First look at the MFA's new entrance, inside and out

Specifically, that would be the north entrance, which faces the Fenway and has been shuttered since before the Celtics won their last championship. This morning I joined a few hundred other journalists, museum employees, rich people museum patrons and assorted hangers-on at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for the opening of the State Street Corporation Fenway Entrance and the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Visitor Center, emceed by Malcolm Rogers, the Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum. It's a naming-rights mouthful, true. But the big-bucks donors are doing something good here.

The facilities are part of the ongoing $500 million Building the New MFA project, which was going on in a serious way just around the corner, on the east side of the museum, where the I-beams for the new American Wing are in place. A couple of cranes from that part of the project symbolically towered over the scene as State Street President Jay Hooley, Rogers and Mayor Tom Menino took to the mic to laud the redesigned and expanded Fenway entrance, complete with reflecting pools, fountains and tons of new Deer Isle granite. Naming rights came with a cool $10 million gift from State Street.

Important note: Sunday June 22 is a State Street-sponsored free Community Day at the MFA, giving you a chance to check out the new entrance and the exhibits inside from 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. without spending a dime. Did I mention that it's free? After the ribbon-cutting, I strolled around the new "Winslow Homer: American Scenes" collection, checked in with "Great Company: Portraits By European Masters," and then begged a press pass to "El Greco To Velazquez" in the West Wing. It's all worth seeing - the El Greco is free on Sunday, too - and if I get some time before then I'll post a few tips here.

My favorite part of the Fenway project is "Day and Night," a two-part sculpture by Antonio Lopez Garcia, which has been outside the Huntington doors for a few months and now flanks the re-opened Fenway entrance. Even Rogers refers to the sculpture as "the giant baby heads," which sounds hilarious when he says it in that plummy accent of his. The sculpture adds an odd, arty, irreverent tone to the scene, which helps set off the forbidding monumentality of that face of the museum, with its 22 Ionic columns, each 36 feet tall. The baby heads are only 8 feet tall, and weigh about a ton and a half each, but they make a dramatically wacky statement in their present position. Kudos to Gail and Ernest von Metzsch for the gift.

There's still some shoehorning here, a shotgun marriage of old and new, in the Fenway Entrance. To reach the actual doors, one slides between the columns feeling a bit like a coin in a slot, and once inside there's a sharp right and a left to negotiate. Architects in the early 20th century were more beholden to grand forms and less concerned with flow than their counterparts today. When the American Wing and other parts of the big project are finished - allegedly in late 2010 - it will be interesting to see if it all fits together as smoothly as it does in the artist renderings and 3-D videos.

Flow will be of great importance here eventually. Late this year the Huntington Avenue entrance will close for a few months of renovations; after it reopens in 2009, the West Wing entrance - now the de facto main entry - will be used only for tour and school groups. So most folks will be coming in through the Fenway entrance.

After those turns, you'll eventually reach the Scharf Visitor Center, which has a cool, modern, Star Trekky feel to it, to the point where it looks like it belongs at the ICA:

Although a few union guys wandered over for the ribbon cutting, construction continues on the American Wing:

I will post the following picture just in case anyone from OSHA reads HubArts. Because, um, they seem to have some unusual safety policies on the American Wing construction site:

Comments

[Doodlebean]

It's hard to tell from the post on the front page that the free day was Sunday, June 22nd (there's just a time for your post, not the date that I could find).

You may want to add a note that the free day has gone by.

Otherwise, thanks for covering the opening!

[JB]

Done. Good point!

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[Mary Garcia]

Great stuff! Keep it up!