Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

Just what are “interpretive materials”? I’m often asked this question and usually have a hard time reducing my answer to one or even five things, as interpretive materials change with time and vary from one exhibition to the next. For the purpose of brevity in this post, in a nutshell, they consist of exhibition didactics, labels, brochures/printed guides, audio tours, podcasts, and more. Notably, they also include our visitor comment books.

Comment book in traditional form in the Asian and Islamic Art galleries.

One of the many goals of interpretive materials at the Brooklyn Museum is to consider the various ways that people learn (e.g. through text, sound, drawing, sharing, etc), to offer new ways for our visitors to experience and engage with objects and to keep the older methods current/relevant. If you’ve visited our permanent collections in recent years you may have noticed some unique labels which offer responses to and interpretations by our visitors to specific works of art – we call these “Community Voices.”

Community Voices label from the Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity permanent collection exhibition.

It’s important to me that in addition to these practices in the physical exhibition, that such object interpretation and, really, education progress alongside technology; in the age of web 2.0 learning is essentially communal. Earlier this year my colleague, Shelley Bernstein, and I decided to try something new, replacing paper comment books with electronic comment kiosks for our special exhibitions Global Feminisms and Kindred Spirits. The overwhelming participation and positive feedback, both in the galleries and through our online comment forum, made it a very successful initiative.

Electronic comment kiosk for the exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art

As Shelley mentioned in her last post, Let’s Hear It, we are rolling out a new version of comment kiosks for the exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art. Now visitors have the opportunity to not only share general comments about the exhibition (as earlier offered), but also to comment on specific objects. In this, the Brooklyn Museum mission and subsequent tradition of Community Voice labels continues (and evolves). We wait anxiously to hear your thoughts.

Photo courtesy Clay Williams

It’s that time of year again! First, a quick reminder that there will be no Target First Saturday in September due to the West Indian-American Day Carnival events taking place at the Museum over Labor Day weekend. This is the 40th year for the festivities! More information about the parade and all the weekend events can be found at the West Indian American Day Carnival Association website. Also, the Brooklyn Public Library has a history feature on Carnival.

Join us again on October 6 when we celebrate BAM’s 25th Next Wave Festival at the launch of our exciting new season of Target First Saturdays. Bring your video camera for our video competition at YouTube. Follow us at Twitter for Target First Saturday updates throughout the evening.

Only two days left until Infinite Island opens here at the Brooklyn Museum! I have enjoyed regaling you with descriptions of huge, complicated installations, and the most unlikely materials ever to be found in a Museum. I assure you, however, that the level of exactitude for which we aim holds true for the other installations as well. For example, take a look at a detail from Tropical Night, by Christopher Cozier, below:

This piece is comprised of 200 drawings on paper, each 9″ x 7″ and hung in a grid, secured to the wall with binder clips and simple pushpins. It is a fairly straightforward installation, and yet preparation for it began months ago with the selection process for proper hanging hardware. I even sent a sample pushpin and clip overnight to Cozier in Trinidad; we wanted to be sure everything was in line with his vision for the completed piece.

Ultimately, we decided to invite the artist to complete the installation here at the Museum, since his preferred placement of each drawing is ever-changing. Though he had shipped the piece to us months ago, he arrived with a stack of alternate drawings to work with so that he would have more variety in creating the final layout. It took the artist two days to construct the grid of drawings.

Drawings to supplement the completion of Tropical Night, by Christopher Cozier.

The completed piece, though installed with everyday office materials and almost childlike at first glance, is actually a complex narrative about repression. It is at once understated, accessible, and very beautiful in its subtlety - and one of my favorite pieces in the show. I’m thrilled to share it with you, and look forward to seeing and hearing your reactions to it.

Christopher Cozier constructs the grid for Tropical Night.

Infinite Island opens this Friday, August 31^st. We look forward to seeing you there!

Screenshot from the Infinite Island comment kiosks.

In preparation for the opening of Infinite Island this Friday, we’ve just finished installing our comment kiosks. For this exhibition, we developed a couple of new components. Now, our visitors can give us general comments about the exhibition or specific comments about selected highlights. To give each comment greater visibility, we created an attract screen for the kiosk that selects comments at random and displays them with the appropriate work of art.

As always, comments can be submitted onsite using our comment kiosks or directly from the website. No matter where you leave them, all comments are visible on the website and in the gallery.

If you are coming to the exhibition, be sure to let us know what you think. Kiosks can be found on both the 4th and 5th floors near the stairwells.

Last time I wrote about how we happened to have the money and the initiative to look for a major new acquisition for the Asian collection. This time, I’m going to talk about how we developed a shopping list before hitting the market.

All curators keep a mental list of types of objects they would love to find for their museum’s collections; some museums require their curators to compile written lists every few years so the Director and Development staff can help keep an eye out for good candidates. Usually these lists are populated by types of art that aren’t well represented in the museum’s collection. The categories can be as broad as “Cubist painting” or as specific as “a fish knife to replace the one that’s missing from the flatware set we already have.” But generally the categories are cited because they would complement or round out the existing collection.

The Brooklyn Museum’s Asian art collection is quite good, with most major cultures well represented. But the gaps were pretty clear: Chinese painting, Chinese stone sculpture, Japanese Buddhist sculpture, and Indian bronze sculpture, preferably of the Chola period. We already have some very nice Chinese and Japanese sculptures, but they’re all a little on the small side, or else they’re fragments of something much larger. (I’m illustrating our best Japanese sculpture here, the head from a painted wood figure of a guardian deity – really a fabulous thing, but think how great it would be to have the whole figure.)

Head of a Guardian Figure. Japan. Kamakura period, 13th century. Hinoki wood with color, inlaid rock-chrystal, and metal. 22 1/6 x 10 1/4 x 13 15/16 in. (56.1 x 26.1 x 35.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alastair B. Martin, the Guennol Collection. 86.21.

I know that looking for a big object sounds kind of petty, like buying a painting because it goes with your couch, but the sad truth is that size matters. When putting together a gallery, it’s really nice to have one large, important, eye-catching object that draws people in and anchors the whole gallery, both visually and conceptually. It’s certainly possible to highlight an exquisite little object in a gallery, but if you have lots of exquisite little objects, the impact of each object diminishes. And we already had quite a few exquisite little objects. So we were hoping to buy an object with some serious physical presence.

In addition to something of size, we were looking for something we could exhibit pretty much permanently. For this reason, we decided early on not to go after a Chinese painting, even though it’s the area where the collection could use the most help. Chinese paintings are made with materials that react poorly to exposure to light. The silk used for early paintings darkens over time, and the inks used even today are very susceptible to fading. Museums must protect their objects, so we keep most of our Asian paintings in storage, bringing them out on a temporary basis so they don’t spend too much time under the spotlights. We decided that we didn’t want to spend all our funds on an object that we could display only occasionally, so we turned our attentions to sculpture.

I haven’t yet mentioned Indian bronze sculpture, the last category on our shopping list (and the one we eventually bought). I will address that in the next installment, because it’s a more complicated situation. Next time: why one masterpiece isn’t necessarily enough…