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One major recent acquisition is Hank Willis Thomas’ series “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America.” The whole series consists of 82 images, two for each year from 1968 to 2008, and the acquisition includes half of the series: one image from each year the series covers. The work appropriates print advertisement from 1968 to the present that targeted a black audience or featured black subjects. From the original ads, Hank Willis Thomas digitally removed all textual components as well as logos. The remaining figures and scenarios are often both captivating and perplexing, as the artist seeks to disclose the visual strategies of advertisers and how these are based in cultural stereotypes. The images encourages the viewer to think about how marketing images construct and underpin stereotypes about African American life in a way that is often embraced by the consumer of both the image and the product. We are hoping to show this new work at the Museum sometime next year.

Hank Willis Thomas from Brooklyn Museum on Vimeo.

The Museum recently acquired some great new photography. Much of it will be on view this coming August when we open a new show with material from the Contemporary Collection.

In this delicate group of black and white photographs, Dash Snow captures his family and extended family of friends in an intimate and unguarded fashion. In a diaristic snapshot of Chinatown at night, a young woman (Snow’s wife Jade) sits in a doorway with the stroller on the sidewalk close by. Despondent, head in hand, or just tired after a long night out (Dash forgetting the house keys, or so the story goes), the mundane snap shot is full of emotion. Another image shows the couple’s baby daughter in bed sound asleep, humorously juxtaposed with the child-unfriendly traces of a parent’s night out. The poetic rendering of Jade’s naked back bears trace of an intimate encounter and a street portrait of a friend hints at the androgynity of adolescence. A refashioned old portrait of the artist’s grandmother adds glamour to the group while an intense self-portrait shows the bearded artist in profile, the whites of his wildly gazing eyes glowing against his mud covered face. Best known for his often candid Polaroid snapshots, Dash Snow has received much attention over the past few years. An elusive graffiti tagger turned visual artist and Whitney Biennial participant, Snow is part of a tightly knit group of downtown artists who turn life into art in the manner of artists such as Nan Goldin, Larry Clark or Wolfgang Tillmans.

Sarah Baley’s show “Bois” opened at Collette Blanchard Gallery on the Lower East Side last Thursday night and we are very happy to have this image by Sarah in the collection.

Sarah Baley (American, born 1969).  Dug, 2005. From the series: Bois, 2009. Chromogenic print, 24 x 20 in. (61 x 50.8 cm).  Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Artist, 2009.14.

Youth culture and sexuality have often influenced both fashion photography and contemporary art. The work of Sarah Baley, an emerging Brooklyn-based artist, is indebted to the confluence of interests and close dialogue between these worlds in the recent decade. Her series “Bois” is an exploration of a Brooklyn-based, lesbian community who identify as bois. Many in the group call themselves gender queer, which implies a rejection of the gender binary system and an embrace of sexuality as a sliding scale of possibilities. In Baley’s view, sexuality has become one of the few ways in which people can still express freedom. In this image, “Dug,” Baley placed her subject—staged her, dramatically lit—by the East River close to the Brooklyn Bridge. The evolving industrial urban landscape, reflected in the rapid development of Brooklyn’s waterfront, functions as a metaphor or mirror for the group’s fluid definition of sexuality and gender. This photograph will be included in an installation of contemporary art at the Museum this coming August and Sarah’s show is on view at Collette Blanchard Gallery through June 17, 2009.

After I was recently asked to write a blog posting about Click! from my perspective, I spoke with some of my colleagues—Patrick Amsellem, Associate Curator of Photography, and Judy Kim, Curator of Exhibitions–about the exhibition, and we began to discuss the term “curated.” The three of us have all been curators of exhibitions in our careers, but we have also all been on juries for exhibitions, and we think that perhaps what the crowd was asked to do here was to jury the selection—that is, to rank the works that were submitted so that a selection could be made on the basis of that ranking. That is sometimes the first step toward curating an exhibition, but only the first step. Once an initial selection is made, the curator usually begins to refine the idea of the exhibition and to see how the ideas represented by the objects selected best work together, and how placing certain works side by side, or across the room from one another can have an impact on the way we perceive them, and thus help to advance the theme and the learning experience. Further “curating” is done by explaining in written form in the labels some of the ideas the installation conveys visually.

So if the crowd juried the images, how was it curated? And what was the idea curated? The theme of the photographs submitted was “The Changing Faces of Brooklyn,” but that is not the theme of the installation that is presented in our galleries. Although the changing faces of Brooklyn is an idea that underlies each of the works of art in the exhibition, the exhibition itself is about the notion of selection, and, specifically, selection by the crowd. Both visually, and in terms of its written didactics, the installation supports that primary idea, put forward—that is, curated—by Shelley Bernstein. And that is what makes it such an unusual and thought provoking exhibition. It seems to me that an exhibition that was only about the changing faces of Brooklyn in photography might be interesting, but an exhibition that is also about the nature of selection, and all the questions it raises about taste, background, interpretation—and a myriad of other issues—creates a richer discourse. In Click! the theme of the work and the selection and installation process complement and mutually reinforce one another, forming a compelling snapshot of who we are and how we chose.

I am interested to know what others think about this, and I will be taking questions on the subject this week.

Cover: Marcia Bricker Halperin. Dubrow’s Cafeteria, 1979.
Softcover: 86 pages, 7 x 7 inches.
Details, including a special $3-off coupon from Blurb.com, can be found here.

It may seem strange that in the third millennium, we still communicate by pressing pigment against the pulp of crushed trees. And yet, although we live in an age of digital data flickering on a screen, people remain deeply attached to books—to the way books look, the way they feel, even the way they smell. A book is, after all, a physical object, with an outside and an inside, and it invites you to enter its inner world and explore it, page by page. This remains an exciting adventure, not only for those of us in the publishing business but for the many millions of the dedicated book-reading public as well.

But how do you produce a publication appropriate to the special nature of Click!, an electronically generated project in which the curatorial shaping of content was designed to take place outside the walls of the Museum and be conducted by the public, in cyberspace? Instead of following the traditional publishing route and working with an established trade publishing company, it was decided to shape the catalogue, like the contents of the show, via the Web—using open book-making software and site resources that are readily available to ordinary users, not only Museum professionals. It’s the kind of project plan often described as “self-publishing.” Although it wasn’t possible to have the public at large create the bound book to the same extent that they had curated the show, it was possible at least to acknowledge the show’s distinctive method by producing this book the way any person with access to the Web would make their own, self-published book—by using easily accessible online resources. Stepping outside the Museum’s conventional way of doing books, which are usually formal ventures with mainstream publishers, the idea was to make this particular book in basically the same way anyone with a computer would go about it.

This meant that the Museum would be making its first foray into the growing business of print-on-demand publishing. Instead of producing thousands of copies of a given book and then storing them in a warehouse or a bookstore backroom until stock is needed, in this new form of publishing, a book is printed when, and only when, someone actually orders a copy, which is then individually output, bound, and shipped. To put the book project into the works, its creator, Shelley Bernstein, worked with Blurb, one of the best-known firms in the self-publishing field, and uploaded the Click! pictures, captions, and text into Blurb’s graphic-design software (while consulting with the Museum’s own editors and designers to choose type fonts and graphic treatments consistent with the institution’s standards). As a result of her innovative thinking, anyone can order a copy of the exhibition’s accompanying book, available directly from Blurb. Now you can experience Click! not only as an array of online images, or as a set of printed photos affixed to the walls of a Museum gallery, but also as a material object you can hold in your hands and keep.

There are those who feel that creating books through “assembly” software online represents, potentially, a revolution in bookmaking almost as significant, in its way, as Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type around 1439. Part of Gutenberg’s genius lay in chopping up words and sentences into their individual letters as separate pieces of wooden or metal type, so that those atoms could be easily assembled into new, unique pages of text ready for printing. Breaking information down into those tiny “bits” actually made it easier to put the necessary pieces together to create something new. In our era, with the resources of the Web, the components of a book can be assembled for printing as freely as Gutenberg assembled the letterforms of words for his press, but now working in the unfettered realm of electronic impulses rather than solid type. You can imagine Gutenberg looking down from his cloud in the great beyond, surveying the world of digitally created books, and saying, “Aha! Not just movable type, but incorporeal type!”

The Click! book serves the same purposes as the online and gallery exhibition, but in its own way. For instance, since the book is, essentially, a photo album in which each picture has its own page, this volume restores the pictures to the egalitarian same-size-for-everyone format in which they were submitted during the open call, instead of following the vote-based larger-versus-smaller sizes assigned to them in the gallery. And it puts the images back into a truly impartial order: alphabetical, by artist name, which is about as nonhierarchical and seemingly “random” a sequence as you can get. Although neutral in itself, the book’s nonjudgmental sequence does make for some surprises: Since by their very nature books are made up of two-page spreads, in our book every image has a random alphabetical companion on the facing page, which produces some astonishing accidental juxtapositions that would have warmed the heart of John Cage. Supposedly unrelated images on two facing pages speak to each other in ways that no one could have predicted. Sometimes the impromptu encounter between two unlikely companions really clicks.