Artful Dogs – The AKC Museum of the Dog

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296 – January/February, 2022

By Sarah Montague

A Collection Comes Home

101 Park Avenue, in Manhattan, which houses the AKC Museum of the Dog, is sleek and modern, but on the inside lies a rich material past. The Museum and the AKC’s archives were first housed at the Club’s old headquarters at 51 Madison Avenue, then relocated to St. Louis, and then returned to New York in February of 2019. The collection now takes up several floors, and the Club’s public display is on the first through the third floors.

“It’s a rather grand space,” says the Museum’s director, Alan Fausel. But it is also both gracious and playful—like dogs themselves. (For example, there’s a generous water bowl on the floor of the ladies room.)

It was designed by the global architecture and design firm Gensler, with projects ranging from hotels to college campuses to tech headquarters and retail destinations.

If you wander into the Museum casually, or even intentionally, you’ll get a pleasant eyeful. The rooms feel spacious, warm, and light-filled. But I was lucky enough to get a guided tour from Fausel, who formerly worked at Bonhams Fine Art Auctioneer’s New York office, where among other things he orchestrated an annual dog art auction coinciding with the Westminster Kennel Club show. He could always be counted on to pluck from the gallery’s crowded walls an emblematic picture with an anecdotal history. So I was not surprised to find him in his element at the helm of the AKC’s reimagined art space.

The Museum and the AKC’s holdings are actually comprised of two collections; an older collection which began to take shape shortly after 1884, the year the Club was founded; and the AKC Museum Collection, which was established in 1982, and contains both period and contemporary works—about 1700 items, according to Fausel.

Click here to read the complete article
296 – January/February, 2022

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Posted by AnthonyA on Feb 10 2022. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.