Archive for the ‘Museum’ Category

This weekend the Arts District in Downtown Dallas will be taken over by the annual City Arts Festival. With music, dance, food, art, and museums, there is something for everyone.

The Culinary Showcase will be held at Pearl @ Woodall and will have some of Dallas’ best chefs as they prepare food, suggest wine pairings, cocktail sessions, tequilla tastings, samplings and much more.

ALL the museums will have FREE admission this weekend so if you’ve been wanting to visit the Dallas Museum of Art, Crow Collection of Asian Art, or the Nasher Sculpture Center, this is the weekend to do it.

Get all the details at this link.

Friday: 6p-10p
Saturday: 11a-10p
Sunday: 11a-6p

After reading the details on how the King Tut exhibit will be packed up and moved, you’ll never look at moving the same way again!

From WFAA:

The curtain has come down on King Tut. The fanfare is over.

Now, a veil of secrecy is descending upon the 130 priceless Egyptian antiquities that constituted “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Event organizers don’t want anyone to know exactly how the objects get disassembled, packed and moved to their next stop in San Francisco.

A team of Egyptians from the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo flew into Dallas on Sunday – the last day of the exhibit – and will begin the painstaking work this morning.

The Egyptian government, which owns the artifacts, will not allow outsiders to photograph or witness the disassembly process. Details of how they are transported also are held close to the vest.

“It’s not a cavalier kind of process,” said Mark Lach, senior vice president of Arts and Exhibitions International, the company that teamed up with Egypt to present the American tour of the Tut exhibit. “It’s very precise and very delicate.”

The disassembly and packing could last 10 days to two weeks.

“The pace moves as the safety and security of the objects dictates,” Lach said.

Careful removal

The Egyptian team – five or six experts with “very educated hands,” Lach said – begins by removing the artifacts from display cases in 11 museum galleries.

They know exactly how to handle each piece and carefully place it upon a table in an “artifact room” set up at the museum. After all, these things are more than 3,000 years old.

Wielding magnifying glasses underneath special lighting, the team will compile a “condition report” for each object – such as royal jewelry, statuary and a stone coffinette that contained Tut’s internal organs. They will compare the artifacts’ condition with photographs taken before the exhibit installation in Dallas.

“They are the best in their field,” said Lach, who designed the Tut exhibition.

But the Supreme Council of Antiquities has not always been above reproach. And criminality regularly plagues priceless objects from the time of the Pharaohs. It seems that someone is always trying to steal or counterfeit these antiquities.

The Associated Press reported in December 2004 that a gang of Egyptians that included three government archaeologists had been charged with stealing 57,000 antiquities and smuggling thousands of them abroad.

The investigation revealed that a box of valuable objects on its way to a dealer in Spain was discovered at the Cairo airport. A certificate from the Supreme Council of Antiquities identified the objects as modern replicas. But they were real.

On to San Francisco

After compiling the condition reports, the team starts packing the objects in wooden or metal crates. The objects are laid in compartments lined with special materials that control temperature and humidity.

The gigantic stone head of Akhenaten, Tut’s father, presents a special challenge. It literally weighs a ton and must be moved onto a truck with a special gantry crane, Lach said.

“It’s quite an ordeal to lift that piece,” he said.

What happens to the exhibits after they leave the museum is anybody’s guess. Lach would not say whether “decoy trucks” are used in the operation.

Presumably, all objects are subject to tracking with a Global Positioning System whether they move by truck, airplane or rail to San Francisco, where the show opens June 27 at the M.H. de Young Museum.

The details of how the collection gets from Dallas to San Francisco cannot be revealed, Lach said. The insurance value of the Tut collection – even the value of one minor piece – can’t be disclosed.

“All that would be too much to talk about,” he said.

Instead, Lach is effusive about what he calls “the human aspect of all this.”

The Egyptian team shopping at NorthPark Center with their local hosts, buying cowboy hats and boots; the informal celebration that will end the exhibition’s run in Dallas.

“There’s a lot of hugging and a great sense of accomplishment,” Lach said.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is scheduled to speak in Dallas today at The Women’s Museum.

The Democrat will share the stage with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison as part of the Women’s Museum Stories From the Top series.

The program, which will be moderated by WFAA-TV’s Gloria Campos, starts around 3 p.m.

The following events take place regularly at the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

Tranquil Tuesdays
Every Tuesday (excluding holidays)

Savor silence and awaken to the reality of the present moment. Join the Crow Collection every Tuesday for a stress-free hour of yoga and Zen Meditation in the tranquil setting of the museum.

Cocktail Hour Yoga
5:45 – 6:45 PM: Spend a stress-free hour in the tranquil setting of the museum with a yoga class presented by BKS Iyengar Studio of Dallas. FREE for Friends of the Crow Collection. $15 for non-members. No reservations required.

Zen in the City
6:15 – 7:15 PM (6:00 PM Orientation for Beginners): Savor silence and awaken to reality of the present moment.

Guidance will be offered on posture, breathing, and mindfulness. This series is sponsored by the Maria Kannon Zen Center. Please wear comfortable clothes. FREE. No reservations required.

Every Saturday
Tai Chi in the Gallery
9:00 – 10:30 AM

Simplify your Saturday and discover your inner chi with instructor Eng Khoo. Tai Chi, martial arts that has been practiced in China for centuries, is believed to improve the flow of internal energy within the body and enhance coordination. All levels of experience welcome.

Free. No reservations required.

To say that Dallas Love Field looks a bit dated would be an understatement. During it’s heyday in the early 1970’s, Love was the nation’s eighth-busiest airport with more than 70 gates and Boeing 747 jumbo jets rumbling down its runways.

But once Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport opened in 1974, Love became an aviation ghost town. It even briefly sported an ice rink inside an abandoned terminal.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. kept the airport alive and steadily grew, despite federal restrictions on how far its planes could fly from Love and the last of those restrictions will end in 2014 – the target date for Southwest and the city of Dallas to complete most of a $519 million capital improvement project set to break ground in June.

The work will replace the existing terminals with a new 20-gate concourse, expand baggage facilities and spruce up a facility that hasn’t had this much attention in decades.

The upgrades and future new routes are expected to nearly double Love Field’s passenger traffic from its current 4 million passengers a year to about 8 million annually, which would beat the 1973 peak of 6.6 million. That’s still far short of the roughly 27 million passengers that get on planes at D/FW Airport annually.

Under the plan, the existing terminals – and their combined 20 gates – will come down as a new T-shaped building rises. The first gates of the new concourse are expected to open in 2011. The biggest hang-up may be extensive work on the lower passenger drop-off road in front of the airport that will be completed in phases.

Still under consideration is a proposed underground people-mover from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Green Line to the new terminal. A feasibility study continues, and a report about its costs won’t come until the fall.

Southwest is managing the improvement project for the city and has the ability to spend up to $75 million to get it started while Dallas waits for the right time to sell bonds to finance most of the improvements. The bonds will be paid for by higher landing fees and gate rentals paid by Southwest and other airlines, and also by ticket fees called passenger facility charges.

Passengers now pay $3 each time they go through Love; that’s likely to rise, but the process to increase the fee is long and complicated.

Revenue from additional parking and concessions also will help fund the work. Love Field’s current 23,000 square feet of food and retail concession space will increase to more than 57,000 under the expansion, Mitchell said. That means more restaurant variety and new shops.

The airline landscape at Love won’t change much with the project. The airport can’t add any gates, and Southwest will end up with 16 of them. Houston-based Continental Airlines Inc. will keep two gates, and Fort Worth-based American Airlines Inc. will have two. The three airlines together have about 160 departures daily from Love Field.

Still to be seen is how popular Love will be when the law that restricts flights from the airport, the Wright Amendment, expires in just over five years, allowing airlines to fly anywhere from Love.

Southwest has already seen the passenger benefits from the end of Wright’s “through-ticket” restrictions at Love Field. Instead of having to buy two separate tickets to fly, passengers now can buy one-stop travel anywhere in the country on just one ticket, boosting Love Field traffic by nearly 1 million passengers a year.

Southwest and city officials will discuss the future of Love Field at a meeting today hosted by the North Dallas Chamber of Commerce at the Frontiers of Flight museum near the airport.

The Dallas Museum of Art’s literary and performing arts series Arts & Letters Live will launch its 2009 series on Friday, January 16 at 7:00 p.m. with best-selling author Stephanie Kallos. She will discuss her just-published novel, Sing Them Home, a deeply moving portrait of three grown siblings who have lived in the shadow of unresolved grief since their mother’s mysterious disappearance when she was swept up by a tornado. Reviewers have called the work “enthralling.”

Stephanie Kallos made her debut as a national best-selling author with her novel Broken for You (2004), which was selected by author Sue Monk Kidd as the Today Show Book Club pick. Kidd said, “Essentially it’s about taking what is broken, especially our lives, and reconfiguring them into mosaics of beauty and meaning.” This dazzling debut earned Kallos comparisons to John Irving, Margaret Atwood, and Carol Shields.

WHAT:
Stephanie Kallos, best-selling author of recently released novel Sing Them Home

WHEN:
Friday, January 16, 2009
7:00 p.m.

WHERE:
Horchow Auditorium
Dallas Museum of Art

COST:
FREE with general admission, but seating is limited; reservations strongly encouraged. For more information call 214-922-1818 or visit DallasMuseumofArt.org/ALL.

After losing a valuable piece of online real estate to enterprising cyber-squatters, the Bush presidential library has replanted its flag into that e-territory.

But the squatters – a North Carolina Web development company called Illuminati Karate – had the last laugh, making a huge profit off an embarrassing oversight by the GOP-connected company charged with overseeing the Web site for the George W. Bush Presidential Library, which will be built in Dallas.

Illuminati Karate paid less than $10 for the www.George WBushLibrary.com domain name – and sold it back for $35,000 to the library’s contracted Web developers, Yuma Solutions, who had accidentally let it expire. Illuminati Karate recognized what the library obviously knew as well – that anything else, like www.GWBPresidentialLibrary .com, would have been cumbersome and less than ideal.

“It worked out very well,” said George Huger, lead Web developer for Illuminati Karate in Raleigh, N.C.

Mark Mills, owner of Yuma Solutions, could not be reached for comment.

The Tallahassee, Fla.-based Yuma Solutions has a history with the Bush family, hosting Web sites for Mr. Bush’s 2000 campaign and for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s 1998 and 2002 campaigns. The company also sold $1.25 million in computer equipment, support and Web services to John McCain’s presidential campaign this year.

Records indicate that in March 2007, the George W. Bush Library Foundation, using Yuma Solutions as its contractor, bought the domain name from a private citizen for $3,000. Officials apparently overlooked the fact that the registration was set to expire within a few months.

Mr. Huger was trolling through a public list of names that were about to expire and saw the potential in the library name. He grabbed it.

Months later, in March 2008, Mr. Huger said he’d gotten some offers on it, but he declined to detail what they were or who was trying to buy it.

After The Dallas Morning News reported that the library had lost the domain, Mr. Mills contacted Illuminati Karate and asked to buy it back, Mr. Huger said.

At the time, a spokesman for the library foundation said officials were unaware that the name had been lost until a reporter contacted them about it.

“When the article came out, I think they wanted it back pretty badly,” said Mr. Huger this week.

Yuma finally reached a deal to buy the Web address back for $35,000, which the company, not the library foundation, apparently paid, Mr. Huger said.

Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Library Foundation, said Tuesday that he didn’t know about the Web site being lost and recovered. But, he said, he would know if the library had been stuck with a surprise $35,000 expenditure.

The site changed hands on April 17 and won’t expire until 2013.