Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Following up on this earlier post, I’m happy to say The Dinner Party Virtual Tour has just gone live on our website. The launch of the tour took an awful lot longer than any of us ever expected. Back in March, the tour was done and the kiosks were installed in the gallery — everything was working just fine until, of course, the day of the Center’s opening.

Suddenly, on some computers the hotspots within the tour had stopped working. There are hundreds of hotspots in the tour, each leading to an appropriate page in our Dinner Party Database which profiles each of the 1,038 women represented in artwork. With all those hotspots broken, on opening day we had a really nice picture, with zero content. Turns out, the night before, Apple had disabled Javascript support in the latest version of QuickTime. As computers auto-updated, the hotspots would break.

We had to start over. Using the same photography, the VR was re-built from the ground up using Flash and it took a while to get all the kinks out. The Flash Panorama Player is not as good at rendering panoramas as QuickTime, but our consultants working on the project tirelessly tweaked and tweaked until the difference was slight.

As it happens, Flash is a bit better for us. More web visitors have the Flash Player already installed, it loads faster than the QuickTime version and we are using an XML file for the settings and hotspots (which means we can easily edit them later if we ever need to).

There’s a plain-text browse version to maintain accessibility for those who don’t want or can’t install the Flash Player. The full screen version of the tour is now running on kiosks in the gallery. Special thanks to Jook and John at 360VR.com and Matt over at Photospherix for sticking with this to the very, very end!

Earlier this week, we installed two striking new photographs in the Museum’s American Identities galleries on the fifth floor, Soldier Claxton and Soldier Mickelson. They are part of a large series of soldiers’ portraits by the New York-based photographer Suzanne Opton, who photographed the soldiers on their return to the United States from service in Afghanistan and Iraq. She met with them at the army base Fort Drum, NY, where they were stationed between tours in 2004 and 2005. Asking them to rest the head on a table (apparently none of the soldiers refused), she shot their horizontal faces close up, against a dark background. In an uncanny fashion, the heads look almost disembodied, and with every detail revealed - you can even see a wandering eyelash under Soldier Claxton’s eye - the thoughtful and tranquil faces appear vulnerable and exposed.

I am usually in favor of hanging images low on the wall, and in this particular case I feel it made even more sense. It not only facilitates for children to approach the pictures, but also, on a general level, it reduces the barrier between the viewer and the work, and creates a sense of almost being in the same space, next to the two soldiers. I think the portraits make a great addition to the American Identities galleries and they will remain on view until the end of this year.

Suzanne Opton (American, born 1945). Soldier: Claxton—120 days in Afghanistan, Fort Drum, New York, 2005. Digital print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Rudolph DeMasi, by exchange, TL2006.90.1

Suzanne Opton (American, born 1945). Soldier: Mickelson—length of service unknown, Fort Drum, New York, 2005. Digital print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, TL2006.90.2

When John published his post about his own Dutch house in Brooklyn, he also kindly provided a list of all the Dutch houses in the area that are still standing. Clicking the markers in the map below will take you to the address and information about each house.

View Larger Map

John has also provided several web resources:

Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn, Maud Esther Dillard (Brooklyn, 1945)

Lefferts Historic House (Prospect Park Website)

The Wyckoff House Museum

Lott House Restoration and Information

In my own travels on the web for this project, I noticed that Christopher Gray wrote this article for the New York Times about John and his house:

Streetscapes/2138 McDonald Avenue, Brooklyn; Preserving a Sense of Dutch Heritage in Gravesend

The Brooklyn Museum Schenck houses are now open! Catch what Carol Vogel has to say in the New York Times.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Schenck family houses have had a profound personal effect on me. In 1990, I was the editor for a book on the Schenck houses called Dutch by Design, written by curator Kevin Stayton. I found that book and the houses it was about so fascinating that I not only taught myself Dutch but I also wound up buying an old Dutch Brooklyn farmhouse of my own.

The book had five chapters. Kevin had countless fascinating illustrations lined up for chapters 1,2, 4, and 5, the chapters dealing specifically with the houses themselves. But almost no illustrations were planned for the middle chapter, a general history of the Dutch in Brooklyn. I suggested that we find Dutch houses still standing out in the streets of Brooklyn and use photos of them as illustrations. “Sure,” said Kevin. “Go knock yourself out.”

Finding the houses was not as difficult as it might seem. A book published in 1945, Old Dutch Houses of Brooklyn by Maud Esther Dillard, provided pictures and addresses of all the Dutch Brooklyn houses standing then, and I had only to see if they were still there. Most, sadly, were gone, but some, miraculously, had survived—and in the strangest places.

Hubbard House, circa 1915

Take 2138 McDonald Ave., the so-called Hubbard House, an 1830 Dutch farmhouse down under the elevated tracks of the F train in Gravesend. There, in 1990, I met Theresa Lucchelli, a wonderful cat-fancying former cocktail waitress who had lived in the house since 1904 and remembered Gravesend as a rural paradise. I asked her if was okay with her if I approached the Landmarks Commission about making the house a landmark. “Sure,” she said. “Go knock yourself out.”

Hubbard House, 2002. Compared to the 1915 photo, the house looks somewhat different. The lean-to on the left side in the photo of 1915 had a second story added to it in 1924.

Theresa died at the age of 95 in 1997, and the Landmarks Commission never has done right by her house. But after her death I bought and renovated the place with help of a private group known as the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and now I sometimes sit by the fire there of an evening as the F train rumbles past and reflect that I owe it all to the Schenck family houses at the Brooklyn Museum.

Last month the last of the darkroom equipment finally left the Museum, nearly 2 years after we shut down the darkroom for good (the darkroom is now the Scan Lab and the film loading room is my office, complete with red light bulb over the door). More about that last piece of equipment later.

Anyone who did photography in the pre-digital days and spent time in the darkroom remembers the magic of developing and printing with a great deal of fondness, even as we conveniently forget the lingering smell of chemicals in our clothes and hair. Digital is a new kind of magic, but I suspect that there will always be photographers who develop and print their own images. It’ll continue to be an art.

The Brooklyn Museum has had a darkroom for decades–as early as the 1930s–so it was a bittersweet farewell both to well-worn enlargers that had seen many decades of use and to more recent equipment like film and print processors. We were able to sell most of the equipment and supplies (in the process helping to fund new digital cameras) and also donated some to educational programs — Stickball Printmedia Arts, the photographic program at The Drew Hamilton Learning Center of the Children’s Aid Society, and Bard College’s Photography Department.

We found ourselves at the end of the process with the highest-tech, newest enlarger still in storage. The Zone VI enlarger would handle 5×7 and 8×10 negatives and was definitely professional grade–not something that students or hobbyists would find useful. What to do? Our last-ditch ad on photo.net brought just a few inquiries. Photographer Michael Halsband came by looking for some parts for his Zone VI and got intrigued. The Museum’s Zone VI enlarger is now in his studio and is being readied for use by visiting Cuban photographers sponsored by the American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba. A donation that made all of us very happy–and I can’t think of a more fitting coda to our darkroom project, especially just as Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art is about to open. Michael’s comment says it all: “it is very cool to have the enlarger come from the Brooklyn Museum and continue to be used to for creative work. ”

I wish I had some photos of Michael disassembling the enlarger and packing it into his car. A Zone VI is really large and complicated , but he made the process look easy. Photographers never cease to amaze me with their ability to deal with any kind of equipment — on top of taking amazing pictures. Not having any Rube Goldberg Zone VI candids to offer, here’s an offering from our amazing photography collection, a candid from another time:

George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-87).
Solution of Dinner Question at the Conduit at Hempstead. Brooklyn Museum, X894.148