FAQ
Shonibare at Play in the Period Rooms
Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play is a work that was made specifically for our period rooms. Last spring when Yinka Shonibare was in New York, he visited the Brooklyn Museum to meet with the relevant staff and also to take a look at the Blum and 4th floor Schapiro galleries, where his survey Yinka Shonibare MBE would be installed. While he was here, we gave him a tour of our period rooms, and he was immediately enchanted by them. Before the day was over, it was decided that he would create a site-specific work for a number of those rooms. Once he was back in London, we emailed him the floor plans for the period rooms along with documents about the history of each of the rooms. Yinka seemed taken not only with the way the rooms look—the furnishings, the maze-like layout of the houses, etc—but also with the historical context of the rooms.
Months later, we started to receive “work in progress” shots of the children-size mannequins. First the preliminary sketches, then the sculpted clay bodies of the mannequins, and finally a picture of the girl with jump rope. Then the mannequins were packed and crated in Yinka’s studio and sent by ship to arrive here in time for the installation. Even though they were produced in London and there were no opportunities to try them out in the respective rooms before their arrival, they all fit perfectly in their new temporary homes.
As Yinka has said about the placement of the children, “It’s like the children’s game, ‘Where’s Waldo?’” There are no individual labels pointing out the specific locations of the children; the idea is for our visitors to wander through the rooms and stumble upon them. Hopefully those who usually come to the Brooklyn Museum to see contemporary works will discover our wonderful period rooms through Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play. And, those who are already familiar with the period rooms will rediscover these rooms and see them in a different way.
Photos: Yinka Shonibare MBE installation Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play in the Brooklyn Museum period rooms. From top to bottom installations in the Cane Acres Plantation House, John D. Rockefeller House Moorish Smoking Room, and Trippe House.
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
July 14th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I saw this the last time I was at the Museum and it is certainly an interesting twist. But the museum itself has made a huge mistake relegating the period rooms to an after thought and destroying the continuity of the original displays for the Feminist areas. It’s terrible the lack of attention they get. The Moorish room needs some work as it is fading rapidly at this point and a number of the important structures are completely gone. The historical Brooklyn houses are shoved in a corner. It is too bad that the historical importance of these works have not received their due.
Brooklyn is one of the most historical places in the US and nearly a scant word is left of what was once the best part of the museum.
July 21st, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Ruben - I have not visited the period rooms at the Museum, but after reading your comment I will make a point to go. I am a big fan of the new American Wing and their period rooms. I think they are my favorite part in the entire museum. There is just something about being in a room that can transcend you back to a point in time and allow you to be completely absorbed in that era. I believe these rooms are important pieces of history that need to be maintained so people can understand what life was like in previous periods. I hope the Museum will pay more attention to these areas.
July 29th, 2009 at 9:34 am
I want to start by saying that I am a big fan of Yinka’s body of work up to now. However, I struggle to find the relevance between Yinka’s comments on the European colonization of Africa and American period rooms. Certainly there was mimicry of European decorative art trends during the colonial period, but here that only confuses the reality that these are not actual European settings. If the artist had somehow chosen to address the African-American experience of the American colonial period, I would be convinced; but his standard Victorian costumes in Dutch textiles just don’t seem to apply here. Yinka is not African-American and the period rooms are not European. I don’t think you can have it both ways. There is no discourse going on here about the tri-continental movement to of either Europeans or Africans. It is as though visual ‘fun’ and getting visitors into the period rooms, has superseded the quality of the art. I think it’s time for Yinka to move forward with his work.
August 12th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
[…] I saw some of Yinka Shonibare’s wonderful work at the Museum of Art in Santa Barbara this past spring. He’s currently got a similar exhibit up at the Brooklyn Museum, though his “Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play” is particularly great, because it makes use of the Museum’s oft-overlooked period rooms. Shonibare has given new life to the installations by peppering the rooms with Victorian children playing, sometimes requiring visitors to explore the spaces differently in order to find them. Even better, his process itself has is being characterized as playful. […]