Speed Art Museum
Louisville
The Speed Art Museum, Kentucky’s oldest art museum, is about to also become its newest. The museum is wrapping up a massive $60 million renovation and expansion that will give it two sleek new buildings and a new outdoor sculpture park, along with a major redo of its original 1927 building.
The renovation was so extensive that the museum has been closed for more than three years. It will reopen to great fanfare March 12, 2016.
Already Kentucky’s largest museum, the expansion will more than double the Speed’s overall square footage and nearly triple the gallery space. One of the centerpieces of the expansion is the new 62,500-square-foot, largely transparent North Building, whose large spaces will provide new opportunities for displaying contemporary works of art.
“We have a very strong classical collection dating back 6,000 years, but we want to expand our contemporary work,” said Steven Bowling, the museum’s director of marketing and communications. “It will mostly be contemporary in the North Building. There is a lot of new exhibit space, and we will have seven exhibits a year, a lot more than in the past.”
A new South Building will have a state-of-the-art 142-seat cinema with a variety of projection systems. “It is something we greatly needed,” said Bowling.
The renovated original building will have new dedicated space in its lower gallery for the museum’s strong collection of Kentucky decorative art. “In the past, it was scattered throughout the museum,” said Bowling.
Bowling said the creative design “marries the old with the new.” An art bridge will lead between the North Building and the 1927 building. “You will be able to see all the way through; it’s a nice vista,” he said. “It’s a new and open look. It invites people in.”
Owensboro Museum of Fine Art
Owensboro
As you enter the soaring two-story glass-ceiling atrium of the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art, get ready be surprised and impressed.
“For a town this size, it is a remarkable facility; actually, it is remarkable for a town of any size,” said museum spokesman Jason Hayden.
Hayden’s comments are not just promotional hyperbole. The museum, the second-largest art museum in Kentucky, has a good representative collection of European, American and Asian art from the 17th century to the present, along with a large collection of Appalachian folk art, in 14 galleries.
The galleries are spread through three wings, two of which are on the National Register of Historic Places. The atrium, part of a 1994 expansion, connects the museum’s original home in a 1909 Carnegie library and an 1859 historic house that displays the museum’s large decorative-art collection.
The expansion was built specifically to display 16 large stained-glass windows from a local Catholic church. Made in 1890 in Germany, the detailed windows depict Catholic saints and the symbolism surrounding them in the Munich pictorial style.
The atrium features large installations of work commissioned by the museum from Joe Downing, a native of nearby Horse Cave, who lived most of his life in France.
The lobby of the Carnegie building has “the museum’s most important piece,” a statue of a ballerina by Degas.
“We love bus tours,” said Hayden, who added that the museum can handle groups as large as 150 divided into smaller groups. “All art has a story. Often, it is as important as its aesthetic value. We tell stories as we go through.”
www.owensboromuseumoffineart.org
Kentucky Folk Art Center
Morehead
The works in the Kentucky Folk Art Center can be whimsical or dark, elaborate or simple, and may not be considered fine art by critics; but one thing they have in common is that they were made by self-taught artists with something to say.
“We are a museum that collects and presents works by self-taught Kentucky artists,” said center director Matt Collinsworth. “They haven’t gone to college and studied art, nor apprenticed with an artist. They learn through trial and error.
“All artists have something to say and say it in a way that grabs the viewer’s attention. Folk art is no different. We say it is a testament to the concerns, courage and convictions of the common man.”
Collinsworth said Kentucky folk artists deal with many themes in many different media. “They have a tendency to use things that are on hand or can be acquired very easily,” he said. “Early on, they depicted farm life and Appalachian culture. Religion has always been a big theme. You also find political issues, wildlife and nature. It runs the gamut.”
The center, part of Morehead State University, is housed in a historic former grocery warehouse. The center has more than 1,400 items in its collection, about 100 of which are on display at any one time in its first-floor gallery.
The second-floor gallery has several changing exhibits each year that feature more than folk art: fine art, textiles, photography and historical content.
“We are the only art museum in Appalachia Kentucky,” said Collinsworth.
