Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

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.

I can’t believe that it’s been more than a year since my last posting on this topic. I guess I got distracted by other tasks. I was recently asked to “wrap it up,” so here it goes…

In my first installment, I mentioned that no curator shops alone. The official process for adding an object to a museum collection really underscores that idea. It’s that final process, known as “accessioning,” that I’m going to talk about here.

Shiva as Chandrashekhara. Southern India. Chola period, c. 970 A.D. Bronze. Height 25 in. Brooklyn Museum. Gift of the Asian Art Council and other donors in honor of Amy G. Poster, 2007.2.

After we were offered the Shiva by a well-known New York dealer, I had a few people join me on a visit to his workspace to see the object. In our group were the curator emeritus whom the object was going to honor, the co-Chairs of the group of supporters who were largely responsible for funding the purchase, the former Chair of the group (who happens to know a great deal about Indian sculpture), and our senior object conservator (Lisa Bruno, a fellow Brooklyn Museum blogger). All of us were looking for different things, especially the conservator, who wanted to make sure the Shiva wasn’t actively deteriorating and who was looking for signs of major repair or tampering that might have compromised the authenticity of the object.

Once the Shiva passed all our criteria, we told the dealer to “hold” the piece for us and we asked for photographs. I rushed back to our Director, Deputy Director, and Chief Curator and showed them the photos while also making a pitch for why the object would make such a good addition to the collection, how we could use it in various different types of exhibitions, why it was an appropriate acquisition to honor Amy, etc. They seemed impressed. Had they not been impressed, it would have been pretty difficult for me to move forward with the purchase. I have had directors reject objects that I really, really wanted, and while it seemed terribly unfair and somewhat arbitrary at the time one has to remember that the Director has broad experience and really is just looking out for the wellbeing of the Museum.

Only after I got their go-ahead did I arrange for the object to come to the Museum. We generally try not to have works of art delivered to the Museum unless we are quite sure that we want them. The Museum usually has to foot the bill for returning the objects we decide not to acquire, and packing and shipping of works of art can get pretty expensive.

After the object arrived at the Museum, it received further inspections by conservators and administrators while I generated the official paperwork to present it to our Collections Committee. Most art museums have a Collections Committee, comprised of members of the Board of Trustees and sometimes other high-ranking constituents. The Committee is tasked with keeping the Museum on track with the kind, quality, and number of objects it acquires (and disposes — more on that later). The Committee looks at gifts as well as purchases.

The curators and Director wouldn’t present anything to the Collections Committee without a strong sense that it should be added to the collection, but the Committee is there as a final check on the Museum staff, to make sure that we haven’t overlooked a serious problem with the object or the terms of its acquisition. They meet several times a year to look at, and vote on, the latest batch of acquisitions. Only after the Committee has voted can an object be added officially to the collection.

After the Collections Committee meeting, and only after the meeting, the Museum cuts a check for the vendor. Sometimes—often—many months pass between the day the curator first expresses interest in a work of art and the day the dealer receives any money for it. Dealers are willing to put up with the delay because of the prestige of having sold an object to a museum. But there are certainly situations in which a Museum loses out on an object because a private collector can pay for it on the spot and the dealer really needs the cash.

Designer Lance Singletary works with Brooklyn Museum Art Handlers to install Shiva as Chandrashekhara.

After the object has been approved by the Committee, it is assigned an accession number (you’ll notice these associated with all of Brooklyn’s objects; they start with a 2-digit or 4-digit date) and a location in storage. In an ideal world we would put all our new acquisitions out on view immediately after they arrive, but installing works of art in a public gallery costs quite a bit of money. Sculptures often need mounts made, pedestals built, etc. It seems kind of tacky, but sometimes we have to tell a potential donor that we can’t accept their work of art as a gift unless they also give us the cash to pay for its installation. Museum casework has to ensure proper climate and security, and an apparently simple pedestal with a Plexiglas bonnet can cost several thousand dollars. Luckily, we already had a pedestal in the Indian gallery that was just right for our Shiva, and he didn’t need any fancy mount because his base sits flat and steady. So we moved him into the gallery shortly after we acquired him and we don’t have any plans to move him in the future, so he’s probably there right now.

A final word on the accessioning process: it is slow, involves a lot of paperwork, and requires the efforts of dozens of individuals, but it is designed to make sure that we are serious, cautious, and deliberate in our intake of art objects. Every art museum (there may be one or two exceptions) has junk in storage. The majority of it was given, rather than purchased. Often the curator knew or suspected it was junk but accepted it anyway because they didn’t want to offend the donor. There’s something to be said for cultivating long-term relationships with donors, but storage space is finite and we’re supposed to treat all objects with a very high level of care that can be a burden on the budget and staff time. So nowadays we are pretty hardcore about what we accept. And like most museums, we do some deaccessioning, or removal of objects from the collection.

Probably most of you have read news stories criticizing museums for selling off great works of art from their collections. Even when deaccessioning is handled properly (with proceeds used only to support future acquisitions of works of art), it can be newsworthy because a community experiences a loss of “cultural heritage” when a beloved masterpiece leaves the area or leaves the public domain. What you don’t hear about in the press is the far greater number of not-so-great works of art that leave museum collections on a pretty regular basis. And you also don’t hear just how much work museums have to put into the process of releasing objects, many of which will fetch three figures on a good day. We have numerous people from several sectors sign off on the release (including the Collections Committee), we put considerable effort into finding appropriate homes for the objects in other public institutions, and then if we do sell we prefer to do so at auction so the transaction can be as public as possible even though an auction might not be the most lucrative venue for sale. In short, deaccessioning is a laborious and mostly unrewarding process and the aim of the curator is to take in as few future deaccessions as possible.

Let’s not end this long series on a grim note! Instead, please let me encourage you to visit the Asian Art galleries, on the second floor of the Brooklyn Museum. We’re gradually getting more and more of the collection out onto the web, but really nothing beats seeing the objects in person. One of the great things about an in-person visit to a museum is the happy accidents—you go to see a specific show or work of art but you catch sight of something you’ve never seen or heard of before and it becomes the thing you remember, the object that changes your outlook in some way. So come visit our Shiva, and maybe you’ll find some other works of art that are even more exciting.

If Marshall McLuhan were a gypsy and his teacup the art world, the tea leaves would be artists’ books. —Ingrid Sishey (National Arts Guide, vol. 1, no.1, Jan-Feb. 1979, p.2-3)

This quote resonates so well with me as it points to the role artists’ books have both as messengers of information and works of art in themselves. From mass produced, or open editions to limited editions to unique bookworks – artists’ books underscore McLuhan’s ideas about the medium as the message. Artists’ books constitute a highly varied contemporary art form which can be described as artworks which exist within the structure of books. Usually these are books utilizing a sequence of pages to produce a stream of imagery - textual and/or visual. They employ a full range of forms utilizing unusual paper, typographic design and bindings.

Artists’ books are a vibrant part of the Brooklyn Museum Library Special Collections. The Museum Library started to actively collect artists’ books in the 1970’s and now there are approximately 2,000 titles with a collecting emphasis on multiples. In an effort not to duplicate what other art libraries are collecting in the New York area, we have developed a collection policy that focuses on:

• Innovative works created by Brooklyn-based artists
• Innovative works created by artists worldwide
• Works created by artists either exhibited by the Museum or who have works in the Museum’s art object collection
• Works that relate to the objects or cultures represented in the Museum’s object collection

We try to present the artists’ books collection to the public either through display in exhibitions or through on-site visits and artist’s talks. This past Saturday we featured Angela Lorenz who is an American artist living in Bologna, Italy. Ms. Lorenz talked about her very innovative work entitled Pandora’s Book (1992). She creates mixed-media limited-edition artists’ books and uses them as a tool to convey cultural observations and historical research. As whimsical and humorous as some of her books are, each one is based on fact often derived directly from experts in architecture, anthropology, art history, textiles, and economics. This thought-provoking bookwork was recently donated to the Brooklyn Museum Library by Dorothy and Jerome Preston in honor of Dorothy Cochlin McCann (1899-1997), art historian and avid sewer.

On December 1st we are going to feature the work of Booklyn – watch our website for details and visit the Library Online Catalog to see what artists’ books we have in the collection!

Portions of this text are excerpted from an essay of mine published in the Artists’ Book Yearbook 2001-2002 (Impact Press, 2001). For copies of the essay or more information about artists’ books send us an email to library@brooklynmuseum.org.