Another site-specific commission is by Miriam Bäckström, who has turned a subterranean space connecting the parking lot with the stairwell of the new building into something celestial. Her woven tapestry with an abstraction of concentric circles, embedded into the curvature of the architecture, provides an illusion of the infinite.
Given the museum’s history with living artists, “it would have been a missed opportunity if we didn’t truly integrate some contemporary voices into the space itself,” said the chief curator, Cathleen Chaffee. “We want people the minute they arrive to feel that they’re stepping into an artwork and not have them wait 10 minutes until they check their coat and get their ticket,” she said.
Inside the exhibition galleries, now double the space at 50,000 square feet, some 400 works from the collection are displayed chronologically, starting in the neoclassical building (with a new roof and warm red oak replacing cracked marble flooring) and wending through the three floors of the new building (named for the financier Jeffrey E. Gundlach, who contributed $65 million to the capital campaign).
Four galleries spotlight the museum’s historical relationship with the Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still, displaying all 33 towering canvases by him in the collection. An adjacent double-height gallery shows contemporary artists who have an affinity with Still, including Joe Bradley, Sterling Ruby, Stanley Whitney and Harold Ancart.
Another highlight is an immersive multichannel video installation by Lap-See Lam, a shadow play inspired by her family’s Chinese restaurant in Sweden and the artist’s U.S. museum debut.
Even people just driving by the campus can see works by Alexander Calder, Robert Irwin, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Lawrence Weiner, among others, clearly visible through the glass facade on the second-floor sculpture terrace, encircling the internal cube of galleries in the contemporary building. “The Gundlach building looks the way it does because the community wanted it,” Mr. Sirén said, emphasizing its porosity.
“I don’t think we could have raised this money,” Mr. Sirén added, “if we hadn’t engaged our community and been authentic about it.”
