Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

If you are a fan of the The Commons on Flickr and live in the NYC area, come to our Common Ground meetup this weekend to celebrate—we’ve got tons and tons of neato stuff to give away!  The folks from the NYPL are going to be joining us to meet and greet and answer questions about the fantastic images being uploaded to The Commons.  We’ll be running a really big slideshow curated by the Flickr community in the lobby, so come find us this Saturday October 3rd, 6-9:30 pm!  That’s smack dab in the middle of a fabulous opera-inspired Target First Saturday, so there will be lots to do here that evening.

Don’t forget, this is a global meetup, check out these other venues if you live closer to these areas:

Sydney, Australia. A bit jealous of our colleagues over at the Powerhouse Museum who have been making preparations all week for an outdoor slideshow on the facade of their building.  The Powerhouse peeps are teaming up with the State Library of New South Wales for a joint event.

Brisbane, Australia.  The State Library of Queensland is also presenting the slideshow outdoors on their Queensland Terrace—one of my personal favorite buildings in all of Australia is the Queensland Library, so that should be an amazing event in a great location!

Canberra, Australia.  The Australian War Memorial is also taking part with a projection in their orientation gallery.

Safety Harbor and Tallahassee, Florida.  The State Archives of Florida are running two events in the area.

Rochester, New York.  George Eastman House is hosting an event in their theatre and that means you can meet Ryan…he’s the one we have to thank for the slideshow because he did a ton of work programming the voting tool and the slideshow via the Flickr API.  Thanks, Ryan!

Corvalis, Oregon.  Don’t miss the photograph on this event listing—these Oregon peeps have a sense of Flickr-humor and we love them for it.

…but perhaps the Swedish National Heritage Board has us all beat!   They are hosting their event in the Medieval St. Karin Church ruin in central Visby on the island of Gotland, Sweden.  That very same church ruin is actually pictured in one of the photographs they’ve uploaded to The Commons.  It kind of doesn’t get more meta than that!

Coming to a meetup?  Tweet using the #CommonGround hashtag and if you upload photos to Flickr, tag them CommonGround2009 and we’d love to see them added to The Commons group.  Hope to meet you there!

We found that 1stfans really enjoyed Nick Fortunato’s project for June’s Twitter Art Feed because of the idea that history could come alive again and be relevant in a social networking age. Trish Mayo, this month’s artist for the Feed, sent in a similar proposal based around the issue of how historical figures would receive twitter if they were alive today.

Trish Mayo. Hot Bird’s Last Stand, 2008. All rights reserved.  Featured in Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition.

Trish is a photographer by trade—her work was featured in our Click! exhibition in 2008 and was recently part of an exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights.  In addition to having her work featured in the New York Times, she has a huge following on Flickr. Trish’s proposal was selected from the open call and we’ve noticed that the proposals we receive via this channel tend to be from artists who use Twitter everyday and have a great understanding of how people interact with the medium in their everyday lives. Here, in Trish’s own words, is her project for October’s Twitter Art Feed:

IF THEY ONLY HAD TWITTER - pity those poor people who lived before twitter was available! I propose to give those twitter-less people a chance to comment on the online social networking phenomenon using their actual words by posting a series of quotes. Taken out of context these quotes can seem to show support, skepticism or trivialize twitter and other social networking sites. Reading these words spoken or written many, even hundreds, of years before the twitter age should make us think not only about what we are saying now, but also about what has been said before and how it resonates through time and space.

In the final dig diary posting for 2009, I talked about the importance of publishing the results of our work at the site. The first phase of publication is the preliminary report (in English and Arabic) that we are required to submit to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) each season describing that year’s work. These reports eventually appear in the journal, Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Egypte.

With the gracious permission of Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the SCA, we are now able to make the English and Arabic reports for the 1996 through 2009 seasons available online as well through the museum’s website.  We hope the reports will be a useful resource for anyone interested in the Mut Precinct and the museum’s work there.

We are in the midst of planning for the next season of fieldwork, scheduled for January-March 2010. Watch for the 2010 Dig Diary, starting in mid-January.

Hieroglyphs for Mut and Sakhmet on the Propylon (main gate) of the Mut Precinct.

One hundred years ago the Brooklyn Museum participated in the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, a city-wide event organized by New York State. The 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration honored two significant historical moments—the centennial of Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat; and the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s entry into New York Harbor, laying the foundation for Dutch colonization in New York.

View of the Brooklyn Museum’s Eastern Parkway façade, showing the museum lit up for Hudson Fulton Centennial, 1909. B/w copy negative, 5 x 7in (12.7 x 17.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum building. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, S06_BEEi014.jpg)

The 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration illuminated New York City in hundreds of thousands of electric lights. This idea can’t quite have the same impact as it did one hundred years ago. In 2009, events such as Earth Hour are celebrated to turn off electric lights and lessen our impact on global warming. However, to understand how the Illuminations were perceived in 1909, it may help to consider that electric lighting was slowly making its way into residential homes, and at that point in time only three out of every ten homes in New York City had electricity. This 1909 advertisement for home electricity highlights the benefits of bringing electric light into homes.

Advertisement for Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn, at the time of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. Printed in the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences Bulletin, Volume 3, no. 16, December 25, 1909.

The 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration Illuminations throughout the city were unprecedented, “the result was an electrical display of great variety and wonderful beauty which excited the admiration of everyone and make a spectacle which had never been presented in New York before on so grand a scale.” The Brooklyn Museum participated in the celebrations by covering the building in 7,200 lights as seen in the first photograph of this post.

In addition to the Illuminations, the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration included art exhibitions, concerts, street and water parades, attracting visitors from all over the world and the Museum Libraries hold many published historical resources [pdf] on the Hudson-Fulton Celebration.  2009 also marks the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival, and a huge range of Dutch themed events scheduled throughout the year can be found through the NY400 website.

You better believe we are going to be watching the True Blood season two finale, which is airing on HBO this Sunday night at 9pm! If you read the blog, you saw Madeleine blogging about the discovery that our Bird Lady statue was spotted in the first episode of the season.  Soon after, the awesome people at HBO got us in touch with Production Designer, Suzuki Ingerslev, who answered our questions about why this object was selected and they gave us some subtle hints as to the significance. Throughout the season we’ve continued to see various references to our object, but things started to really heat up again in episode ten…

Here’s the character Maryann creating a “meat tree”…see the resemblance to the Bird Lady? Michelle Forbes (the actress who plays Maryann) gave an interview for TV Guide in which she talks about the tree: “It was filled with real meat and reeked as the weeks wore on. There are bobcats and coyotes roaming around that ranch where we shoot, so they had someone sit by the tree with a gun at night to protect it.”  Love that—all bird ladies warrant protection.

(Conservators please avert your eyes!)  Bird Lady is spotted several times in Sookie’s house where Maryann is squatting.  Seen here in episode ten, she’s covered in eggs and eggshells and if you watched episode eleven those eggs have even more meaning. Now, as we *try* to wait patiently for Sunday’s season finale, we’ll leave you with a few things to ponder….

…this quote we found from Michelle Forbes:

…this awesome finale still shot (!!!!!)  sent to us from the fabulous people we’ve been speaking with at HBO:

…lastly, don’t forget to stop by and see our Bird Lady—she’s 5,500 years old and waiting for you on our third floor in Egypt Reborn….