Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

We’ve been on MySpace for a while now and we just confirmed our 10,000th friend request (above). I thought a look back would be in order. We were lucky early on. Ellis G., a Brooklyn-based artist, had a lot of friends and thankfully sent bulletins to all of them telling them about our profile. “Add this user” called Ellis and suddenly we had a lot friends which provided a nice start (thanks, Ellis). …but, with many friends comes….spam and lots of it. (more…)

A major factor influencing Brushed with Light’s design was due to the delicate nature of watercolors themselves. Because the works are light sensitive it is required that they be exhibited in low light. This being said, a dim room is not always the most comfortable environment to view works of art.

As a solution, I designed the inner walls of the room to be recessed at the top so I could install lighting fixtures, which were then colored with gels and diffused to give the room an inviting glow, without subjecting the paintings to additional light. I repeated this technique in the gallery entrance so the visitor is reminded before even entering the space the important role light plays within these beautiful paintings. In addition the walls were painted with a deep berry palette which functions to make the paintings “pop”, due to the fact that light is reflected off the pictures while being absorbed by the wall around them, highlighting the pictures rather than the room.

Art handlers installing Miguel Luciano’s Platano Pride and Miguel Luciano himself.

Over the past few months of teaching university students in Infinite Island, I have found that students instantly respond to works of art that incorporate ideas and images referencing popular culture. Pieces in the show such as the one by Miguel Luciano, Platano Pride, start conversation before I even have a chance to ask any questions because the students understand immediately the visual language with which the artists are working. This Saturday, November 17, at 2 p.m. we will host the third panel discussion in the Infinite Island discussion series which will focus on the role that music and popular culture play in contemporary Caribbean art and culture. I look forward to hearing more from the panelists about how popular culture and music can serve as sites for creativity and resistance in the Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora communities. I know that the insights they share will enhance my teaching and the discussions I will have in the galleries with my students.

Panelists include Sujatha Fernandes, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York and author of Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures; Raquel Z. Rivera, Research Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, and co-editor of an forthcoming anthology Reading Reggaeton: Historical, Aesthetic and Critical Perspectives; and Infinite Island artist Miguel Luciano. The discussion will be moderated by Infinite Island curator Tumelo Mosaka.

If you join us we would love to know what you think!

One of the things we are always striving to do is share our collection in new and unique ways. This can be seen in many areas of the physical building, from our cross-collection approach in American Identities to other installations like Luce Visible Storage. After reading a recent article in Wired, I started to realize why Facebook’s application platform makes it different from its peers and it got me thinking about how we could utilize their API to bring greater visibility to our collection.

As it turns out, one of our programmers here, Mike Dillon, had been poking around Facebook on his own and was eager to develop on this platform. We had a brief conversation about it and the rest, I have to say, is all his doing. By the way, I’m posting on this because Mike is more the punk-rock-i-don’t-do-blogs type, but have to give credit where credit is due ’cause ArtShare rocks!

What can you do with ArtShare? Well, you can select works from the Brooklyn Museum collection to display on your profile. But then, because social networking is about connecting and seeing what others contribute to the social fabric, anyone can also use ArtShare to upload their own work and share it with others. You can use ArtShare to select a wide variety of work, then each time your profile is loaded a different work will be displayed at random from your selections.

For the past week, we’ve been uploading (OK, well, Francesca Ford has been uploading…thanks, Francesca) our collection highlights into the application, but then we hit a snag when we got to our Contemporary collection. Since artists often retain the copyright on contemporary works, we stopped uploading and started making phone calls and sending emails to artists and galleries seeking permission to include their work in the first phase of this project. I have to extend my thanks to the artists (Jules de Balincourt, Barron Claiborne, Anthony Goicolea, Rashid Johnson, Lady Pink, Kambui Olujimi, Suzanne Opton, Andres Serrano, Swoon, Yoram Wolberger) who saw the worth in this kind of endeavor and said go for it. We will continue to contact more of the contemporary artists in our collection and add to these initial works, but we wanted to pause now and launch ArtShare for beta testing.

If you work at another institution and want to share your museum’s collection this way, we can set you up with your own tab in ArtShare. When we set this up for you, your institution’s logo will be displayed alongside the works that you upload, so they are easily identifiable as being a part of your collection. More information on the specifics of how to do this can be found here.

Have fun, help us test and let us know the bugs so we can iron things out. Oh and, while you are there, add me as a friend.

Eleanor Whitney and I had a great time at our recent Academic Open House which was an exciting first step towards engaging professors and to hear what they would like from the Brooklyn Museum. In the Museum Libraries and Archives we have considerable resources documenting the Museum, its history and collections to provide information to Museum staff and the visiting public. We also have collected research material on the broader areas of art, archaeology, ethnology and cultural history and wish to make these resources more readily available to professors and their students. If you are a professor or student who would like to visit our Library, feel free to send an email to library@brooklynmuseum.org or search our online catalog.

Eleanor and I look forward to the next steps in this process by widening our reach to include professors from academic institutions in all the boroughs and beyond! We look forward to the next open house in March which will include a tour of our newly opened Japanese print exhibition, Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print 1770-1900.

As an Academic Programs Coordinator my job involves connecting members of our local academic community with the resources that the Brooklyn Museum has to offer. This often takes the form of a conversation, because what I really need to know is how professors would like to use the Museum with their classes. To facilitate this and to get to know representatives from the local academic community a little bit better, Deirdre Lawrence and I worked together to plan and host the first ever open house for professors and academic representatives in mid-October. We put together a Friday afternoon program focused on Infinite Island that included a curator talk by Tumelo Mosaka and a short presentation and discussion about academic resources including tours and internships for university students.

I felt the open house was a way to make the concept of “academic resources at the Brooklyn Museum” more personal. I was very pleased that many of the professors who attended hailed mostly from institutions in the Museum’s immediate community such as Pratt Institute, Medgar Evers College, Brooklyn College, Long Island University and Kingsborough Community College. They represented a range of disciplines from art history and studio art to English and Social Sciences. Their questions for Tumelo during his talk ran the gamut of questions about the formal qualities of K. Khalfani Ra’s work to wondering about the difficulty of finding art and artists from the Caribbean who were not producing work for the tourist market. From my perspective as an educator, I really enjoyed seeing how this diverse group of academics interacted with the works of art in Infinite Island and the questions and ideas they were able to draw out of it. This event was only the start of a larger conversation between the Museum and the higher education institutions in our community. Deirdre and I plan to host these open houses for professors and academic representatives once a semester, so if you are interested in attending the next one, please email academic.programs@brooklynmuseum.org.

Lessons learned post about the Visitor Video Competition for all the colleagues out there who might be thinking of doing something similar. (more…)

As the Brooklyn Museum means so much, and in so many different ways, to our audiences, these videos are an extraordinary reflection of both this diversity and of the enormous talent of our competitors. I’d be proud to have the Museum, its collection, and First Saturdays represented by any of the submitted videos, and I am thrilled by the selection of Mr. Cool, the Art Thief, and Off the Wall as our first winners! I am also deeply grateful to our volunteer judges, Christina Norman, Danny Simmons, and Patrick Amsellem for their great devotion to this difficult task. Congratulations to all and to all my sincere thanks. —Arnold Lehman, Director

First Place
Mr. Cool at the Brooklyn Museum
by Andrei Severny / Charles Grantham

Second Place
Brooklyn Museum - “Art Thief”
by Matthew K.

Third Place
Off the Wall
by Ralph Favilla / Louise Tiranoff

Runners up (in the order the date they were submitted) (more…)

On the eve of the announcement of our judges’ decision, Brooklyn Museum staff wanted to share some of our own thoughts (ranging from the “I-have-to-smile moment” to “the wow feeling” to “sleeper hit artworks”) with the filmmakers who created these videos. Good luck to everyone! Click the ‘more’ link to see our thoughts. (more…)

Michael Jackson was here for an Ebony photo shoot. This was pretty exciting for us and it looks like there were good shots of our Kevorkian Gallery, Rubin Pavilion and Beaux-Arts Court. The shoot was for the December issue, so it should be on newsstands fairly soon.