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…

Contemporary art often employs cutting-edge techniques, technologies, and materials, and our Infinite Island artists are proof in point. I would love to share some of the interesting materials coming in to the Museum as we get ready for the exhibition opening - just days away!

1200 AA batteries are used to light Bounty, a series of light boxes by Deborah Jack.

As mentioned in earlier posts, in many cases, I have been called upon to shop for materials, a task that can be simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. But at the end of the day, if the artist is pleased with what we have found, then all the hours of phone calls, internet searches, jaunts to thrift stores, and long truck rides out to New Jersey are worth it. Some of the items we collected are pretty extraordinary, and the way the artists have manipulated them for the finished pieces, even more so. Read on.

A wall of real leaves hangs behind Kuku (Kitchen), by Marcel Pinas - shipped to the Museum directly from the forests of Suriname.

The biggest challenge, in my opinion, was coordinating the delivery of 70 used car and truck tires for Kawtchou by Maxence Denis. You might have heard a bit about this from Nicole Caruth’s blog earlier this month, but I think the sheer magnitude of this task warrants another mention. The artist had specified not only the total number of tires he needed, but also the required diameter of each tire - ranging from 13″ to 26″ - and these precise instructions made it much more difficult to locate exactly what he wanted. We were very lucky that Anton Junicic Ent., Inc., a Brooklyn auto parts shop, was willing to collect the tires for us, and made three trips over with our big truck to transport them to the Museum. Special thanks to Robert Barclay, our dedicated truck driver, for all his help with this! The artist was very pleased, and so were we. The finished piece, which incorporates audio/visual elements, makes quite an imposing statement.

Tires for Kawtchou, by Maxence Denis, fill the Brooklyn Museum truck.

Another great accomplishment involved furniture-shopping for Spirit of the Caribe, an installation by Tirzo Martha. For this, all the credit goes to Dasha Chapman, our wonderful research assistant with an eye for a bargain. Like Kawotchou, this installation was completely recreated for the exhibition, and the artist needed new materials that matched his vision for the piece. Kudos to Dasha for biking around Brooklyn on the hottest day of the year in search of the perfect chair, loading coffee tables into the backs of cabs, and riding the truck out to New Jersey to pick up the bed frame she found on Craig’s List.

Chair and rug for Spirit of the Caribe, by Tirzo Martha.

Art handlers assemble the bed, to be used in Spirit of the Caribe, by Tirzo Martha.

Though this post focuses mainly on raw materials, I would like to include a sneak peak of the installation of Tirzo Martha’s work - I think you’ll be surprised to see what became of that bed:

Installation detail of Spirit of the Caribe, by Tirzo Martha.

That’s right; all the furniture now hangs on the wall, creating a vertical bedroom 12 feet high. I will leave the rest of the piece to your imagination for now; come and visit us to see the completed piece!

From 1200 batteries to 1000 feet of black cord, 85 cubic feet of packing peanuts to 7 cubic feet of beach sand, Infinite Island certainly breaks ground in its ingenious use of materials. We have just a few finishing touches to put on the show before we welcome you this Friday, August 31^st! Mark your calendars for the opening!

While Marc was visiting us from the Getty to carry out XRF on our mummy Demetrios, we decided to give Marc a sample of the linen used to wrap him, to perform radiocarbon dating (C14). A small sample (2-5mg) of the linen was taken near the feet, where there was already previous damage.

A sample of linen near the feet was taken for C14 dating.

Marc will send this sample to the NSF Arizona AMS Facility at The University of Arizona. This will give us a ballpark date of how old the linens are, and by association, how old the mummy may be. While we know stylistically it is between 30 B.C. and 395 A.D., we may be able to get a narrower date with C14 dating. We also wanted to find out more about the mummy itself. Is Demetrios really a man? Across the linens, in gilding just under his name is written 89 years. Does that mean he was 89 years old when he died? What did he die of? Is there anything else wrapped up with him in the linens? In order to answer some of these questions, we decided to have Demetrios CT scanned. CT scanning, or computed tomography, is another non-destructive technique that allows us to see beyond the linen wrappings, without having to un-wrap Demetrios. A three-dimensional image is generated using X-rays. This was carried out at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset New York.

Lisa, a BM objects conservator, makes sure Demetrios is securely packed before his big trip. Photo by Adam Husted.

Before Demetrios could travel to Long Island, we needed to make sure he was stable enough to withstand the truck ride. One of our art handlers, Jason, constructed a custom made box with foam padding so that Demetrios wouldn’t shift in transit. We used a special art packing and shipping company, Marshall Fine Arts, to transport Demetrios to the hospital. Their tucks are climate controlled and have “air ride” suspension to give the mummy a nice, smooth, cool ride. This was also an opportunity for us to give Demetrios a “trial run” to see if any damage will occur during transit. While we take every possible precaution to avoid damage to our objects, sometimes there are unforeseen problems. Demetrios hasn’t left the BM since he arrived in 1911, and while he was only going to Long Island for this trip, he will be traveling to 11 different museums across the US as part of the exhibition “To Live Forever, Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum”. If any problems occur during this quick trip, we can address them before he goes out on the road for over 3 years of travel. Check back next week to read about our adventures in CT scanning!

Lisa and the guys from Marshall Fine Arts load Demetrios into the truck. Photo by Adam Husted.

As we prepare for the Brooklyn Museum’s tipi exhibition, I am in Billings, Montana attending the 2007 Crow Fair with my colleague Susan Kennedy Zeller. Here are a few images from the morning parade and the Grand Entry to the Powwow which took place on August 17, 2007.

Participants in the morning parade prepare for the procession.  Photo by Susan Kennedy Zeller.

Participants in morning parade moving through the Crow Fair campgrounds. Photo by Susan Kennedy Zeller.

The Grand Entry involving all particpating dancers who will be competing in the Powwows on Saturday and Sunday nights. Photo by Susan Kennedy Zeller.

In my previous entry, I introduced a wonderful object, an Indian bronze of Shiva from the tenth century. I am tracing the way that this work of art entered the Brooklyn Museum’s collection in 2007, offering an introduction to the various concerns curators address when determining what objects a museum should buy. Today I’m going to talk about the very important issue of backing, both financial and administrative.

If you’re going to consider buying a major work of art for a museum, the first thing you need is cash, or a sense of where to get it. The Brooklyn Museum is not known for spending large sums of money on works of art. Unlike many other American museums, Brooklyn does not have particularly large endowments for art purchases. The Museum has done very well over the years, but primarily through gifts of works of art and very judicious purchases of lower-cost objects in areas that have not yet been “discovered” by the market.

So it was pretty unusual when I was set to the task of finding a major (read: high-priced) Asian work of art to purchase in honor of Amy G. Poster, my predecessor. Amy retired from the Museum in the summer of 2006 after more than 35 years of service. During her long tenure, Amy had attracted a large following of collectors and donors, many of whom had made contributions over the years. A while ago, the Museum received as a bequest a large collection of Indian and Southeast Asian art that contained a lot of objects that were not up to our standards (as well as some good things). We sold off the minor pieces and kept the proceeds for future acquisitions. As a result, there was some money in our coffers, and Amy’s retirement was such a momentous event that we felt inspired to spend it all on one object. After a quick tally of available funds, we had a good sense of how much we had to spend. Suffice it to say that it was less than $1 million. In other fields, that would be chicken feed, but luckily most types of Asian art are still relatively affordable and we were confident of our ability to find something great within our budget.

Throughout my discussion of the acquisition of this object, I will be using a lot of “we.” It’s not a royal we, believe me. It’s plural. First of all, the process began before I even arrived, and even before Amy’s last day. I came in on it after a period of searching but before the perfect work of art was found. Amy really led the search, which might sound a little presumptuous given that the object was supposed to honor her, but it actually made loads of sense because Amy knows the market better than almost anyone, and she certainly knew what sorts of objects the collection needed. Her involvement guaranteed that she wouldn’t be disappointed by the object that bears her name. The idea to purchase a work of art came from several of our Trustees, who are ardent supporters of the Asian art collection and its activities. They were involved in all the discussions and decisions. They also presented the idea to our Director. It’s really a good idea to make sure that the donors and administrators are behind you before embarking on a search for a major acquisition. As in any aspect of life, you’re far more likely to get better results if you involve your funders in big decisions, rather than suddenly plunking some really expensive object in front of them and saying “buy this for me now.”

On that sage note, I will sign off for now. Next time: the curatorial shopping list…

On July 5, Marc Walton, a scientist with the Getty Conservation Institute came to examine one of our mummies, knows as Demetrios. He brought a portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) machine with him. With this non-destructive technique, he can take readings of different inorganic materials on the surface of our mummy, which will tell us the chemical make-up. Marc wanted to compare both the red lead and gilding found on our mummy, Demetrios, to the red lead found on the Getty mummy, Herakleides. It turns out that the red lead and gold are very similar – they have similar trace elements. The Getty is continuing their research to find out what that all means, but it is possible that these all came from the same workshop. There is also evidence to suggest that the lead used to make the red lead pigment may have come from a silver mine in Spain. When silver is smelted from the ore, lead is a common by-product. The lead would have been used to make the red lead paint. The Getty is also researching this further to determine whether the red lead pigment was made in Spain then traded to Egypt, or if the raw lead was traded to Egypt and the pigment made there. It is also unclear why the color red was chosen. Perhaps it was because the color red was thought to ward off danger. Sometimes, the more we find out, the more questions we have - there is still a lot to learn about our mummies! Check back next week to find out what other techniques we are using to learn more about Demetrios.