The de Montebello Years: Curators at the Met celebrate 3 decades of acquisitions

To celebrate Philippe de Montebello's 31 years as Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the curators of the Museum announced on June 2 plans to organize an exhibition of approximately 300 of the more than 84,000 works of art acquired during his tenure.

Among the highlights of the celebratory exhibition will be a standing Buddha in mottled red sandstone from India (Gupta period, 5th century).

Montebello – the eighth and longestserving Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art – announced in January his plans to retire at the end of the year.

The unique exhibition – ‘The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions,' -- which will be on view in The Tisch Galleries from October 24, 2008, through February 1, 2009 – will be a collaboration of the curators currently working in the Museum's 17 curatorial departments.

Special emphasis will be placed on works that were transformative to the Metropolitan Museum's collections by building on existing strengths and expanding into new areas of collecting.

"We wanted to create an exhibition to celebrate Philippe de Montebello's auspicious career by focusing on an area of spectacular achievement at the heart of the institution acquisitions," said Helen C. Evans, the exhibition's coordinator, who is the Metropolitan Museum's Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine Art.

"The breadth and greatness of the works on display in ‘The Philippe de Montebello Years' will tell multiple stories – of his stellar leadership of the Museum's more than 300 curators, conservators, scientists, librarians, and educators of the excellence of the collections in representing 5,000 years of human artistic achievement around the world; and of the Museum's vital evolution in terms of renovating, expanding, and reinstalling galleries, developing conservation and research facilities, and enhancing visitors' understanding and experiencing of art."

To read the full article, click here...
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.desitalk.com

Aviation AeroSvit Ukrainian Airlines celebrates 5 years New York - Kyiv service

AeroSvit Ukrainian Airlines celebrated the 5th anniversary of its trans atlantic flights from Kyiv to New York at The Helen Yarmak Penthouse Showroom in New York City on April 17.

The airline expanded its services to New York on March 30, 2003, creating its premier non-stop flight from Kyiv to New York's JFK airport. Since 2003, the flights and passengers coming from Kyiv to New York have increased by 150 percent, the press release stated. AeroSvit increased from its two weekly flights at inception to five weekly flights in 2008.

In today's global market, AeroSvit has nearly doubled the number of its worldwide destinations from 26 to over 50 from 2003. The airline's international destinations include Baku, Beijing, Cairo, Delhi, Dubai, Moscow, Salonika, Sofia, St. Petersburg, and Tel Aviv.

The airline has code-share partnerships with American and Delta airlines. In the United States, the airline's partnerships have helped increase the number of routes from 13 to 40 U.S. airports since 2003.

To read the full article, click here...
To read the ePaper, visit: http://www.desitalk.com