The Brooklyn Museum, New York City’s second largest art museum, is celebrating its 200th anniversary. And it’s being done in a characteristic way, a way that drives traditionalists crazy. We’re basically emphasizing and re-emphasizing what’s been going on for a long time, which is basically an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space surrounded by the body of a traditional museum.
And we’ll do just that with two big season-opening projects. One is a complete overhaul and reimagining of American art galleries, filtering centuries of art from both hemispheres through a post-Black Lives Matter lens. The second, less radical, brings together new community-based works by more than 200 contemporary artists who live and work in the borough.
Let me touch on a little history here. The museum was founded in 1823 as a circulating public library in what was then the village of Brooklyn, across the river and separate from rival Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the Brooklyn Institute began collecting natural history specimens and art, along with books. (Among the first works acquired was the painting “First Harvest in the Wilderness” (1855) by Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand, which was re-exhibited in an American gallery. )
In 1898, the current museum moved to the current home of McKim, Mead & White, and over time a cultural coup was born. It was one of the first American museums to introduce African art as art rather than as ethnology. In 1926, three years before MoMA existed, a nervous survey of European avant-garde modernist art was organized. This museum was also the first in Japan to establish an art school and a conservation laboratory.
Over time, it stirred controversy by giving space to art that was not welcome elsewhere. In 1980, when two other museums canceled touring Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, Brooklyn not only accepted it, but also purchased the installation for its collection. (This work is on permanent display at Brooklyn’s first art museum, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Feminist Art Center.)
And in 1999, when a touring exhibition called “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” was condemned as blasphemous by New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and attempted to be shut down, the museum, under director Arnold Lehman , just stood its ground, only to be pushed back by suing the city.
That defensive position has long been exposed to the threat of financial crisis. Just keeping the doors open and the exhibition rooms air-conditioned costs a lot of money, but museums don’t have those costs. Compared to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s attendance numbers, visitor attendance is always modest or small. Judging by what I can observe during my weekday visit, the borough’s rampant gentrification over the past few decades has not changed that.
From 2002’s Star Wars: The Magic of Myth to the more recent Giants: Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’ Art from the Dean Collection and Spike Lee: Creative Source (2023-24). Certain popular shows include: Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s extravagant fashion shows, it’s calculated to draw an audience. At the same time, Brooklyn’s Permanent Collection Galleries, meant to highlight its extraordinary holdings, are often mostly empty, sometimes even empty of art, left dark and untouched. . This place has the feel of an ongoing, improvised installation.
I’m not sure what could change this so much. However, under Lehman’s chairmanship, and now his successor, Anne Pasternak, there was an adjustment in the attitude of making the Metropolitan’s large-scale museum into a facility that was philosophically not typical of a Metropolitan University. It seems so. Racially and ethnically diverse demographics. This leads to a new reorganization of American art collections.
The exhibition, titled “Towards Joy: A New Framework for American Art,” is organized by Stephanie Sperling Williams, the museum’s curator of American art, and led by a team of staff from various departments. The opening galley wall text defines the joint outline as follows: “As a museum, we are a place that celebrates beauty. But what does one do when beautiful works of art are caught up in an ugly and often violent history?”
This is an important question, and one that our large old museums are only beginning to ask. And what’s the answer? Colonialism, global imperialism, genocide, enslavement, and environmental destruction are discussed here, but feminist thinking and black and environmental studies are needed to name and talk about these histories. Please refer to. This is a heavy self-challenge, and in reality, it can actually be awkward, and in this case it is. In sections of the show, interpretive gloss on objects seems to generate only negative news. At the same time, as the overarching phrase “towards joy” suggests, Brooklyn’s curators take seriously the beauty of visual and conceptual art, which they curate from Brooklyn’s extraordinary holdings. This is evident from the selection of objects.
The opening gallery, called “Trouble the Water,” is a model for subsequent galleries, with multicultural objects assembled in loose themes and accompanied by commentary pointing out hidden histories. The dynamic is embedded in the gallery title. The words are taken from a 19th century black spiritual called “Wade in the Water.” The song’s lyrics sound like an uplifting baptism, but they can also be read as a travel warning for runaway slaves.
Grouping objects also creates multivalent meanings. Water is depicted as a source of pure material power in Louis Remy Mignot’s 1866 painting of Niagara Falls, and as a source of spiritual energy in a 15th-century sculpture of the Aztec water god Tlaloc. I am. It is an element that can captivate us (as in Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1939 wild little painting “Hawaiian Fishhook – No. 1”) and calm us (as in Chester Higgins Jr.’s Boat photo of a man sleeping in Niger River), yet we abuse it mercilessly. In John Koch’s 1930s painting “East River,” factories spew smoke and the expanse of liquid separating Brooklyn and Manhattan appears like a sea of noxious sludge.
The gallery entitled ‘Radical Care’ reveals a relatively eclectic mix of images, although thematically it is far less coherent. This is about the conservation role of museums in art. Asher B. Durand, who announced the collection, appears. But the most enlightening content is the kiosk-like library of books that provides keys to the scholarship that shaped the reinstallation.
And in a section called “To Give Flowers” we get almost pure poetry. The phrase, in African-American terms, means to express due admiration, and the curators have earned it here. Against the backdrop of refreshing wallpaper based on textile designs by painter Lois Mailou Jones, you’ll find beauty centered around flowers one after another. Joseph Stella’s 1926 painting of the Virgin Mary. An early self-portrait by Emma Amos called “Flower Sniffer”. A small Mayan god that emerges from a cornflower.
Almost everything has a backstory. The Italian woman who appears in the portrait painted by Esther Frances (Francesca) Alexander, a self-taught foreign painter, continues to think of her lover who never returned, and as expected, a photo of him appears in her sewing basket. It was decorated. But best of all is the information provided by botanists and beekeepers on staff at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.
The large, tall, salon-like space that follows is devoted almost entirely to black-and-white works, a selection that contrasts with the obvious political overtones, some of which are held aloft, making it easy to parse. It’s difficult. Still, is it better to watch less for smoother viewing? No. And how wonderful it was to come across Chakaia Booker’s sculpture with thorns, William Edmonson’s angel, and Marsden Hartley’s painting of a seagull (another kind of angel).
Certain ideas are novel. Nudity exhibits are common in museums, but I can’t remember the last time I came across an exhibit that focused on the derriere. Also unusual, I think, is the examination of historical portraits seen through the lens of drug culture, as in the section called “Some Seats.” Here, American Swell paintings from 18 and 19 are hung low to the floor and displayed with printed labels. , Victoria von Black (also known as Perfect Poison), and Miz Cracker, who calls herself a New York City-based drag artist, were quick to spill the tea on them.
Such narrow-scope curatorial activities would likely find a natural audience in a more specialized environment. (Before coming to Brooklyn, Williams was a curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.) But in Brooklyn’s last major gallery, everything is open.
The installation titled “Witness” is entirely devoted to portraiture. And from the Pacific Northwest’s stunning Thunderbird transformation mask, to Thomas Eakins’ portrait of a pensive, pale Letitia Wilson Jordan, to Faith Ringgold’s fiery early self-portrait, to the once-installed Rikers Until the majestic painting “For a Woman’s House.” The island is also here. This gallery speaks the language of communities within difference that everyone can relate to and that cannot be found in other museums in the city.
Finally, I’d like to mention here, and one of my colleagues follows, that something of the same dynamic is being exhibited on the first floor of the museum, the second biennial “Brooklyn Artist Exhibition.” I would like to mention that it is invigorating. Sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum’s Artist Stewardship Committee (Jeffrey Gibson, Vic Muniz, Mickalen Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli) and coordinated by Sharon Matt Atkins, Associate Director of Fine Arts, the exhibition represents the museum’s long-standing This is the successor to the “Working in Brooklyn” exhibition series. It appeared regularly from 1980 to 2004.
Selection for the biennial exhibition began with an invitation issued by a committee and expanded to an open call. There were over 4,000 responses, and approximately 200 artists were ultimately selected. The only commonality between them is Brooklyn (applicants must have lived or worked in the borough in the past five years), but all other points, i.e. birthplace, ethnicity, race. In , this population is completely global. It’s the borough itself, and it’s like America defined by “Toward Joy.”
Toward Joy: A New Framework for American Art and the Brooklyn Artist Exhibition
Opens October 4th. Installations from the collection are on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, (718) 638-5000). Brooklynmuseum.org. The “Brooklyn Artist Exhibition” is on view there until January 26, 2025.
“Salon des Refuses 2024,” the second public group exhibition featuring 200 artists who were unable to participate in the “Brooklyn Artist Exhibition,” will be held at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in Red Hook until October 13th.・Held at a gallery. (718) 596-2506/www.bwac.org.
