Busy Barries
collect museum gigs
by
Steven Litt,
Plain Dealer Art Critic
The Plain Dealer
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Clevelanders
Dennis Barrie and Kathleen Coakley Barrie have landed impressive
assignments since launching a museum-consulting business in 2005.
"The biggie,"
as Barrie calls it, is the so-called "Museum Project" of the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. Barrie Projects,
the couple's firm, officially became part of the team creating content
and exhibits for the museum in July.
"Obviously,
I'm very excited," Barrie said Wednesday, discussing the project
publicly for the first time. "It's probably the premier job in the
country today because it deals with the movies and their impact
on our society, and there's probably very few if any art forms that
have had greater impact on the last century and the century we're
in, so it's a big deal."
In addition,
the Barries are working on plans for a $35 million Grammy museum
in Los Angeles and the proposed Mob Museum in Las Vegas.
The Mob Museum,
to be housed in a restored post office in downtown Las Vegas, is
a project of the Cleveland architecture firm Westlake Reed Leskosky,
for which Barrie works four days a week.
The assignment
to work on the Grammy museum also came through Westlake Reed Leskosky,
although the museum will be designed by the Los Angeles office of
the architecture firm RTKL.
In addition
to other assignments, the Barries are consulting through their own
firm for the Great Lakes Science Center and the Steamship William
G. Mather Museum in Cleveland and for University Circle Inc. They
recently completed the "Uptown Catalogue," a compendium of planning
concepts, for UCI.
Barrie gained
national fame in 1990 as director of the Contemporary Art Center
in Cincinnati when he was tried and acquitted on obscenity charges
for having exhibited homoerotic art by Robert Mapplethorpe as a
small part of a show on the photographer's work.
The trial was
commemorated in a made-for-TV film in which actor James Woods starred
as Barrie.
Barrie was the
inaugural director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
in Cleveland from 1993 to 1996. Coakley Barrie led the Committee
for Public Art, now Cleveland Public Art, from 1984 to 2000, when
she joined Malrite.
Litt is art
critic of The Plain Dealer.
To reach this
Plain Dealer columnist:
slitt@plaind.com,
216-999-4136
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