Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

It’s that time of year again: the massive stage is going up in the Museum’s back parking lot, which means the West Indian-American Day Parade and Carnival is right around the corner. In light of the upcoming revelry this weekend, I thought I would feature Schawannah Wright, the Museum’s Manager for Community Involvement, who has been busy coordinating the logistics of this huge annual event with its producers, while ensuring the safety of the Museum’s premises. Once it’s all over (and she’s fully recovered), Schwannah spends the rest of the year focusing on getting the word out to the community about all of the resources and programs that are offered here. As we got to talking about her past work experiences and interests, it became obvious to me that Schawannah’s always up for an adventure; it’s no wonder she thrives in this dynamic public role as the Museum’s on-the-ground community liaison. Here’s more from Schawannah:

Where are you from?

I’m originally from Dallas, TX, and I’ve lived in New York for, let’s see… 30 years! Hm, I guess I can call myself an official New Yorker now.

What do you do here?

Essentially what I do is share information about the programs and exhibitions of the Brooklyn Museum with our community.  I share this information by attending street fairs, festivals, career days, community board meetings, and neighborhood association meetings, and I try to form collaborations with various community groups so they can have increased access to the Museum.

One thing I’ve done recently was to enroll the Museum in the Cool Culture program that captures families, such as early childhood day cares, low-income, or foster care families, and gives them free admission to cultural institutions in all five boroughs. It’s great because it allows us to invite non-traditional museum goers here and encourages parents to use the Museum as an educational resource.  Often, it’s social workers or PTA members who are trying to encourage these families to participate, but they’ve usually never been here, so we also host orientations so they can fully experience what they are offering.

Overall, I spend about half my time out of the office meeting with community leaders, and the other half here hosting events for different groups, such as the MTA hearing earlier this year or community board meetings, among other things.

And this time of year, you’re busy getting ready for the West Indian-American Day Parade.

Yes, it’s the calm before the storm right now…it starts on Thursday and continues for 4 nights of concerts, which all lead up to the big Labor Day Parade on Monday. During those four nights, there’s a steel pan competition where 15 different bands (each with 30 to 100 members) play a few songs and synchronize them … Then there’s the King and Queen Costume competition–people spend months and months making these huge elaborate costumes with sequins and feathers. There’s also a Soca and Calypso music night, featuring local and international artists.

All activities take place on our premises so my role is to help implement the activities around Carnival and ensure the safety of our community and the site.

Schawannah takes matters into her own hands on the Festival’s concert stage.

How did the Museum get involved with this event?

The West Indian-American Carnival Festival Association formed a relationship with the Museum 40 years ago because the celebration of West Indian culture centered here in Crown Heights. Brooklyn actually has the second largest Jamaican population outside of Jamaica (though in the Museum’s immediate neighborhood, it’s primarily Haitian and Trinidadian). The celebration started out small, but has lasted through many evolutions and challenges into what it is today. People now come from all over the world for Carnival: we have over 5,000 people here each night and about 3 million on Eastern Parkway for the parade. All of the West Indian island cultures are supposed to be represented during this event.

My favorite part is seeing the excitement of the crowd during the Steel Pan Competition and the friendly rivalry between the bands. And one new thing I was introduced to last year was getting to try a shark sandwich, which is a Caribbean delicacy.

How long have you worked here?

I’ve been here for 10 years…it’s a bananas milestone!

What were you doing before coming to the Museum?

I was in TV and film for 15 years: I started at ABC news, then the Maury Povich show, and also HBO sports (working on World Championship Boxing was pretty exciting). I’ve actually had a lot of pretty crazy jobs…at one point I managed the bridal registry at Macys on 34^th Street…Oh I witnessed it all there: mother-daughter fights, crazy brides… one couple even tried to return china with spaghetti sauce still on it!

At one point I was also an assistant to Diana Ross, which was very cool. In the beginning, you’re in awe because you’re in the presence of an icon that you’ve watched on TV, but then all of a sudden you’re sitting in front of her having a normal conversation. She was actually pretty down to earth…I remember she liked to make her own salad dressing.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be an anchorperson. So I tried it, but I really did enjoy it. I just didn’t like all those people looking at me, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that all these other people were out there looking at me too.  So that didn’t last too long…

Do you have any hidden talents?

I’m a fencer, though I haven’t done it in a few years. I wanted exercise and wasn’t so great about going to the gym so I thought this would be a good exercise outlet. Plus, it turned out that it’s a pretty great conversation piece. I fenced for 8 years and I really enjoyed it… I even managed to make it into a couple of tournaments (which mostly just let me know that I needed to take more classes).

We actually had a lot of diversity amongst the students… I fenced at the New York Fencers Club, and Peter Westbrook, who’s an Olympic athlete, runs a non-profit out of there that trains young kids in fencing and provides them with college scholarships.  There’s even a brother-sister team from Brooklyn who won the scholarship recently.

Finally, what’s your commute like?

Well, I’m now a proud new homeowner (yay!) in Harlem, so I take the train right from my corner and I’m here in about an hour.

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To meet more of our staff, visit the Brooklyn’s Finest Flickr set.

This month on the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed artist, we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to feature one of our very own 1stfans: the anonymous, yet notorious, Twitter personality known as @MuseumNerd. If you’re one of the over 24,000 followers of this feed, you’ve probably already experienced Museum Nerd’s insightful commentary and contagious love of all things related to art, art history, and museums.

Whether it’s through tweets, photographs, or ruminations that sometime exceed 140 characters, this character is intriguing not only because of the seemingly omnipresent reports on art and museum happenings around the world (though primarily focused on New York), but also because it reflects a highly personal, and unadulterated, take on everyday experiences with works of art. For the Twitter Art Feed this month, Museum Nerd launched a community project that is an ode to-what else?-museums that will unfold throughout the month for our followers. I’ll let Museum Nerd explain further:

“This month, I’m extremely excited to be Brooklyn Museum’s 1stfans digital artist in residence. Initially I conceived of this project as a collective “love letter” to “museums.” I posted a message on twitter asking if anyone who “loved museums and could lick a stamp” wanted to be involved in an art project and used the hashtag #MuseumArt. Since the 1stfans artists are kept under wraps until their project launches, I wasn’t able to explain exactly what #MuseumArt involved, but people were excited nonetheless. I asked them to send me postcards showing museums and to write what they loved about the museum on the back.

Since @MuseumNerd is a secret identity, I enlisted the help of museum world friends who tweet for their museums. They received the postcards on my behalf and I went on several #SecretMission operations to meet them and attain the postcards. On one #SecretMission I visited four museums in four NYC boroughs to pick up postcards. In part I wanted to give recognition to the real people behind museum twitter feeds and remind folks that museums are not monolithic unapproachable institutions.

This project falls into critic Ben Davis’s “Greimasian Semiotic Square” as a “social art collaboration,” and was partly inspired by artist An Xiao’s explorations of the relationship between digital and analogue communication, especially in her 1stfans twitter art feed. What started as a brief digital message evoked dozens of analogue communications (postcards) which will now be posted again as digital scans, but with my own creative intervention. These will be in the form of simple word bubbles which reflect my obsession with words and words in art (e.g. Ed Ruscha). This is part of a body of work that celebrates “museums” themselves as the wonderful inspiring places they’ve been for all the participants in #MuseumArt and millions of others.”

It is no secret that the Brooklyn Museum’s public hours have been inconvenient to many of our visitors.  From the frustrated tourist arriving on a weekday at 4:30pm only to be told, “Galleries will begin clearing in 15 minutes,” – to our neighbors exiting the Brooklyn Museum/Eastern Parkway subway stop on their way home from work—a 5:00pm closing time represented a serious obstacle to visitation.

Back in March, I initiated an online discussion of the issues and asked for feedback. We heard from many of our friends, and the responses we received helped drive our decision-making. As we performed a delicate balancing act of providing more evening hours without significantly increasing costs, we kept these visitor preferences in mind:

• “Keep the weekend morning hours; that’s a quiet, less crowded time that combines well with a brunch.”
• “Stay open on Thursdays or Fridays at least until 9.”
• “Provide additional late night opportunities to see special exhibitions.”

I’m thrilled that the new public hours announced today meet these goals:

• Wednesdays 11-6
• Thursdays and Fridays 11-10
• Saturdays and Sundays 11-6

We look forward to welcoming everyone as we implement the new schedule on Wednesday, October 6, 2010. For more information, please read our press release (pdf).

Careful watchers of the museum’s online image collections may have noticed some large new batches of African works begin to pop up over the last month.

This summer, with the help of Connie Jang, an intern with the Digital Collections department (and incomparable prep work by Katie Apsey, our Curatorial Assistant, and a loaned photo backdrop from the Egyptian offices), I’ve started a photo survey of one of our most important sub-collections of African objects—the significant number of works acquired by our curator Stewart Culin during a 1922 Museum-sponsored collecting expedition to Europe. While on this trip, Culin purchased several important pieces from William Oldman and Paul Guillaume, pioneering art dealers in London and Paris, respectively, before making his way to Brussels. There, Culin was introduced to an obscure employee of a local veterinary school named François Poncelet who, through means as yet unknown, had amassed a collection of over 1500 pieces, mostly from the Congo. Culin managed to acquire the entire collection for around $2,000—twice his initial budget, but a shrewd investment, as time has told. In addition to being the foundation for the Museum’s African collection, and the subject of the groundbreaking 1923 exhibition Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Congo, this sub-collection is a crucial historical artifact in its own right, reflecting the creation and circulation of Congolese art at a specific (and comparatively early) time and place.

Single Head Goblet (Mbwoongntey), early 20th century. Wood, 8 1/16 x 3 1/2 in. (20.5 x 9.0 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Expedition 1922, Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.1485.

Many of these works have not been previously photographed, and this has also served as a crucial opportunity to review and update our records on these works. Every day in the store room brings with it a new discovery, and I look forward to sharing them with our visitors as the project progresses. You can keep an eye on our progress, by visiting this link.

The current exhibition Andy Warhol: The Last Decade features some remarkable paintings that Warhol made with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente in the 1980s. With the earliest of these, one artist would begin a canvas and then it was circulated to the other two, who each made their own contributions and revisions. Origin of Cotton, for instance, features a yellow flower from Warhol, faces by Clemente, and white designs added by Basquiat:

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960-1988), and Francesco Clemente (Italian, born 1952). Origin of Cotton, 1984. Mixed media on canvas, 50 ½ x 71 in. (128 x 180.5 cm). Private Collection, Courtesy Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich. © 2010 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. © 2010 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris/ARS, NY

Keith Haring has a great quote about the Collaborations: “It was a physical conversation happening in paint instead of words. The sense of humor, the snide remarks, the profound realizations, the simple chitchat all happened with paint and brushes.” We wanted to see if we could facilitate an exchange like that among visitors to the exhibition, and the result was Collaborations, Continued.

Since a blank slate can be intimidating, our designers helped me get six large pads of paper printed with a base color and various icons (all Photoshopped to look a little like a screenprint) to serve as a starting points. These are set up down in the galleries with some writing implements, stencils, a book on the Collaborations, and the Haring quote. The basic idea was that visitors could stop by and add what they wanted, responding to the starting image and to each other. Once a poster filled up, we would take it down and archive it, and a new one would begin.

The only problem: for the first two weeks, every visitor seemed to want to start their own new poster. Then we tried putting up some tiny signs reminding people to add to what was already there, and good things happened. (We did also have an intrepid young visitor who braided together all the strings holding our crayons; but to be honest, I was kind of impressed with the effort.) Summer intern Julie McMahon took these great photographs showing all the different ways each basic image—a plane, a toaster, a telephone—has been transformed so far:

Have you ever tried something like this? What worked and what didn’t?