Meet Another Charming Lady

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Yekaterina Barbash

All of us were a little sad to see “Bird Lady” go, even if it is only for a brief period of time, but we were able to take this opportunity to conserve another female figurine and introduce her to you.

Figurine of Woman

Figurine of Woman, ca. 3650 B.C.E. - 3300 B.C.E. Terracotta, painted, 8 3/4 x 1 9/16 x 2 in. (22.2 x 3.9 x 5.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 07.447.501.

Like our “Bird Lady,” the “Female Figure with Stump Arms” was also made five and a half thousand years ago, and comes from a nearby tomb in Ma’mariya. Although this female figure is missing her head, she is just as delicate and charming as the better known “Bird Lady.” You may notice that her arms are stubbed rather than upraised. She’s an example of another type of figurine from the site of Ma’mariya that have these particular abbreviated “stub-arms.”

You’ll find her in our Egypt Reborn galleries in May, and she will remain on view with her more complete partner, the “Bird Lady,” when she returns from her venture across the river in August.

Posted in Egyptian Art, Newly on View | Leave a comment

Santi Moix

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Eugenie Tsai

Perched high on a lift in the fourth floor contemporary galleries, Brooklyn-based artist Santi Moix is drawing directly on the wall with charcoal to create a striking piece entitled Huckleberry Finn, “I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.” A lush tree resembling a fish is already visible. The final drawing will depict Huck Finn sitting on a hammock strung between two trees.

Santi Moix

Brooklyn-based artist Santi Moix is drawing directly on the wall with charcoal to create a striking piece entitled Huckleberry Finn, "I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway."

Once Moix completes the wall drawing, art handlers will hang colorful Moix’s watercolor, Fishing Day (Huck and Tom) directly over it. This piece was recently acquired by the museum and is being presented here for the first time with the addition of the wall drawing. Both are part of a series that was inspired by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s novel about a boy’s coming of age on the Mississippi River in the mid-nineteenth century.

Photos and video are being posted to Flickr as Santi continues to work.

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Connecting Cultures Through Books!

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Deirdre Lawrence

The presence of three books in the new Connecting Cultures installation  gives me a welcome opportunity to talk about these key works that are in the Library collection. This is the first of a series of blogs that will discuss the books on view as well as other ways information has been culled from the Libraries and Archives to enhance this installation.

Art books have an advantage over other books since they offer many components that have an intrinsic quality. Hand colored images, good paper quality, innovative typography, overall design, types of binding—these are all elements that make art books a physical experience ranging from touching, holding, reading, smelling and of course understanding the message that the author intends. We are very fortunate to have many wonderful examples of the art book in the Museum Libraries and to have the opportunity to showcase some of these in exhibitions both held inside and outside the Museum walls.

Three great examples of the art book—ranging in dates from 1692 to 2011—are on view in Connecting Cultures and they each offer an opportunity for us to think about what the physical book offers in terms of textual and visual information (credible or not). Let’s start in 1692 with the Atlas nouveau : contenant toutes les parties du monde … (Paris: Chez Hubert Iaillot …,1692).

Sanson Atlas Table of Contents

Atlas nouveau : contenant toutes les parties du monde ou sont exactement remarquès les empires, monarchies, royaumes, estats, republiques & peuples qui sy trouuent á present.

Known as the father of French cartography, Nicolas Sanson (1600-1667), was the patriarch of a famous mapmaking family who dominated map publishing in the seventeenth century. Hubert Jaillot, another most important French cartographer had a partnership with the Sanson family and re-published and re-engraved many of their maps. This rare atlas had been in the collection of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library Association founded in 1823 and the first free and circulating library in Brooklyn. The Library was the nucleus of the Brooklyn Museum and this book is an excellent example of the original institutional vision as it documents a need to know about the world and the desire to share information. This book documents a view of the world in 1692 through French eyes and is a powerful example of how information has been created and circulated over time.

Sanson Map

Sanson map is used as background imagery on one of the walls in Connecting Cultures.

In addition to being on view in a specially designed low light case, one of the maps has been reproduced on the gallery wall. This is one of many examples of how the Libraries and Archives add to the life of exhibitions here at the Brooklyn Museum!

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A Sunset for 1stfans

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Shelley Bernstein

It’s been roughly three and half years since Will Cary and I started the 1stfans Membership program at the Museum; come July, the program will come to a close with a sunset—quite literally.

Sunset from the Brooklyn Museum roof.

How do you end a program with personal ties? You throw a party and, in the case of 1stfans, that will be our annual rooftop ice cream social where we watch the sun go down; this was the scene at last year's event.

The program was announced in December of 2008 and was created for the Brooklyn Museum visitor who wanted something a little different than the traditional Membership structure.  That very idea was the program’s greatest strength, but also its biggest weakness.

1stfans allowed us to see that most individuals looking to truly support us are interested in a deeper and more personal connection with the Museum and, often, people are looking for a more social experience within the structure of events and their relationship with the institution.  It was the deep engagement of the program that was incredibly successful, but 1stfans was its own entity that was never fully integrated into the Membership structure. This separation made it difficult to gain awareness for the program and, as such, the growth rate stalled.  Most importantly, this separation made it difficult to move 1stfans up the membership ladder—something that’s incredibly important in development and the lifecycle of membership growth. Simply put the program was too separate for its own good; keeping the program in a silo was the primary reason the program couldn’t succeed.  The challenge for us moving forward will be to take what we learned about deep engagement and create new programs that both scale well and will be more a part of the institution as a whole—we’ve got some news on that coming next week.

I’ve already written a lot about our use of various social platforms to run 1stfans.  If you remember, we found utilizing Facebook and Twitter to be overwhelmingly time consuming and shifted to Meetup.com in late 2010. The shift to Meetup made the administration of the program much easier for us and solved many issues, but in the end the choice of platform didn’t matter much outside of the administration of it.  The growth rate was pretty much consistent from one platform to the other and the personal nature of the program remained as successful no matter which site we used.  The age old finding that different people are on different platforms rang true—as we moved from one setup to the other, we saw a lot of new faces while many from the original disappeared. Moving platforms did shift the membership base, but the personal nature remained the same and the growth rate almost parallel.

At conferences, people always ask me how do you end something like this when you’ve got all these personal relationships and strong ties.  My response has always been, “with transparency…and then you throw a heck of a party.”  As 1stfans comes to a close, we’ve written each Member personally and our final event will be the ice cream social on the roof where we gather to watch the sunset from one of the best views in the borough.  This event is the party that 1stfans look forward to all year and we’ll be sunsetting the program with a literal sunset.

For those of you who have supported the Museum by becoming 1stfans at one point in our program’s history, we can’t thank you enough; your support over the years humbles me personally.  So many of you have become friends and are faces that I’ve come to look forward to seeing at our monthly meetups.  I’m looking forward to sharing the roof with you one last time.

Posted in 1stfans, Membership, Technology | 4 Comments

Where is our Bird Lady?

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Yekaterina Barbash

Many of you may be wondering where our beloved Female Figurine, nicknamed the “Bird Lady” is. One of the stars of our Egyptian collection, she normally greets visitors to the Egyptian Galleries’ Predynastic section and she’s the signature image for the second phase of our reinstallation, which opened in 2003. For this reason and because she is the most complete example of this type of figurine, the “Bird Lady” traditionally does not travel on loan to other institutions for special exhibitions, but she has taken her first voyage out of the Brooklyn Museum to be part of The Dawn of Egyptian Art, a very exciting exhibition on Predynastic art at the Metropolitan Museum.

07.447.505

Female Figure, ca. 3500-3400 B.C.E. Terracotta, painted, 11 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. (29.2 x 14 x 5.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 07.447.505

In addition to being stunningly beautiful and graceful, our “Bird Lady” is one of the most ancient objects in the Museum. She was excavated by Henri de Morgan in 1907 from Tomb 2 at the site of Ma’mariya in Egypt, which dates to about 5,500 years ago. Female Figurines of this type are extremely rare and this is the best preserved example. That is why we very much wanted her to be part of The Dawn of Egyptian Art exhibition.

The Dawn of Egyptian Art

The Dawn of Egyptian Art is on view at the Met from April 10 to August 5, 2012.

Several other important objects from the Predynastic (circa 4400-3100 B.C.E.) and Old Kingdom (circa 2675-2170 B.C.E.) sections of Egypt Reborn accompanied our Bird Lady across the river, so be on the lookout for Brooklyn Museum objects just across the way.

Posted in Egyptian Art | 1 Comment

The Big Picture(s)

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Matthew Yokobosky

As Kevin mentioned in his last post, Connecting Cultures is presented in thematic sections: Places, People, and Things, in addition to an Introductory Center. Since the artwork was curated cross-collection, the question for me as a designer was how to visually unify artworks that spanned 5 millenia, and were products of so many unique artistic practices from around the world.

The easy solution would have been to choose one color for each section, but since the room is 24-feet high, and most of the art is under 4-feet tall, that would have left a lot of empty visual space, even after double-hanging. And so I began to explore the idea of using over-sized murals as backgrounds, and asking myself questions like, “what is something visual that connects all of these works together?” Immediate answers for the place section for example would be to use the weather or landscape. I even thought about things like seismographs or lightning, which are universal experiences. Then, I moved to think about what structures, or frameworks, could hold each group together. I began to think map, and then met with the Museum’s librarian Deirdre Lawrence who showed me our 1680 Sanson Atlas, and its beautiful world map. Taken to greyscale, and then with a white-to-transparent overlay, the Sanson map clearly indicated Place and gave the artwork installed on top of it an instant cohesion; the greyscale then allowed the artworks’ color to pop forward.

Installation of Map

One of the first things you'll notice upon entry are the gigantic murals that we've installed on the walls as background images, each one relates to the themes we are highlighting. Here, a world map from the 1680 Sanson Atlas is getting installed in the "Place" section.

I then extended this idea of structure and greyscale to the other sections. One common framework of all people is the skeletal system, and so I worked with a skeleton drawing by Daniel Hungtinton from our American collection. Skeletons and anatomy also being one of the first subjects you draw as an art student. For Things, I met with the planning department, and paged through decades of old blueprints produced for the Museum. A drawing of one of the Museum’s staircases from 1954 by Brown, Lawford & Forbes, became the background for a display of historical and contemporary mirrors.

Egyptian Eye

The Egyptian eye that you see upon entry is just a mere 2.5 inches in real life, but has been digitally captured and rendered in hi-definition. Enlarged to 19' wide x 22' tall, its 1000% enlargement makes the statement, "look."

And last, was the question of what to use as an “entrance” for an installation about new ways of looking at out collection. Our common structure for looking is the eye, and in our Egyptian collection we have a life-size eye made 3,500 years ago, from Obsidian, limestone and blue glass. This 2 1/4″ eye was photographed in HD by Karl Rudisill from Duggal, in 6 parts, re-assembled into an 18GB file, and then enlarged to 19′ wide at 1,000% enlargment, without pixellation. A miracle of photography.

Together, these monumental murals form a dramatic set of indicators that provides unity for all of the places, people and things that artists in our Permanent Collection, have created as records of our amazing world . . . A world in Brooklyn.

Posted in Design, Newly on View | Tagged | 1 Comment

Say Hello

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Kevin Stayton

Yesterday, Arnold Lehman, our Director, initiated a new initiative that coincides with the opening of the installation Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn. He was the first Brooklyn Museum staff member to occupy a desk in the installation in order to provide the visitor with a human connection to the Museum within the context of this introductory gallery.

Arnold Lehman at the Connecting Cultures Desk

Director Arnold Lehman greets visitors at the staff desk in Connecting Cultures. Each staff member at the Museum will act as a "connector" at the desk for two hour shifts once every two months. When you come visit us, you'll meet a different person each time and be able to give us your feedback about the installation and your visit with us.

At this desk, visitors will have the opportunity to meet diverse Museum staff and to interact with them about many different aspects of the Brooklyn Museum. Whether the conversation is as simple as getting directions to the cafe or as complex as discussing favorite works of art in the collection, the point is to provide a human connection between the visitor and the Brooklyn Museum. The conversation goes both ways. Not only can the visitor learn about the Museum, but the staff members, or “connectors,” can learn what it is the public needs to know, and what they are thinking about, so that we can better tailor what we provide to meet those needs.

Arnold reports that he had a great time during his term as a “connector.” Yesterday was a lively day at the Brooklyn Museum, and he talked to visitors from around the country and around the world. I happened to have a group of visitors from another American museum for a tour in the afternoon, and they were impressed to find our Director greeting visitors in the galleries, and they took full advantage of the opportunity to learn more about the institution. They went away astonished at the friendly and open spirit of the Brooklyn Museum.

Yesterday was a trial run for this program. It begins in earnest on Wednesday, May 2, when Brooklyn Museum staff “connectors” will rotate shifts at the desk in Connecting Cultures. You never know who you will meet, so come for a visit. I hope to see you there!

Posted in Newly on View | Tagged | 1 Comment

Vetting Wikipedia for WikiLink

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Edward Bleiberg

In Shelley’s previous post, she announced the installation of QR codes installed in exhibitions that lead visitors to Wikipedia articles for further information. These QR codes are now found in Egypt Reborn and the Hagop Kevorkian Gallery of Ancient Near Eastern Art, both on the third floor of the Museum.

As a curator I have always wanted our visitors to have access to more information about the collection than is usually available. I’ve long been frustrated that the 100-word label provides only the briefest introduction to an object. So when Shelley suggested that there was a way to bring in-depth information into the gallery for those who want it, I was happy to help find appropriate material. For example, the code on the label for the Museum’s statue of Senwosret III will take you to an article about the king’s reign. There you will find information on his building projects, his appointment of his son as co-regent—a sort of co-king-in-training—and his pyramid. All of this information is drawn from the latest scientific studies of the reign. The QR code with the faience shabti called “The Lady Sati” leads you to an article describing the process of making this material drawn from a basic Egyptology source—Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw’s Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology.

Senwosret III

Senwosret III, on view in Egypt Reborn (now with QR code), was one of the most powerful kings of the Twelfth Dynasty.

All of the articles linked to the Museum’s objects have been vetted by curators. When we read an article, we could see from the footnotes whether or not it was based on standard interpretations by professional, scientific scholars. Ancient Egyptian art is the object of interest for both scientific scholars and a wide variety of other researchers using non-scientific means. The Museum adheres to scientific standards, so curators insured that all the linked articles are part of our interpretive tradition.

Senwosret III Wikipedia

QR code in the gallery links to Senwosret III's Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia’s reputation with scholars and teachers is a mixed bag. Many teachers forbid its use because students are not always ready to read the articles found there critically. I was also wary about linking the Museum’s objects to a source that varies greatly in quality. But with proper vetting, Wikipedia offers additional background about the Museum’s objects based on the best information. I hope that this experiment with QR codes will help enhance the visitor’s experience in visiting the Egyptian and Ancient Near East collections.

Posted in Egyptian Art, Technology | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

WikiLink (QR Redux)

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Shelley Bernstein

You may remember my blog post a while back, QR in the New Year?  In it, I talked about our QR code testing and reported on some rather alarming #fails that we were seeing like five to ten fold drops in traffic.  Never one to give up on a problem, this comment from Lori Phillips sparked my interest. I took a look at the stats around the Indy Children’s Museum project and was pretty impressed.

I had to wonder if the reason QR was getting good take up in Indy was its pairing with Wikipedia.  In our own experiments with putting Wikipedia in the galleries, we’ve seen a great deal of success.  You may remember WikiPop: the Wikipedia resource for Seductive Subversion?  As I reported in a subsequent post, WikiPop, was one of our most popular in-gallery interactives to date with 1/3 visitors to the exhibition spending ten minutes at a time looking at approximately 11 articles.  After all, we all know the power of Wikipedia’s statistics—in just a month, Wikipedia sees an extraordinary amount of traffic…482 million unique visitors, 18.1 billion pageviews.  Simply put, Wikipedia is a well-used resource and it’s likely something that visitors find incredibly familiar because of the daily presence in their lives. What we know of QR is almost the opposite.  QR is dominated by technical frustration, marketing interests, low scan rates and user confusion.  Could Wikipedia get visitors over QR code hump of technical hurdles and poor user experience?

WikiLink

WikiLink installed in Connecting Cultures on Coffin in the Form of a Nike Sneaker.

Today we embark on a new trial project called WikiLink that pairs Wikipedia articles with QR codes on objects in two of our galleries—the new Connecting Cultures exhibition and the Egyptian and Near East galleries.  With WikiLink, curators have selected Wikipedia articles that are relevant to certain works of art and may be helpful to visitors as extended information.  After scanning a few codes, visitors are surveyed about the project on their mobile devices.

My hope is that by leveraging the most accessible platform for information (Wikipedia) that we see QR code use increase, but why do we care about this?  Well, as frankly as I can put this, we can spend a lot of time and money devising all the fancy location-aware apps we can muster, but the fact remains that QR is an incredibly lightweight and compelling way to get visitors more information.  For those institutions on limited budgets and staffing, this equation is one that we have to pay attention to and if we can increase use in general, then anything we put behind QR will benefit.  In this trial, we are going to be looking at metrics across all QR use in the building to see if we can  get these numbers up across the board.

WikiLink will be installed through the summer for a three to four month trial.  At the end of it, curators, technologists, and interpretive staff will be looking at the statistics and the visitor feedback we’ve received to determine if the project is worth continuing or expanding upon; stay tuned for our findings.  In the meantime, Ed Bleiberg, one of our Managing Curators and Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art will blog tomorrow about the complexities of selecting the Wikipedia articles for this project.

Posted in Technology | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Shifting the Paradigm in Connecting Cultures

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Kevin Stayton

Connecting Cultures, a new installation that includes works from the Brooklyn Museum’s many diverse collections, has now opened on the first floor in the Great Hall. For the first time, museum visitors will be presented with a taste of what is to come during their museum visit in an introductory gallery.

Nick Cave's Soundsuit, 2008

Art Handlers install Nick Cave's Soundsuit, 2008, one of several works by contemporary artists in the Connecting People section of Connecting Cultures. Soundsuit transforms the human body and allows the wearer to assume new identities by alluding to a range of rituals, from ceremonial African dances to Christian liturgy.

If you think about past visits to the Brooklyn Museum—or to any art museum, for that matter—you probably remember galleries divided into traditional categories. For instance, you might go to the Asian galleries or the African galleries, which are organized by geography. Or you might go to the ancient galleries or the contemporary galleries, which are organized by chronology or time; or you might visit paintings galleries or silver galleries, or period rooms, which are organized by medium or type. These organizational principles have been standard in museums for over a hundred years. We can learn a lot about objects and the cultures, eras and types they represent by seeing them organized in this way. But such a standard organization can also be limiting. It can prevent us from making new and exciting connections between geographical locations, time period and types of objects. It is these connections that often help us understand what it is to be human and how the arts express that.

Wall of 90 Pitchers

Electricians test lighting in the wall of 90 pitchers in Connecting Cultures. These pitchers show the depth of the collections at the Brooklyn Museum and suggest what can be learned from assembling large numbers of objects together. The basic form of things is often defined by their purpose; pitchers, across time, place and cultures are meant first to hold liquid and then to pour it. As a result, pitchers have certain similarities no matter where or when they were made, but they also reveal, in their details, a great deal about their time and place.

So, Connecting Cultures breaks down traditional categories to challenge the viewer to see things in a new way and to make new connections. There are three very simple and straightforward themes in the installation—connecting people, connecting places, and connecting things. I hope that the new installation will do two things—first, introduce the visitor to the wide range of riches available at the Brooklyn Museum, and, second, stimulate some thinking about how to make connections between the museum galleries, as well as within them.

Many different themes could be developed using Connecting Cultures as a model: how does dance appear throughout time and among cultures; does the color blue mean the same thing in all cultures; how are concepts of death expressed in the arts? The possibilities are endless. Connecting Cultures can help us to begin to explore them.

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Doodling as Communication

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Maya Valladares

One of my favorite discoveries since Keith Haring: 1978-1982 opened is how much Haring thought. Journals dating back as far as his middle school years are open for reading both in the galleries and via Tumblr (where the Keith Haring Foundation uploads a new journal page daily), and seeing them them is like being shown a window into his brain as he painstakingly worked out the “visual language” he would use for the rest of his life. More than other shows I’ve seen that feature his work, this one is about his process.

Keith Haring Journal

Page from Keith Haring's journal NB-0 c.1971 (age 13). The Keith Haring Foundation is uploading a page a day to Tumblr.

In the exhibition there is one room towards the back of the gallery set apart as a place to draw, sketch, or doodle. The goal of this room was to allow visitors to think and respond visually to the work on the gallery walls, to experience, in a way, the artist’s process. Haring’s journals are filled not only with words but also with marks familiar to many of us, artists or not: doodles. Doodles often get a bad rap as being signs of distraction, when in fact they are often one of the best sources of creativity. In art school I was once given an assignment to doodle until something good emerged, even if that meant drawing for hours and hours. For most people in my class, the work that came out was some of the most interesting of the term. The symbols that emerge, and reemerge, when you are not trying to make a perfect drawing often tell us a lot about what’s in our heads. Think of doodling as a form of communication, as a conversation between your dreams, your thoughts, and your pencil.

Keith Haring Interactive

Visitors to Keith Haring: 1978–1982 use Boogie Board LCD tablets to doodle.

Keith Haring Interactive

Visitors to Keith Haring: 1978–1982 use Boogie Board LCD tablets to doodle.

Keith Haring Interactive

Visitors to Keith Haring: 1978–1982 use Boogie Board LCD tablets to doodle.

Keith Haring Interactive

Visitors to Keith Haring: 1978–1982 use Boogie Board LCD tablets to doodle.

This past Saturday I went to peek in on the people drawing. The space had a calm yet busy energy; it was quiet despite being filled with people. The drawings on these boards are temporary; they will disappear at the press of a button, so I think it’s more for the experience of drawing than the outcome that visitors spend time in this room. To me, it felt both meditative and really challenging to draw with no specific outcome in mind. I saw moments where drawings stood on their own, the spaces around them blank, and places where drawings came together, touching at points, or spread across many boards at once. I wonder if this is how Haring felt when working; I wonder if his drawings are like records of conversations he had with himself.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Shop ’til you drop and follow us on Pinterest!

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Sallie Stutz

If you’ve visited us sometime over the last year, you probably noticed a lot of construction activity that is part of a multiphase transformation of the first-floor. Behind those temporary walls, directly off the Main lobby, a huge renovation project to build a new Museum Shop was taking place. Designed by award-winning architectural firm Visbeen Associates, Inc., the new Shop just opened its doors and offers a totally new shopping experience for the Museum visitor. Over a year in the making, it took a resourceful and collaborative team to make this a reality. Come help us celebrate the new space and get a chance to meet some of the designers behind our new product at our open house on Thursday, April 12th, 7-9 p.m.

Brooklyn Museum Shop

For the new shop design, the architects took a typical box-shaped space and made it come alive with an organic curved ceiling that moves gently around the room from front to back. The curve is echoed on the floor with an arched jewelry counter and display tables, allowing you to meander around the shop with ease. Featured as part of the lighting design, there are two stunning, sculptural chandeliers created by Brooklyn designer, David Weeks.

With our expanded shop, we are featuring a special section dedicated to Brooklyn-designed products and we are highlighting a selection of the borough’s emerging and established designers, artisans, jewelers, authors and illustrators. We’ll also be highlighting collection-based products and have been particularly inspired by the Museum’s expansive Decorative Arts collection that has recently acquisitioned objects by Brooklyn designers, Jason Miller, Harry Allen and Paul Loebach. Among the pieces on display you will find nature inspired dinnerware by Jason Miller, the Chrome Brush Vase by Harry Allen, and Paul Loebach’s Distortion Candlesticks. In honor of Brooklyn’s bourgeoning culinary ventures and along with the new book Edible Brooklyn, we are offering Brooklyn Salsa, made with locally sourced ingredients as well as Mast Bros. Chocolate bars whose cocoa beans are selected from equatorial global regions.

 

Everyone on our staff has a favorite product and brought a different style to the evolution of the product selection—making it as diverse, exciting and eclectic as possible. Tracy Boni, our shop’s Associate Information Manager, will be using Pinterest to pin some of our favorites to a pinboard.  Follow us on Pinterest to learn more about new products we are featuring and tell us what you think!

Follow Me on Pinterest

Posted in Merchandising | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Google Art Project Deux

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Shelley Bernstein

Starting today, you can find the Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project. I’m here in Paris at the launch for the second phase where more than a hundred museums contributed images of works in their collections for the ever-growing database.

Google Art Project 2 launched this morning at Musée d'Orsay. There were dozens of museum colleagues waiting for their institution to show up on screen for this photo op. It was kind of hilarious.

Google launched the second round of the Project this morning at the Musée d’Orsay giving the press and museum reps a tour of what’s new. Last year, Art Project was launched with 17 museums in 9 countries, 400 artists and 1000 works of art.  In round two, the project has grown to include 151 museums in 40 countries with 6000 artists and 32,000 works. Interestingly, only 20 of the museums are in the United States, so what’s in the Art Project now is much more representative of the international museum scene.  There are a couple of really interesting features—you can search across institutions, you can filter by medium and you can create your own collection.

Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project

Collection objects from the Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project.

Our contribution consists of images from almost 1000 collection objects; for launch we selected objects that were currently on view at the Museum, were clear of copyright issues and had publication quality images.  To get them to Google, our API was used to fetch the data (thanks, Piotr) and was paired with images that Deb Wythe grabbed from our Digital Asset Management System. Having both systems in place allowed us to join the Art Project less than a month ago and get a sizable amount of data there very quickly.

It was sort of interesting to watch the slides during Google’s presentation this morning.  As I sat there, up popped our Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and I snagged a photo thinking, “that’s ours!”

Is this the Brooklyn Museum portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart...or...?

I started wondering if it really was the Brooklyn Museum version of that painting…Gilbert Stuart was known for painting George Washington quite a bit and our own text on the web and in-gallery says as much.  Sure enough, a quick search in Google Art Project revealed three similar versions—one from the National Portrait Gallery, one from The White House and our own.  Now you can see them all together—at least together online—and that’s one of the great things about Art Project’s expansion.

A search for Gilbert Stuart in Google Art Project shows similar works side by side.

Go explore and see what you find.

Posted in Digital Lab, Technology | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Playing House: Working with Artists

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Lisa Bruno

In the exhibition Playing House four artists, Betty Woodman, Ann Chu, Ann Agee and Mary Lucier, install their own artwork into and around several period rooms on the 4th floor, activating the space to engage the viewer to think differently about the traditional presentation of domestic interiors.  The museum has done these sorts of interventions before but on a smaller scale with Yinka Shonibare and Kiki Smith.  This marks the first time that multiple artists are working together in concert.

As a conservator working with each of these artists, the sometimes conflicting working methods and points of perspective were a challenge to manage while remaining flexible.  Conservators work within a set of principles, such as light is damaging too many artworks, handling should be kept to a minimum, and the interior environment can often be hazardous to the preservation of artifacts.  Conservators need to have great hand skills, have an attention to detail, be creative problem solvers, and above all else, respect the object.  Artists work within another set of principles.  Everything is significant, details matter, experience must be illuminated, and all objects and materials can be put towards this purpose.  Creativity is grand and ever changing and needs continuous feeding.

Do you see how there could be some conflict here?

Many of the period rooms were installed in the 1950’s and 60’s when museum best practices were much less formulated than they are today.  The condition of the objects having been on continuous display since that time are often fragile and unknown as museum condition records were not what they are today.  The first step in preparing for the installation was to get an overall plan from each artist as to what their intervention into the rooms would be.   What did I say about creativity being grand and ever changing?  The Curators did their best to wrangle broad concepts from the artists, and the Registrars compiled lists of the items coming and did their best to make sure that everything arrived safely and was accounted for.

Mary Lucier

Mary Lucier works with her team to film in the Dining Room of the Nicholas Schenck House.

The installation worked a bit differently for each artist.  Mary Lucier with a video component needed access to the Schenck rooms well in advance of the other artists.  The challenge was to prepare the rooms, and safeguard the collection while having actors, props, and the artist filming within the often cramped and tightly installed space.   The plan of what to film was fluid and responsive to events as they happened.  This meant that the conservator working with the artist needed to also be fluid and responsive to allow space for creativity while setting appropriate limits and boundaries.

Betty Woodman

Betty Woodman works with art handlers to install her ceramics in the Hall of the Cupola House.

Betty Woodman and Ann Chu proved challenging in that it was impossible to know which collection objects would work well with the artist’s objects until the artist arrived and began to arrange in each room; Cane Acres, Rockefeller, Russell, Cupola, Worgelt, and two dioramas.  The difficulty was assessing on the spot whether a collection object could safely interact with the artist’s object.  Is that vase too heavy for this piece of furniture?  Is the ceramic cup stable on the period table?

Anne Chu

Anne Chu works with art handlers to install her work in the Moorish Room of the John D. Rockefeller House.

Ann Agee’s was the most labor intensive installation.  The artist made several pre-visits to the Milligan rooms as part of formulating what she wanted to transform the room into.  Discussions about what was and was not impossible to remove from the room were fruitful.  The compromises fed the creative process.  With this installation, Ann much like a conservator had to be a creative problem solver too.

Ann Agee

Ann Agee works with art handlers to install her work in the Library and Drawing Room of the Milligan House.

I think the experience in the end was fruitful for all and that the activations spark new illuminations on your experience.

Posted in Conservation, Contemporary Art, Decorative Arts | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A Recent Donation from Camille and Luther Clark

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Deirdre Lawrence

The Brooklyn Museum Library collection has recently been enriched with the donation of several rare items of African American art given by Camille and Luther Clark. This donation is one of many in response to the Museum’s collecting initiative that began in 2010 to focus on collecting art by African American artists who worked between the mid-nineteenth century and pre-contemporary times. To parallel the growth of the art collection, the Museum Library has tried to increase its holdings on African American artists and this recent donation is an excellent addition to the research collection.

Fifty books, periodical articles and other primary documents have been received from this major donation and several items are now featured in the Library Display Cases at the entrance of the Museum Library. On display are rare books such as the catalog for the seminal exhibition entitled The Negro artist comes of age; a national survey of contemporary American artists which was held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1945. According to the Brooklyn Museum Bulletin (November 1945, No. 2), the exhibition consisted of fifty-three paintings and nine sculptures “by the leading young Negro artists of the United States. A few of these, such as Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin, have been widely shown but the work of the large majority is only now beginning to be recognized as an integral segment of our native art.”

Negro Artist Comes of Age

This was an influential exhibition and led the way in how the Museum’s collection developed in later years. For example, the Museum acquired a work of art by Eldzier Cortor that was included in the 1945 exhibition.

Survey Graphic

Many of these items are illustrated essays found in periodicals such as the very rare periodical entitled Survey Graphic. The March 1925 issue showcased Harlem with a beautifully illustrated cover bearing the title Harlem: Mecca of the new Negro. The entire issue contains many interesting articles such as “The Making of Harlem” by James W. Johnson and is illustrated by several artists, including Winold Reiss. This and other journals in the Clark donation are not only of great interest textually, but also visually.

Negro in Art Week

Other illustrated covers of periodicals are on display such as The Black Scholar, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, and The Negro in Art Week exhibition catalog with its visual reference to Egyptian culture.

Portraits of a People

In addition to these historical materials, the donation includes key recent works such as Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century and Artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Camille and Luther Clark donation has greatly enhanced the Brooklyn Museum Library’s documentation on African American art and we are honored to have these important research materials here.

 

Posted in Arts of Africa, Libraries & Archives | Tagged , | 1 Comment