Word: museumed
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Attempting to spice up these celebrity lives, illustrator Odessa Begay has created the Museum of Modern Tweets, posting illustrated interpretations of stars' Twitter posts each week. Her works play off poor grammar and lack of context for maximum comedic effect, turning everyday updates into surreal, vibrant scenes. The results include Lance Armstrong sitting on a couch with mythical creatures, Kirstie Alley in a bear suit and Shaq hunting down miniature versions of LeBron James with a butterfly...
...understand the new gallery's significance, consider the history of the DIA, as the museum is known in Detroit. Shortly after its founding in the 1880s, the DIA began collecting Islamic art. The 1920s auto-industry boom made Detroit one of the world's wealthiest cities - "the Paris of the Midwest," many called it. In 1927, the DIA moved into its current home, a white Beaux Arts building near Detroit's downtown, and sharply expanded its collections, mainly with European and American pieces, although it briefly hired an Islamic-arts specialist to curate a small collection. In the following decades...
...Detroit Institute of Arts opened its newest permanent gallery, one devoted to Islamic works. The collection, which features a Timurid Koran written on gold-flecked Chinese paper, and ceramic bowls from the 15th century Ottoman Empire, is a bold acknowledgment by one of the country's most venerable museums of the breadth of Islam's influence. It's also a test of whether the cash-strapped museum can tap into this region's relatively affluent Middle Eastern community, the largest in America...
...late 1990s, the DIA hired Graham Beal, who formerly headed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to serve as its CEO. He arrived just as the DIA was set to launch a six-year, $158 million renovation and expansion. Beal's mandate: "to rethink how we present art to the general public." That meant tripling the amount of space devoted to the DIA's Native American art collection and opening a department to curate a collection of African-American art. Beal ordered that exhibit labels be more accessible to the masses. In one gallery, he added a virtual dining...
Because of Detroit's disastrous past decade, the renovation took longer than expected, and the museum struggled: attendance, which is highly dependent on special exhibits, fell sharply. Last year Beal reduced the DIA's budget, from $32 million to $26 million, partly by laying off 20% of the museum's staff. Cultural sites nationwide are struggling to weather the economic crisis, but the challenge facing Detroit's institutions is especially severe; they can no longer rely on support from the region's ailing auto industry. Raising money, Beal says, "has been unbelievably challenging." (See TIME's special report "The Committee...