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.
Brooklyn Museum
Posted inOpinion
David Wojnarowicz’s Journals Make His Private World Very Public
Just in time for National Coming Out Day last Tuesday and the November opening of the controversial Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Brooklyn Museum, Triple Canopy has published a selection of visual artist and writer David Wojnarowicz’s journals online. Giving readers a brief and fascinating look into Wojnarowicz’s life and thoughts, the publication of the journals follow Wojnarowicz’s imploring to turn the private into something public as a political tactic.
Posted inNews
Rare Egyptian Book of the Dead Goes on View at Brooklyn Museum Tomorrow, Sept 28
Following a three year conservation project, the final section of the rare, Egyptian Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sobekmose (c. 1539-1292 BCE) will go on long-term view at the Brooklyn Museum on September 28.
Posted inNews
Early Keith Haring Show Coming to Brooklyn
Keith Haring: 1978-1982, the first large-scale exhibition to explore the early career of one of the best-loved American artists of last century will be presented at the Brooklyn Museum from April 13 through August 5, 2012.
Posted inNews
Brooklyn Museum Nixes Street Art Show
The Brooklyn Museum has issued a press release stating that it will no longer be hosting LA MOCA’s Art in the Streets exhibition, which was scheduled to appear in Brooklyn next spring.
Posted inArt
Interview with Tipi Artist Bently Spang
The following is an interview with artist Bently Spang, whose work appears in the Brooklyn Museum’s current Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains exhibit. Through the interview, Spang explores ideas of Native American identity, cultural stereotypes and the difficulty of showing Native American spiritual objects in museum spaces. The Brooklyn Museum show makes progress, Spang says, but there remain problems to be solved.
Posted inOpinion
Wonderland Installation Live at Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum’s newly renovated Great Hall is filled with pirouetting abstract figures made of billowing cloth. This architectural ballet is Brooklyn architecture firm Situ Studio’s reOrder, an installation inspired by hoop skirts, but blown up to enormous proportions. reOrder is now on display at the museum, through January 15 2012.
Posted inArt
An Attempt to Shatter Native American Stereotypes in Brooklyn
A traditional 19th-century Sioux warrior shirt in the Brooklyn Museum’s current Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains exhibit is made from buckskin, decorated with green and red pigment, hair, feather, fiber and a white and red beaded bear claw motif. Like all Plains war shirts, it could only be worn by males after acts of bravery in battle.
Exhibited just a few feet away, Northern Cheyenne contemporary artist Bently Spang’s “War Shirt #3, The Great Divide” (2006) is made out of photographs, photographic film, sinew, velvet and found objects such as the compact disc pinned on the shirt’s center like a decorative medallion or amulet. Its arms are outstretched through a white plastic stand in the form of a “t” and two tiny white plastic toy horses flank either side of its base. Like the traditional Sioux shirt, Spang’s is now ensconced in a glass case but it has never been — nor will it ever be — worn.
Posted inOpinion
Native American Art’s Disputed Boundaries
Every so often an art review riles readers and critics enough to actually respond to it. That’s what happened after New York Times art critic Ken Johnson’s review of the Brooklyn Museum’s Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains exhibit was published a week and a half ago. Johnson is not shy about stating his assessment up front, leading with “You know there’s trouble when the first object you encounter in a museum exhibition looks as if it had been misplaced from the gift shop.” Johnson faults the museum for exhibiting “kitschy” contemporary Native American artists alongside the “outstanding” mostly 19th-century Plains objects that make up the majority of the exhibition.
Posted inArt
Alice in a Brooklyn Museum Wonderland
Situ Studio’s reOrder, a new project under construction at the Brooklyn Museum, looks like Alice in Wonderland, wandering among surreal spaces not quite of this world. The folding cloth and underlying structure of hoop skirts actually provided inspiration for the installation, Situ Studio partner Bradley Samuels tells me.
Posted inArt
Brooklyn Museum’s New Acquisition Shines Light on Unlikely 18th C Racial Revolutionary
The Brooklyn Museum has an extensive collection of Spanish Colonial painting, but the institution’s relatively new curator of European art Richard Aste knew the museum lacked the same depth in their British colonial works. Recently, Brooklyn’s premiere fine art institution announced the acquisition of a new work by Agostino Brunias, “Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape” (ca. 1764-1796), which will partially fill that gap but there is something else about the painting that makes it interesting to the contemporary viewer, namely its multicultural subjects.
Posted inNews
Brooklyn Museum Posts Archive of 1st Fans Twitter Art
The Brooklyn Museum has posted an archive of its 1st Fans Twitter art. The Twitter Art Feed was a benefit for @brooklynmuseum‘s 1stfans (formerly @1stfans) members from December 2008 to December 2010. The feed featured tweets by contemporary artists every month, including Joseph Kosuth, Tracey Moffatt, Mike Montiero, Duke Riley, and names familiar to social media art fans, such as An Xiao, Man Bartlett, Lauren McCarthy, Nina Meledandri, and Joanie San Chirico.
