BY ALBERT AMATEAU | The Dahesh Museum of Art, which has an important collection of 19th-century academic realist artwork, opened its museum gift shop and offices on June 4 in Hudson Square
The 3,500-square-foot, ground-floor location at 145 Sixth Ave., with its entrance on Dominick St., will also serve as a coordination and information center for all Dahesh Museum of Art activities, including public programs.
“After 17 years in Midtown, we are more than ready to join the movement Downtown,” said Amira Zahid, a founding director of the museum. “Here in Hudson Square we feel youthful energy abounding and we love looking out on a tree-lined park,” she added, referring to Soho Square, between Spring and Broome Sts. on the west side of Sixth Ave.
“Through the gift shop and our public programs, we hope to introduce the academic art of the 19th century — as it shaped and discovered the world — to the people who live, work and visit this dynamic neighborhood,” Zahid said.
The Dahesh has been functioning as a museum-without-walls for the past four years, developing traveling exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad while lending important works to museums worldwide.
During this time, the Dahesh Museum has been partnering with Syracuse University, mounting exhibitions in Syracuse and in Lubin House, the university’s gallery space at 11 E. 64th St.
In June 2011, Dahesh and Syracuse took a joint exhibition to Dubai. “Reconnecting East & West” explored 19th-century European adaptation of Islamic ornament and its influence on the modern Dubai cityscape.
The museum is named for the late Dr. Dahesh, a writer, philosopher and art collector from Beirut, Lebanon. After the 1975 Lebanese Civil War, Dahesh sold his art collection to Zahid’s family, who emigrated to the U.S. a year later. They founded the museum in 1995, opening at 48th St. and Fifth Ave. The museum moved to the IBM building, at 580 Madison Ave. at 56th St., in 2003 but closed there in 2008 when Dahesh began its relationship with Syracuse University.
The museum continues to look for a building to serve as a permanent home while it mounts exhibits and lends works drawn from it entire collection now in storage, said Paula Webster, a Dahesh spokesperson.
From this January to April, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, borrowed 32 works for its exhibit “The Epic and the Exotic: 19th Century Academic Realism from the Dahesh Museum of Art.”
The museum has also loaned works to the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute in Utica, N.Y., and the Bellarmine Museum of Art at Fairfield University in Connecticut. In the spring of 2013, five Egyptian-themed painting from the Dahesh collection will anchor the “Egyptomania” exhibition at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven.
The new gift shop space at 145 Sixth Ave. will also periodically display selected works from the collection.
