Winner of a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (1958) will screen in VMFA’s grand Leslie Cheek Theater. Tati’s reputation as a darling of world art house cinema pretty much rests on his career output of 5 precious feature films (and a few smaller projects) thus VMFA is showing 1/5 of his oeuvre.


Modernism was sweeping mainstream design and thought by the 1950s. With Mon Oncle, Tati leapt into the vanguard of a seminal postmodern backlash against a perceived Modernist hegemony, and this was over two decades before Tom Wolfe’s popular tract, From Bauhaus to Our House (1981).


In his two most ambitious cinematic masterpieces, Mon Oncle and Playtime (1967), Tati launched salvos at the rising Modern movement. His recurring character, the soft spoken and gently deferential Mr. Hulot, personifies the old way of quirky charm that flies in the face of a Paris being overrun by a cold Modernist rationalism and logic. He paints Modernism as a syndrome of obsession with counterintuitive behavior that ultimately is anti-humanistic, anti-ergonomic, and downright anti-pleasure.


Tati is not given to vile bitterness and tends to make whimsical fun out of society’s perverse Modernist impulses in the tradition of Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). And, like the Chaplin movie, Mon Oncle is, at least in-part, a silent film with clever sound effects and a feast for the eyes.


Do come see Tati’s warm and at the same time edgy take on the mid-20th century’s runaway age of reason.

---H. Hobart Cornell, Critic-at-large