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Shelburne Museum Announces Plans for Center for Art and Education

Shelburne Museum Chairman James Pizzagalli announced plans for a new center for art and education at Shelburne Museum in Vermont, that will expand the museum’s educational programs, bring new and exciting exhibits to visitors and, for the first time, open the museum year-round.


Shelburne Museum Planned Center for Art and Education Ann Beha Architects

The announcement opens the public phase of the Campaign for Shelburne Museum, a $14 million capital campaign with the center for art and education as its centerpiece. To date the campaign has raised $10.75 million.

The 16,000-square-foot center will include galleries, an auditorium and classroom space and will accommodate a year-round calendar of exhibitions and programs for youth and adult audiences. Currently, the museum’s 39-building campus opens in mid-May and closes at the end of October.

“The center for art and education at Shelburne Museum enhances the museum’s educational and cultural missions. We envision significantly expanded opportunities for the community, for Vermont and for all museum visitors as a result of the new center,” Pizzagalli said.

Plans for the center for art and education include:
5,000 square feet of gallery space that will be used for temporary exhibitions. New galleries will provide for special exhibitions on a year-round basis, while Webb Gallery will be reprogrammed to exhibit the museum’s permanent collect of over 500 American paintings. Today, due to space limitations, only a small percentage of the paintings collection is on exhibit.

An auditorium with seating for 130, allowing the museum to offer lectures, presentations and symposia.

2,000 square feet of flexible classroom space designed to be programmed in a variety of ways for different activities and group sizes.

Design that meets the LEED certification standards of the United States Green Building Council including: use of local materials, such as stone, to reduce required transportation of materials and to support the local economy; wood products selected from sustainably harvested forests and energy efficient heating, cooling and lighting.

Ann Beha Architects, a Boston-based firm with extensive expertise in museum and sustainable building design, was selected to design the new building. Construction is tentatively planned to start next year with the center opening in 2013. The project, which is still in the planning stages, must move through both local and state permitting processes before construction begins.

About Shelburne Museum: Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont is one of North America’s finest, most diverse and unconventional museums of art, design and Americana. Over 150,000 works are exhibited in a remarkable setting of 39 exhibition buildings, 25 of which are historic and were relocated to the museum grounds. The museum’s collection includes works by the great Impressionists Claude Monet, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas as well as a prized collection of folk art including trade signs, weathervanes and quilts.

About Ann Beha Architects: Ann Beha Architects (www.annbeha.com) is engaged in both contemporary design and in the preservation and adaptive re-use of landmark buildings. Their particular focus is on the role of architecture in sensitive and complex historic settings. Based in Boston and practicing nationally, ABA has led planning and design projects for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut; Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire; Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Florida; National Women’s Hall of Fame in New York; and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in California.

SHELBURNE MUSEUM
6000 Shelburne Road
PO Box 10
Shelburne, VT
802-985-3346
shelburnemuseum.org

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