At 200 years young, the Brooklyn Museum, the second largest art museum in New York City, has begun celebrating the bicentennial of its founding. And it’s doing so in characteristic fashion — meaning in ways that make traditionalists crazy. It is emphatically re-emphasizing what it has, basically, long been: an institution with the heart and soul of an alternative space enclosed in the body of a traditional museum.
And it does so with two large-scale season-opening projects. One is a complete rehang and rethink of its American art galleries, filtering centuries of art from two hemispheres through a post-Black Lives Matter lens. The other, less radical, is a community-based roundup of new work by more than 200 contemporary artists living and working in the borough.
Let me wedge in some 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 independent from a rivalrous Manhattan. In the mid-19th century, the library, called the Brooklyn Institute, began collecting, along with books, natural history specimens and art. (Among the first pieces acquired was a painting, “The First Harvest in the Wilderness” (1855), by the Hudson River School artist Asher B. Durand. It’s in the American galleries rehang.)
In 1898, what is now the museum moved into a version of its present McKim, Mead & White home where, over time, it scored some cultural coups. It was among the first United States museum to present African art as art rather than as ethnology. It organized a nervy survey of avant-garde European modernist art in 1926, three years before MoMA existed. The museum was also one of the first in the country to have an art school, and to create a conservation lab.
As time went on it also courted controversy by giving space to art unwelcome elsewhere. In 1980, while two other museums backed out of a traveling tour of Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” Brooklyn not only took it in but acquired the installation for its collection. (It’s on permanent view in the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, another Brooklyn first.)
And in 1999, when the traveling show called “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” was excoriated as sacrilegious by New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who tried to shut it down, the museum, under its director Arnold Lehman, not only stood its ground but pushed back by suing the city.
That defended ground has long been subject to endangering fiscal tremors. Just to keep the doors open and the galleries climate-controlled costs a fortune, which the museum doesn’t have. Visitor foot traffic, compared with that of the Met, has always been modest to small. To judge by what you can observe on a midweek visit, the rampant gentrification of the borough over the past few decades has not altered that.
Certain popular shows, from “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth” in 2002, to the recent “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” and “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” (2023-24), are calculated to pull crowds, just as the Met’s fashion extravaganzas are doing. At the same time, Brooklyn’s permanent collection galleries, meant to highlight its extraordinary holdings are often all but empty, some empty even of art and left dark. The place has the feel of being an installation perpetually in progress, improvising as it goes.
I don’t know what could materially change this. But under Lehman’s directorship, and now that of his successor Anne Pasternak, there seems to have been an attitude adjustment, an effort to make a Met-size museum into a philosophically un-Met institution, one mindful of — indeed shaped by — the borough’s racial and ethnically diverse demographic. Which brings us to the new rehang of the American art collection.
Titled “Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art,” it’s organized by Stephanie Sparling Williams, the museum’s curator of American art, leading a team of personnel from various departments. A wall text in the opening galley defines their joint brief: “As an art museum, we are a site for celebrating beauty. But what does one do when beautiful artworks are entangled in ugly and often violent histories?”
It’s an important question, one that our big old museums are only beginning to ask. And the answer? Name those histories — colonialism, global imperialism, genocide, enslavement and environmental degradation are some addressed here — and draw on feminist and Black and environmental sea studies thinking to talk about them. It’s a weighty self-assignment, one which can —- and in this case sometimes does — turn gawky in practice. In sections of the show interpretive glosses on objects seem to yield only negative news. At the same time, as the overarching phrase “Toward Joy” implies, the Brooklyn curators take the beauties of art, visual and conceptual, seriously, evident in the choice of objects they’ve culled from Brooklyn’s extraordinary holdings.
The opening gallery, called “Trouble the Water,” sets the model for those that follow: a multicultural selection of objects laced together by a loose theme, and accompanied by interpretive commentary that points to hidden histories. The dynamic is embedded in the gallery title. The words are lifted from a 19th-century Black spiritual called “Wade in the Water.” The song’s lyrics sound upliftingly baptismal, but they also can be read to encode travel warnings for escaping slaves.
Groupings of objects also generate multivalent meanings: water as a source of sheer material power in Louis Rémy Mignot’s 1866 painting of Niagara Falls, and of spiritual energy in a 15th-century carved figure of the Aztec water god, Tlaloc. It’s an element that can enchant us (as it does in Georgia O’Keeffe’s wild little 1939 painting “Fishhook from Hawaii — No. 1 “) and soothe us (in Chester Higgins Jr.’s photograph of a man asleep on a boat on the Niger River), yet it’s one we relentlessly abuse. In John Koch’s 1930s painting “East River,” factories belch smoke, and the liquid expanse that separates Brooklyn from Manhattan looks like a sea of noxious sludge.
We find a comparably eclectic, though thematically far less cohesive, mix of images in the gallery labeled “Radical Care,” which takes the museum’s preservative role in art as subject. The collection-launching Asher B. Durand is here. But the most enlightening inclusion is a kiosk-like library of books that offer a key to the scholarship that shaped the reinstallation.
And we get pretty much pure poetry in a section called “To Give Flowers,” a phrase meaning, in African American vernacular, to express due praise, and the curators earn that here. Set against sprightly wallpaper based on a textile design by the painter Loïs Mailou Jones, we find one floral-intensive beauty after another: Joseph Stella’s 1926 painting of the Virgin Mary; an early self-portrait called “Flower Sniffer” by Emma Amos; a tiny Maya deity emerging from a maize blossom.
Almost everything comes with a back story. The Italian sitter in a portrait by the self-taught expat painter Esther Frances (Francesca) Alexander pined away for a lover who never returned and, sure enough, there’s his photo propped in her sewing basket. But best of all are informational tidbits by botanists and beekeepers from the staff of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
The big, high, salon-like space that follows is devoted almost entirely to works in black and white, a contrast with obvious political implications, though the selection, some of it hung high, is hard to parse. Still, for the sake of smoother looking would I rather have fewer things to see? No. And how great to come across a prickly Chakaia Booker sculpture, a William Edmondson angel, and a Marsden Hartley painting of a sea gull — a different kind of angel — in the mix.
Certain ideas are eccentric. Exhibitions of the nude figure are common enough in museums, though I can’t remember the last time I encountered one focused on derrières. Also rare, I would guess, are surveys of historical portraiture viewed through the lens of drag culture, as in the section called “Several Seats.’’ Here paintings of 18th and 19th American swells are hung low to the floor and, in printed labels, commentators like Victoria Von Blaque (also known as the Perfect Poison), and Miz Cracker, self-identified as a New York City-based drag artist, snappishly spill the tea on them.
Such narrow-gauge curatorial exercises probably find their natural audience in more specialized settings. (Before coming to Brooklyn, Williams was a curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.) But in the big final gallery in Brooklyn everything opens out.
The installation, titled “Witness,” is given over entirely to portraiture. And from a fantastic Thunderbird Transformation Mask from the Pacific Northwest, to Thomas Eakins’s likeness of pensive, pale Letitia Wilson Jordan, to a fiery early self-portrait by Faith Ringgold — and whose majestic painting “For the Women’s House,” once installed on Rikers Island, is here too — this gallery speaks a language of community-within-difference that anyone can relate to, and that you won’t find in any other museum in town.
Finally, I’ll mention here in passing — and one of my colleagues will follow up — that something like the same dynamic animates the second biennial offering, “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” on view on the museum’s first floor. Organized by a committee of Brooklyn Museum artist trustees — Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli — and coordinated by Sharon Matt Atkins, deputy director for art, it’s a successor to the museum’s longtime “Working in Brooklyn” exhibition series which appeared regularly between 1980-2004.
Selection for the biennial show began with invitations issued by the committee and expanded into an open call for submissions. There were more than 4,000 responses, and around 200 artists were finally picked. The only common link among them is Brooklyn — (the applicants had to have been living or working in the borough during the past five years), yet in all other ways — place of origin, ethnicity, race — the cohort is thoroughly global, like the borough itself, and like the America defined by “Toward Joy.”
Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art and The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition
Opening Oct. 4. The collection installation is on long-term view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, (718) 638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org. “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” is on view there through Jan. 26, 2025.
A second open-call group show, “Salon de Refuse 2024,” featuring 200 artists who didn’t make the “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” cut, is on view at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition Gallery in Red Hook, through Oct. 13. (718) 596-2506/www.bwac.org.
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