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Welcome to the Akron Art Museum

Spanning three centuries, the Akron Art Museum combines a late nineteenth-century brick and limestone building with the twenty-first century John S. and James L. Knight Building, a soaring glass and steel structure by the celebrated Viennese architectural firm Coop Himmelb(l)au.

The brick building opened in 1899 as Akron’s main post office. Designed under the direction of James Knox Taylor, supervising architect for the Treasury Department, it has walls of deep red brick laid in the Flemish Bond pattern and adorned with limestone trim. Pairs of carved eagle medallions and bronze lanterns decorate its Market Street façade and a mosaic depicting a Pony Express rider is imbedded in its lobby floor. An outstanding example of the Italian Renaissance revival style, the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Akron Art Museum moved into the building in 1981 after a major renovation by Cleveland’s Dalton, van Dijk, Johnson & Partners. The firm’s design won architectural awards for adaptive reuse.

The 2007 design by Coop Himmelb(l)au integrated approximately 21,000 square feet of the 1899 building with a new 63,300 square foot building. Coop Himmelb(l)au [www.ccop-himmelblau.at] founded in 1968 by principals Wolf D. Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky, is renowned for its leadership in contemporary architectural theory and practice and its thought-provoking approach to the reinvention of existing buildings. The Akron Art Museum is the firm’s first public project in the United States and, while still under construction, received a 2005 American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum.

The museum’s design employs innovative engineering to generate a structure that is highly functional and energy efficient but also visually spectacular, providing a new landmark for the city. Prix asserts, “The dream of the architect is to get rid of gravity.” Throughout the building are cantilevered, suspended and floating forms, as evidenced in its three main architectural elements. The “Crystal,” a three-story glass and steel lobby, is a focal point connecting the museum’s spaces while also serving the city as an indoor piazza. The “Gallery Box,” a flexible exhibition space clad in aluminum panels, appears to float due to its 52-foot cantilever. The “Roof Cloud” is a 327-foot long cantilevered steel armature extending over and embracing the old and new buildings and part of the street.

Notwithstanding its radical forms, the new building is respectful of the older structure. The Crystal leans toward it in an embrace while the Roof Cloud stretches above like sheltering arms or wings. To promote an even more dynamic dialogue between old and new, Prix removed part of the 1899 building’s south façade, opening the solid brick structure to activity in the new building and its urban setting.

Transparency and permeability are key characteristics of the Knight structure, just as they are important qualities of much early twenty-first century architecture. Coop Himmelb(l)au’s design opens the museum to the city and to the public, creating a cultural hub for the community and serving as a symbol for Akron’s embrace of the twenty-first century.

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Additional Artist Information: Travis Hetman

*This information is supplemental to the post http://akronartmuseum.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/a-week-in-denver-part-one-art/.*

Name: Travis Hetman
Age: 27
Currently working out of Denver by way of Minneapolis MN.
Studied art and art history at the University of Minnesota.

“My work is more or less a visual continuation of existential curiosity.  The treat of visual art to me is the privilege of making wild associations and the general lawlessness that comes with creative thinking.  I love art for it’s own aesthetic beauty but a main goal of my art is to unlock new ideas and ways of thinking, to learn something from painting and drawing that I otherwise wouldn’t–sort of the way dreams work.  Space is a common theme in my work and I use it as a visual motif because it represents possibly everything (the infinite) yet reads as a finite object on the visual plane. I enjoy visual contradictions like this in that they get one thinking about perception and how faulty it can be.  All philosophy and heavy thinking aside, there is always room for humor in the absurd and if this is found in my work, all the better.”

Favorite artist: Philippe Petit, a French high wire walker who writes poetry in the sky.
I find inspiration in existential literature, physics, the absurd, and always Tom Waits.
A few favorite visual artists include: Neo Rauch, David Schnell, Barry McGee

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Arcade

– Copy and Paste Me –>

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Try This: Drawing Still Life

Drawing can be as easy and complicated as you choose it to be. Still Life is a good way to hone your skills. Set up something you can draw many times in different styles. Keep working until you’re happy with the results.

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Try This: Encaustic

All painting is pigment plus a binder. Many paints, like watercolor and acrylic, are liquid at room temperature. Encaustic is a pigment mixed with wax. The paint needs to be heated to be viscous enough to apply to a paint surface. The media is challenging, requiring a fast hand. The rich surface, however, makes this media satisfying.

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Try This: Silverpoint

Silverpoint is an age-old form of drawing, using a metal point on a gessoed surface. The contrast in the fine details of the drawings increases over time as the image oxides in the air.

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Try This: Using Drawing Fluid

This type of printing is effective to make multiple screenprints. You’d need the basic silkscreen materials (screen, squeegee, ink) plus drawing fluid and screen filler. This style of printmaking is wonderful for line drawings.

What You Need a silkscreen, drawing fluid, ink, a brush, paper, and a squeegee

Try This?

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Try This: Silkscreen Printing Using a Vinyl Stencil

This type of printing is effective to make multiple screenprints without many specialized tools (like when transferring a photograph to a silkscreen). You’d need the basic silkscreen materials (screen, squeegee, ink) and vinyl. You can cut a pattern with scissors or with an Exacto. This style of printmaking is wonderful for simple, bold images.

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Creativity Invitation: Make a Marker Mess

Explore more drawing resources if that helps inspires you.

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Try This Invitation: Be Inspired by Your Own Music

You could also make music inspired by our collection. Abstract art can be great inspiration for sonorous expressions.

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