Recent arts coverage:
- At Mexic-Arte Museum, “31K Portraits for Peace” highlights hope
- At AMOA-Arthouse Laguna Gloria, small is the new big
- ‘Failed States:’ Artist-witness creates exhibit in response to shooting at Texas Capitol
- Austin Lyric Opera, music school formally quit
More arts coverage | Follow this blog on Twitter @artsinaustin | Read recent arts reviews
Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > May > 27 > Entry
Your A-List: Best Museum
Readers have chosen Austin Museum of Art as their favorite in this week’s A-List poll with AMOA receiving 37 percent of the votes.
This weekend, AMOA opens ‘The Lining of Forgetting: Internal & External Memory in Art,’ an exhibit of international contemporary art that all expresses the ways we remember or forget or even re-write our memories.
Image from the exhibit at right: Dinh Q. Le, ‘Untitled (From Vietnam to Hollywood),’ 2003, C-print and linen tape, Courtesy of P.P.O.W., New York.
Here’s something to remember: Austin’s art museums have a very symbiotic history.
Nearly a century ago, friends of famed German-born sculptor Elisabet Ney established the Texas Fine Arts Association in 1911 to honor Ney. The group bought Ney’s idiosyncratic home and studio in the Hyde Park neighborhood to pave the way for some kind of official state art gallery.
At its first meeting, that group of early 20th-century arts supporters pledged to found an art school in connection with the University of Texas, thus planting the seeds that grew into UT’s art program and the Blanton Museum of Art), now the largest university art museum in the country.
In the early 1940s, the TFAA deeded the Ney house to the city of Austin, which now operates it as the Elisabet Ney Museum, a national, state and local historic landmark. And yet the materials in the Ney Museum, belong to UT’s Ransom Center.
Wait, there’s more: After the Ney house was deeded to the city, TFAA received stewardship of the Clara Driscoll estate on Lake Austin known as Laguna Gloria. TFAA ran its programs there until 1961, when a separate entity known as Laguna Gloria Art Museum, was established.
TFAA and Laguna Gloria Art Museum co-existed at the Driscoll mansion for years with TFAA organizing an annual exhibit and Laguna Gloria percolating and growing as a civic art museum.
Jump ahead a few decades and by the early 1990s, TFAA moved downtown to a permanent facility at 700 Congress Ave and re-named its Arthouse. It’s now a burgeoning contemporary arts center.
At the same time the TFAA was morphing into Arthouse, Laguna Gloria re-named itself the Austin Museum of Art and opened its current downtown location at 823 Congress Ave.
Others receiving A-List votes
- Mexic-Arte Museum, 19 percent
- Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, 17 percent
- Blanton Museum of Art, 16 percent
- Austin Children’s Museum, 2 percent
- Ransom Center, 2 percent
- LBJ Library and Museum, 2 percent
- Texas Memorial Museum, 1 percent
- O. Henry Museum, 1 percent
- Elizabet Ney Museum, < 1 percent
- George Washington Carver Museum, < 1 percent
- Austin Museum of Digital Art, < 1 percent
- French Legation Museum, < 1 percent
Comments
When commenting, we ask that you keep things civil and abide by our Visitor Agreement. To report comment abuse, click here.