Guggenheim Celebrates 50th With Wright Exhibit
Words: Bronzella Cleveland, Cory Sekine-pettite, David Carney, Robert Bevins, Patricia Carney
Guggenheim Museum Celebrates 50th Anniversary With Wright Exhibition
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition commemorating the museum’s architect. Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, co-organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, will be on view from May 15 through Aug. 23, 2009. The exhibition brings together 64 projects designed by one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, including privately commissioned residences, civic and government buildings, religious and performance spaces, as well as unrealized urban mega-structures.
Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, said, “Fifty years ago, the trajectories of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Frank Lloyd Wright became intertwined. When it opened in October 1959, the museum drew both criticism and admiration, but what was indisputable was that Wright had reinvented the art museum.” Armstrong continued, “How fitting that we open our fiftieth-anniversary celebrations with Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, an exhibition that documents and challenges how architecture influences the way we live and how we experience art.”
According to the museum, Wright (1867–1959), who died just six months before the opening of the Guggenheim, worked independently from any single style and developed a new sense of architecture in which form and function are inseparable. Known for his inventiveness and the diversity of his work, Wright is celebrated for the awe-inspiring beauty and tranquility of his designs. Whether creating a private home, workplace, religious edifice, or cultural attraction, Wright sought to unite people, buildings, and nature in physical and spiritual harmony. To realize such a union in material form, Wright created environments of simplicity and repose through carefully composed plans and elevations based on consistent, geometric grammars.
Following the presentation of Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain, where it will be on view from Oct. 6, 2009 through February 2010. For more information on the exhibition, visit www.guggenheim.org.