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!

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.

One of the great feelings I experience at the Brooklyn Museum is when I see a true connection between the Library and art collections here. This connection was felt recently at a public program showcasing the work of the widely-admired translator Zahra Partovi and the Brooklyn-based artist Kelly Driscoll. Kelly and Zahra’s work Fragments of Light II is now on view in the exhibition Light of the Sufis: The Mystical Arts of Islam and several other books published by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. are on view in the Library display cases on the second floor. The conversation included Zahra, Kelly, Ladan Akbarnia, Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art, and me, with a large audience made up of artists and artisans who have collaborated with Vincent Fitzgerald over the years. We had a lively conversation and the opportunity to view some remarkable books.

This panel discussion, held Saturday June 13, 2009 at the Brooklyn Museum, addressed the production, collection, and display of Sufi-inspired artist books. Zahra Partovi, whose artist book Fragments of Light II is featured in the special exhibition Light of the Sufis, discussed her art in conversation with collaborating book artist Kelly Driscoll, Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art Ladan Akbarnia, and Principal Librarian Deirdre Lawrence.

Vincent has been the primary leader in the overall conception, design and production of these books, pulling together incredibly talented artists and artisans to create them. The books, all inspired by the Sufi poetry of Rumi as translated by Zahra Partovi, are a jewel in the crown of our artists’ book collection and remain wonderful examples of how contemporary art can carry on the essence of traditional art.

How did these wonderful books come into the Brooklyn Museum collection?

Back in October 1998 the Brooklyn Museum held an exhibition entitled Royal Persian Paintings, The Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925 curated by Dr. Layla Diba. This exhibition was one of several that Brooklyn has featured over the years and an example of the Museum’s long standing interest in Islamic art. The Library collection is also rich in this area due to a series of grants from the Hagop Kevorkian Fund and donations such as the personal library of noted Islamic scholar Charles K. Wilkinson whose selected acquisitions are on view in the newly reinstalled Islamic Art galleries.The Library has a collection of artists’ books, ranging from multiples to limited editions to unique works, many of which relate to the cultures represented by the Museum’s object collections. Many of the books published by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. fall into this latter category as they resonate so well with the Islamic collections here.

I first met Vincent FitzGerald and Zahra Partovi in the Dieu Donne Galleries in 1999 at an exhibition entitled Dialogues in Collaboration: the publications of Vincent FitzGerald & Co. I remember being swept off my feet by the books on view and wanted to bring some of these books into the Brooklyn Museum collection.  Both Vincent and Zahra recognized the Museum’s longstanding interest in Islamic art and knew their books would fit in well with our collections.

Through the generosity of anonymous donors and guidance from Vincent we were given nine books created by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. The books demonstrate in a beautiful way that thirteenth-century Persian poetry can be made intellectually accessible to a present-day audience. Since we acquired these books we have featured them in exhibitions such as Working in Brooklyn: Artists Books in 2000 and they have been a favorite of visiting teachers, students and artists in the Library Reading Room. Both visually challenging and intellectually stimulating, these books speak to the future of the book as a vibrant tool for communication while being works of art in themselves. The Fragments of Light series is the most recent example of innovative ways Vincent and his collaborators challenge the definition of the book.

Come visit and see these great books in person!

Librarians are natural collaborators—we share materials through interlibrary loan, data through cataloging cooperatives, and our subject and technical expertise on numerous listservs and professional committees—but moving beyond these traditional modes of collaboration is challenging. Collaboration is hard because it often requires an institutional shift; it is time-consuming and relies on effective communication, teamwork, consensus-building and a healthy dose of respect. Last week, Brooklyn Museum hosted a discussion on collaboration led by representatives from NYARC to talk about the future of art museum libraries and used the consortium’s activities as an example of how museum libraries are working together. Since the launch of Arcade in January, there has been a lot of buzz in the art libraries community regarding NYARC and this was a good session to demystify who we are (the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum, Frick, MoMA, and the Met), what we are doing (shared catalog aka Arcade and digitization projects) and where we are going (resource sharing, collection development and engage future partners).

Arcade launch party held in the Reading Room of the Frick Art Reference Library, February 24, 2009. From left to right: Ken Soehner, Arthur K Watson Chief Librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Milan Hughston, Chief of Library and Museum Archives, Museum of Modern Art; Deirdre Lawrence, Principal Librarian, Brooklyn Museum; and Deborah Kempe, Chief of Collections Management & Access, Frick Art Reference Library.

The event brought a nice mix of graduate students and library professionals together to exchange ideas and ask questions of the panel, which included Ken Soehner (Met), Deborah Kempe (Frick), Milan Hughston (MoMA) and our own Deirdre Lawrence. Some of the key buzz words to come out of the discussion were that we have entered a period of “permanent beta” and “permanent whitewater”. I think these two phrases succinctly characterize today’s current environment given economic realities, the swift pace of technological advances and our users’ expectations of working and producing scholarship in an increasingly more dynamic environment. It is precisely due to the perfect storm of challenges facing us that collaboration is more necessary than ever.

Although I have been working with NYARC for the last few years, what I found really interesting during the discussion is the number of projects and sustained level of collaboration that the group has managed to realize… at times, it is difficult to see the forest for the trees and we need these events to focus on what has been accomplished and what remains to be done (a NYARC website coming soon!). None of us are fooled into thinking that we have achieved anything radical yet, but we certainly have the foundation and potential to make it happen. Stay tuned …

We are very proud of the fact that Walt Whitman not only lived and worked in Brooklyn but that he had a direct connection to this institution in its early days as a library. This past Saturday we had a fabulous opportunity to celebrate Whitman and our past with representatives from the Whitman Project and Woodside Press.

The Whitman Project included Associate Artistic Director Greg Trupiano; Associate Artistic Director Lon Black; Nicole Mitchell; and Hakim Williams. Both Greg and Lon read  eloquently from Whitman’s writings about witnessing the early days of the Brooklyn Apprentice’s Library and the Brooklyn Institute. Their readings from “Brooklyniana,” Leaves of Grass, and Specimen Days beautifully captured Whitman’s fond memories of the sites and sounds of Brooklyn. They also read excerpts from books that were in the Library at the time Whitman was acting librarian in 1835, including titles such as The History of Printing in America by Isaiah Thomas, published in 1810, and An historical … view of the United States of America by William Winterbotham. Mezzo-soprano Nicole Mitchell graced us with her beautiful renditions of “Oh! Susannah” and “Ode,” set to the music of the “Star Spangled Banner.” Hakim Williams passionately recited Whitman’s words from his texts, including “Old Brooklyn Days” and “Brooklyniana” including a wonderful description of Francis Guy’s A Snow Scene in Brooklyn in the Olden Times which describes in detail the painting in the Brooklyn Museum collection. Mr. Hakim’s reading of “Early Typesetting Experience” by Whitman set the stage for the next part of the program which focused on a poem entitled “Pictures.”

Andrew Birsh and Davin Kuntze from Woodside Press, a traditional letterpress printing shop in The Brooklyn Navy Yard, premiered their new book featuring a poem by Walt Whitman. They created a small edition of Pictures: A Poem by Walt Whitman, which is available directly from the Press. When time allows and the inspiration is there, they publish and print fine-press editions that illuminate their capabilities with classic typography, letterpress presswork, and bookbinding by hand. The beautiful letterpress chapbook is set in Linotype Baskerville, hand-sewn and printed on Magnani Avorio paper and was designed and printed for Woodside Press by Davin Kuntze.  The book has a very magical quality—we were all convinced that Walt Whitman had been overseeing the production of the book, which matches the colors and ink that were used in the original 1927 edition. Mr. Kuntze had not seen the edition that is in the Brooklyn Museum Library collection and we were all amazed on Saturday when we got our book out to compare to the new Woodside Press edition. There is an uncanny likeness to the original!

We all agreed that Walt Whitman is still with us in spirit as he had been in the days when he lived in Brooklyn oh so long ago. A comforting thought in today’s world.  Here’s the program PDF if you’d like to see it.