Big Changes At Yale Art Gallery

NEW HAVEN — Beginning this summer, Yale University Art Gallery’s landmark Louis I. Kahn building will undergo major renovation, the first since its construction 50 years ago. The project will incorporate the Kahn building as well as The McNeil Lecture Hall and the museum’s sculpture garden.

Because of construction, the gallery’s main entrance will move from Chapel Street at York to the corner of Chapel Street at High School. Signs will be posted.

During the estimated two-year period of restoration and renewal, the adjoining Egerton Swartwout building will become the center of the museum’s activities. The recently refurbished American galleries, housing one of the world’s finest collections of American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts, will remain open and a selection of artworks from the gallery’s other departments – including more than 200 artworks from the African, Asian, early European, modern and contemporary, and pre-Columbian collections – will be on view in the sculpture hall and adjoining gallery. A comprehensive group of objects from the ancient art collection, along with large European sculptures, will be installed in the sculpture hall in September.

All exhibitions and many of the art gallery’s programs will, for the next two years, be in the Swartwout Building.

The museum store will relocate from the entrance of the Kahn building to the entrance of the Swartwout building.

The department of prints, drawings and photographs will move to the second floor of the Swartwout Building and will be accessible, by appointment only, after June 1.

On view until July 6 is “Homer To Hopper: Masterpieces of American Watercolor.” The exhibition presents pieces drawn from YUAG’s collection of American watercolors. It includes 25 works ranging from the swiftly noted idea to the color-saturated sheet, from mystical empathy with nature to realistic transcriptions of place by such artists as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Maurice Prendergast, Charles Demuth, Charles Burchfield, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe, among others.

Yale University Art Gallery can be contacted at 203-432-0600 or www.yale.edu/ArtGallery.