Museums all want to be popular with their local audiences, courting art fans with lectures, events, and activities. But what happens when a museum gets a little too popular? The Brooklyn Museum has been forced to alter its Target-sponsored free First Saturdays because the monthly parties are getting too crazy. In a Pleasantvillian touch, dancing has been outlawed.
Brooklyn Museum
Posted inNews
See GO Brooklyn’s Top 10 Artist Nominees
The Brooklyn Museum’s GO Brooklyn event netted an estimated 147,000 studio visits to 1,708 artists over the weekend of September 8 and 9. Over the art-packed weekend (which we documented here), studio explorers nominated their favorite artists, and now we have the top 10 nominees. Surprisingly, none of the final artists live in Williamsburg or Bushwick, and the majority work in traditional media.
Posted inArt
GO Bushwick, Gowanus and Greenpoint: Artapalooza
I approached the massive GO Brooklyn open studios event, which was organized by the Brooklyn Museum, with some hesitation. I was unsure about the sinking feeling I had that the Brooklyn Museum may be trying to co-opt the borough’s massive visual arts scene in order to give it a much needed PR boost. Why did Brooklyn’s premiere fine arts museum need to consolidate this DIY tradition into open studio sprawl? Adding to my trepidation was the notion of checking-in and voting that made the whole affair seem more competitive and trendy.
Posted inArt
How to Do GO Brooklyn: The Neighborhood Guide
This weekend, GO Brooklyn will see over a thousand Brooklyn artists opening their studios to the public. Here’s Hyperallergic’s guide to a few of the event’s highlights, organized by neighborhood.
Posted inNews
Brooklyn Museum Returns to Crowd Curating with “Go”
Last Friday the Brooklyn Museum announced plans for Go, a new crowd-curated exhibition happening this fall and winter. For those familiar with the museum’s work over the past few years, the use of crowd curating shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — in fact, if anything, it’s become something of a trend at the institution.
Posted inOpinion
A Sad Goodbye to Brooklyn Museum’s 1stfans Membership
LOS ANGELES — A few days ago, Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum announced that 1stfans, the museum world’s first socially networked membership, would be coming to a close after more than three years of great programming.
Posted inArt
The Guerrilla Girls Get Nostalgic
While a crowd of roughly 150 people sat and chatted in the Brooklyn Museum’s auditorium last Thursday night, waiting for the appearance of the Guerrilla Girls, Christina Aguilera played over the sound system. “What a girl wants, what a girl needs,” she sang — lines and a melody that came as something of a surprise throwback. What year was it? Why did I still know the words to this song? And shouldn’t we have been listening to Beyoncé?
Posted inArt
Opening Up the Museum to an Emerging Artist
The first view of Shura Chernozatonskaya’s work is on the soaring white wall of the Brooklyn Museum’s lobby, spanning over forty feet and high above viewer’s heads. “Domino” (2012) is a painting installation of thirty-three canvasses set-out in a recognizable game formation: a yellow-to-blue chain tic-tacking its way across the threshold to the galleries. Each canvas is marked with approximations of the traffic-light symbol with circles of red/amber/green applied, in glowing transparency, to grounds ranging from pale lemon to deep indigo. Graphically cheerful in tone, the work nonetheless sparks significant cognitive tension. The integration of two distinct pictorially communicative systems, “domino” and “traffic light,” here orchestrates a string of yes/no, stop/go associations in a reception space where viewers’ expectations are strongest. “Domino” is a youthful work. It suggests a brave execution — an exuberant, if harmoniously imperfect, immersion in color and play — and is a fitting symbol to Raw/Cooked, the Museum’s bold new exhibition series of emerging artists of which Chernozatonskaya is the featured third.
Posted inArt
Two Sculptors Wrestle with Emotions, Language and the Body
It’s not every day that a contemporary artist gets to show her work alongside that of a master. But from now through August 12, Rachel Kneebone is having her day.
Posted inArt
Always Here, Always Queer and Art History Is Starting to Get Used To It
While at the landmark exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Brooklyn Museum, I realized I had to start my review with a statement that will look simple and quite possibly stupid: Hide/Seek is more than David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire In My Belly.”
Posted inOpinion
Artist Protests Supposed Catholic Bashing at Brooklyn Museum
Oh, brother. Artist Scott LoBaido is “disgusted by the constant bashing of Catholicism” by a “publicly funded institute,” so he decided to haul his painting of a naked Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman and a toilet to said institution and filmed it! No word on his thoughts about the constant bashing of LGBT people by Catholicism.
Posted inOpinion
NY Catholic Group Wants Brooklyn Museum to Cut Wojnarowicz Video from Show
Here we go again. Almost a year after the controversy at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Catholic groups in New York have started to raise alarm over David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire In My Belly” (1986-7) that will appear in the Brooklyn version of Hide/Seek.
