In recent months, as construction dust flew around the Museum of Design Atlanta’s storefront space on Peachtree Street in Midtown, not coincidentally across the road from the High Museum of Art, folks peeked inside wondering what the place was going to be.
Informed that it was the future home of Atlanta’s design museum, the curious almost all responded, “I didn’t even know we had one.”
Yes, we do — since 2003, in fact, when the Atlanta International Museum of Art & Design metamorphosed into MODA, dropping the global art aspect that had been its main thrust to focus on design. It became the only museum in the Southeast dedicated exclusively to the study and exhibition of that topic.
MODA organized or hosted a steady stream of significant exhibits, on everything from the modernist architecture of Hungarian-born Marcel Breuer to the animation of Atlanta-based Cartoon Network, that drew praise from critics and in-the-know patrons but a paltry trickle of visitors.
When she switched from board member to executive director three years ago, Brenda Galina said it “took, like, one second” for her to determine that the museum’s hard-to-find location — with gallery space on two floors of Peachtree Center’s Marquis Two tower downtown (next to the Marriott Marquis hotel) — was a serious issue.
“We were down there really dying, and I said, ‘OK, either we step this up or we close the museum,’” Galina recalled. “You can’t keep holding on when nobody knows you’re here.”
Well, with its opening today on Atlanta’s most famous thoroughfare, across the street from the Woodruff Arts Center and near other Midtown cultural powers, MODA will be suddenly hard to miss. It hopes to transform from a barely hanging in there shoestring entity into an essential institution that not only represents, but rallies, the city’s growing force of design professionals.
“A rebirth or renaissance” is how MODA board President Bruce McEvoy, an architect and associate principal of Perkins+Will, refers to the museum’s new post at Peachtree and 16th streets.
“This is the exact type of location we’d always talked about,” he said. “Not only are we in the cultural corridor of Atlanta, but we also have this fantastic pedestrian traffic and storefront presence now, which was always a dream of the museum.”
McEvoy and Perkins+Will — which had purchased the six-story building for its 220-person Atlanta office, renovated its top four floors and moved in late last year — had more than a little to do with realizing that dream.
Perkins+Will not only contributed the design of the museum space, converting a street-level surface parking lot underneath the Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library’s Peachtree branch (which remains), but ponied up $1.5 million for the transformation.
MODA will operate rent free for three years and then will pay a graduating fee for several more years before its lease rises to market rate. As it gets on firmer footing, it’s expected to begin to pay back part of the $1.5 million, too.
“They have given us a grace period to get ourselves together, and I think that’s absolutely right,” Galina said. “If we can’t get ourselves together by year four, we shouldn’t be here.”
The executive director believes MODA can eclipse the 10,000 annual attendance downtown in the first month in Midtown.
She takes as a positive sign that a “$9 for Design” promotion, launched last year after the move was announced, brought in 450 new members, more than doubling the existing ranks of annual supporters.
McEvoy is optimistic that additional foundation and private funding will follow. “When the community sees the shows we bring to the city and the gift that MODA is providing, I don’t think there will be any question about the level of support and commitment,” he said. “We’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘We want to see you on your feet, we want to see you prove yourself and then, absolutely, we’re with you.’”
Perkins+Will decided it wanted to be literally with MODA in Midtown after McEvoy proposed the idea to firm president Phil Harrison, another design museum board member. The architecture firm had been in the neighborhood for more than three decades, occupying a converted Midtown house that had been expanded several times and then leasing an additional floor in the Earthlink headquarters across Peachtree.
The architects knew that the street-level parking beneath the building and the horseshoe-shaped drop-off driveway, both favoring commuters over life on the sidewalk, had to go.
“It’s not what we’re about as a firm,” McEvoy said. The general idea was to replace it with something “that could become an asset to the city.”
Different prospects were pondered before McEvoy proposed a new home for MODA, a notion Harrison quickly embraced.
Giving MODA a new lease on life was “walking the talk,” McEvoy said. “We’re not just telling our clients to [give to the community]. We’re doing it first.”
Atlanta attorney Robert Edge, who heads the Loridans Foundation, which has granted MODA prior operating support, gives kudos to the architecture firm. While Edge said he can’t predict the museum’s future support, he added, “It is a good thing to have a resource like MODA available as part of our community’s cultural offerings. Its chances of survival should increase markedly with its move to a nice facility in the vicinity of the High.”
The 9,000-square-foot space is bright and open, spacious and sleek, emphasizing exposed concrete, energy efficiency and tall ceilings — 12 feet high in the first gallery and, down a wide central corridor, 25 feet in a viewing space built out from the back of the building. Floated ceilings, or “clouds,” hide lighting, audio and the video projection equipment that will help interpret exhibits and make them less static.
With its doubled gallery space, MODA, which does not have a permanent collection, should no longer have to turn away major touring shows. The museum “should give any curator coming down the road the flexibility to tell whatever story they’d like to tell,” McEvoy said, “or set up whatever conversation they’d like to set up.”
The inaugural show is “Passione Italiana: Design of the Italian Motorcycle,” featuring 11 masterworks of Italian motorcycle design — by makers including MV Agusta, Ducati, Bimota and Moto Morini — loaned from the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum in Leeds, Ala., outside Birmingham. The show will explore the ingenuity and technological advancement expressed in Italian motorbike design, with interpretive stations placing that in the larger context of fashion, industrial and furniture design.
Galina said future exhibits will approach design from the broadest definition. “I want to [bring] things new to Atlanta as much as possible. Honestly, anything is design. The crazier the idea, the better we like it.”
MODA’s across-the-street neighbor, the High Museum, is also quite keen on design. As part of its ongoing collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, the High will open the 150-piece show “Modern by Design” on June 4, focusing on MoMA’s 20th century design collection-building and taste-making. In conjunction with that exhibit, the High will present works by seven artists represented in its own 2,200-piece decorative arts and design collection.
MODA officials have met with Woodruff Arts Center President and CEO Joseph Bankoff and High Director Michael Shapiro about the possibility of shared programming and audiences, and came away encouraged.
“When the opportunity arises, hopefully we’ll be able to work together,” Galina said.
McEvoy believes the two institutions can be a “catalyst” to raise appreciation in Atlanta for all sorts of design — graphic design, fashion, architecture, interior design, industrial design and more.
“If Atlanta is going to be the city we all know it can be, culturally, I think it has to catch up with some of its competitors,” he said. “With MODA having its rebirth, it can join the ranks of some of these great Atlanta institutions like the High that really contribute to the city’s momentum.”
The fact is that MODA, the little design museum that barely had a present, now has designs on a brighter future.
