Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

One of my favorite parts of my job as a museum educator and public programmer is witnessing the conversations that visitors have in the galleries and or during public programs, such as performances and panel discussions. The works of art in Infinite Island have stimulated a lot of discussion, especially around questions of identity, culture, nationality, history and community. We are continuing to highlight these themes with two upcoming public programs that will give Infinite Island a proper send off.

Roger Bonair-Agard in Masquerade. Photo by Peter Dressel

The first is a performance this Saturday, January 19, at 2 p.m. by Brooklyn-based Caribbean members of spoken-word collective louderARTS Project. It is hosted by Def Poetry Jam’s Roger Bonair-Agard, and features poets Hallie Hobson, Rich Villar, and Cheryl Boyce Taylor.

Next weekend, on January 26, we will be collaborating with the organization Domestic Workers United to present their short film “Work and Respect” in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Members of Domestic Workers United, many of whom are from the Caribbean, will talk about the film making process and their experience organizing for their rights as domestic workers in New York City.

I am really looking forward to both these programs which highlight many important voices from our community and, if you join us, we would love to know what you think.

Art handlers installing Miguel Luciano’s Platano Pride and Miguel Luciano himself.

Over the past few months of teaching university students in Infinite Island, I have found that students instantly respond to works of art that incorporate ideas and images referencing popular culture. Pieces in the show such as the one by Miguel Luciano, Platano Pride, start conversation before I even have a chance to ask any questions because the students understand immediately the visual language with which the artists are working. This Saturday, November 17, at 2 p.m. we will host the third panel discussion in the Infinite Island discussion series which will focus on the role that music and popular culture play in contemporary Caribbean art and culture. I look forward to hearing more from the panelists about how popular culture and music can serve as sites for creativity and resistance in the Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora communities. I know that the insights they share will enhance my teaching and the discussions I will have in the galleries with my students.

Panelists include Sujatha Fernandes, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens College, City University of New York and author of Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures; Raquel Z. Rivera, Research Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, and co-editor of an forthcoming anthology Reading Reggaeton: Historical, Aesthetic and Critical Perspectives; and Infinite Island artist Miguel Luciano. The discussion will be moderated by Infinite Island curator Tumelo Mosaka.

If you join us we would love to know what you think!

As an educational programmer I am always on the lookout for organizations with which we can collaborate to bring innovative and diverse programs to the Museum. I am especially excited about our upcoming film programs this weekend that are a partnership with Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century. Art:21 offers a unique perspective on contemporary art by giving viewers an often unseen look of artists working in their studios, installing, and reflecting on their works in progress. On October 13 and 14 we are showing a special sneak-preview of the episodes “Protest” and “Paradox” from their upcoming 4th season.

The episode “Protest,” showing Saturday, October 13 at 2 p.m., features artists Jenny Holzer, Nancy Spero, Alfredo Jaar and An-My Lê. The artists in this episode employ visual art as a means to provoke personal transformations and social revolutions. This episode is particularly relevant to the exhibitions featured in our Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art because it speaks to the themes of The Dinner Party and Global Feminisms Remix. Following the screening, Brooklyn-based artist An-My Lê will discuss her work (see above for a clip from “Protest” featuring An-My Lê).

On Sunday, October 14 at 2 p.m, we are screening the episode “Paradox” as part of our Caribbean Film Series. “Paradox” features the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, whose video and photographs are featured in Infinite Island. The episode explores artists responding to paradoxes between global and local realities, and engaging with uncertainty in the art they create. Following the screening Eve Moros Ortega, Art:21’s Series Producer, will discuss the episode.

As I am committed to closely linking public programs to themes and questions that are raised by the works of art in our exhibitions, I am enthusiastic about the two Art:21 episodes that we are screening and the talks that accompany them. If you join us we would love to know what you think!

Infinite Island opened nearly three weeks ago at the Brooklyn Museum, and thousands of people have already visited the exhibition. We’ve been getting great feedback - check out what visitors are saying.

Roughly half of the show’s participating artists are back in town for this evening’s Members’ reception, as well as to participate in various panels and discussions taking place at the Museum over the next few weeks. Festivities and events include, of course, our next Target First Saturday on October 6^th. That weekend will feature many programs and activities focusing on Infinite Island, so be sure to stop by!

Annalee Davis, one of our presenting artists, installs Just Beyond my Imagination at the Brooklyn Museum.

The artists’ return to Brooklyn also offered a great opportunity to organize an informal artists’ talk in the galleries tomorrow, Friday, September 21^st. Do you have a question about a work in Infinite Island? Would you like to meet your favorite artist in the exhibition? Beginning at 12:30 PM tomorrow, over a dozen Infinite Island artists will be on-hand in the galleries, ready to discuss their work and receive your questions and comments. One artist will present every half-hour through closing at 5:00 PM, and talks will occur simultaneously on both floors of the exhibition. When you arrive, you can find the final schedule for tomorrow’s talks in the Lobby, or ask for more information at our Visitor Service desk. We look forward to seeing you!

Remy Jungerman installs Sometimes Travelers Don’t Come Back… at the Brooklyn Museum. Hear Remy discuss this work tomorrow!

Contact tamara.schechter@brooklynmuseum.org with any questions about this event.

Artist Steve Ouditt installing his Infinite Island work, “Excerpts From the Propagandist’s Diary of L. Padre Grande,” 2007.

What happens after an exhibition opens? Even after the works of art are displayed in the galleries, activity behind the scenes at the Museum does not stop. In the case of museum educators and educational programmers like me, our work really begins after an exhibition opens, but starts many months before. To prepare for Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, I have been working closely with curator Tumelo Mosaka to decide what kinds of public programs related would offer innovative perspectives and interesting experiences for our visitors. After months of preparation, our inaugural public program for Infinite Island will take place this Saturday, September 22nd at 2 p.m.

Visualizing Caribbean Art and Culture in the Twenty-first Century includes five dynamic speakers who come from a variety of backgrounds and areas of expertise: Aisha Khan, Associate Professor of Anthropology at NYU and Director of Undergraduate Studies; Infinite Island catalog essayist Annie Paul, Associate Editor of the journal Small Axe and Head of Publications at Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Research at University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica; and Infinite Island artists Jean-Ulrick Dèsert, Deborah Jack and Steve Ouditt (pictured above). Tumelo Mosaka will moderate the event.

This is the first in a series of three panels and it should be exciting to hear the discussion of contemporary Caribbean art and culture with these artists and scholars. If you attend, let us know your thoughts.

Update 9/26/07: Photos posted to our Flickr account.

Just what are “interpretive materials”? I’m often asked this question and usually have a hard time reducing my answer to one or even five things, as interpretive materials change with time and vary from one exhibition to the next. For the purpose of brevity in this post, in a nutshell, they consist of exhibition didactics, labels, brochures/printed guides, audio tours, podcasts, and more. Notably, they also include our visitor comment books.

Comment book in traditional form in the Asian and Islamic Art galleries.

One of the many goals of interpretive materials at the Brooklyn Museum is to consider the various ways that people learn (e.g. through text, sound, drawing, sharing, etc), to offer new ways for our visitors to experience and engage with objects and to keep the older methods current/relevant. If you’ve visited our permanent collections in recent years you may have noticed some unique labels which offer responses to and interpretations by our visitors to specific works of art – we call these “Community Voices.”

Community Voices label from the Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity permanent collection exhibition.

It’s important to me that in addition to these practices in the physical exhibition, that such object interpretation and, really, education progress alongside technology; in the age of web 2.0 learning is essentially communal. Earlier this year my colleague, Shelley Bernstein, and I decided to try something new, replacing paper comment books with electronic comment kiosks for our special exhibitions Global Feminisms and Kindred Spirits. The overwhelming participation and positive feedback, both in the galleries and through our online comment forum, made it a very successful initiative.

Electronic comment kiosk for the exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art

As Shelley mentioned in her last post, Let’s Hear It, we are rolling out a new version of comment kiosks for the exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art. Now visitors have the opportunity to not only share general comments about the exhibition (as earlier offered), but also to comment on specific objects. In this, the Brooklyn Museum mission and subsequent tradition of Community Voice labels continues (and evolves). We wait anxiously to hear your thoughts.

Only two days left until Infinite Island opens here at the Brooklyn Museum! I have enjoyed regaling you with descriptions of huge, complicated installations, and the most unlikely materials ever to be found in a Museum. I assure you, however, that the level of exactitude for which we aim holds true for the other installations as well. For example, take a look at a detail from Tropical Night, by Christopher Cozier, below:

This piece is comprised of 200 drawings on paper, each 9″ x 7″ and hung in a grid, secured to the wall with binder clips and simple pushpins. It is a fairly straightforward installation, and yet preparation for it began months ago with the selection process for proper hanging hardware. I even sent a sample pushpin and clip overnight to Cozier in Trinidad; we wanted to be sure everything was in line with his vision for the completed piece.

Ultimately, we decided to invite the artist to complete the installation here at the Museum, since his preferred placement of each drawing is ever-changing. Though he had shipped the piece to us months ago, he arrived with a stack of alternate drawings to work with so that he would have more variety in creating the final layout. It took the artist two days to construct the grid of drawings.

Drawings to supplement the completion of Tropical Night, by Christopher Cozier.

The completed piece, though installed with everyday office materials and almost childlike at first glance, is actually a complex narrative about repression. It is at once understated, accessible, and very beautiful in its subtlety - and one of my favorite pieces in the show. I’m thrilled to share it with you, and look forward to seeing and hearing your reactions to it.

Christopher Cozier constructs the grid for Tropical Night.

Infinite Island opens this Friday, August 31^st. We look forward to seeing you there!

Screenshot from the Infinite Island comment kiosks.

In preparation for the opening of Infinite Island this Friday, we’ve just finished installing our comment kiosks. For this exhibition, we developed a couple of new components. Now, our visitors can give us general comments about the exhibition or specific comments about selected highlights. To give each comment greater visibility, we created an attract screen for the kiosk that selects comments at random and displays them with the appropriate work of art.

As always, comments can be submitted onsite using our comment kiosks or directly from the website. No matter where you leave them, all comments are visible on the website and in the gallery.

If you are coming to the exhibition, be sure to let us know what you think. Kiosks can be found on both the 4th and 5th floors near the stairwells.

Contemporary art often employs cutting-edge techniques, technologies, and materials, and our Infinite Island artists are proof in point. I would love to share some of the interesting materials coming in to the Museum as we get ready for the exhibition opening - just days away!

1200 AA batteries are used to light Bounty, a series of light boxes by Deborah Jack.

As mentioned in earlier posts, in many cases, I have been called upon to shop for materials, a task that can be simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. But at the end of the day, if the artist is pleased with what we have found, then all the hours of phone calls, internet searches, jaunts to thrift stores, and long truck rides out to New Jersey are worth it. Some of the items we collected are pretty extraordinary, and the way the artists have manipulated them for the finished pieces, even more so. Read on.

A wall of real leaves hangs behind Kuku (Kitchen), by Marcel Pinas - shipped to the Museum directly from the forests of Suriname.

The biggest challenge, in my opinion, was coordinating the delivery of 70 used car and truck tires for Kawtchou by Maxence Denis. You might have heard a bit about this from Nicole Caruth’s blog earlier this month, but I think the sheer magnitude of this task warrants another mention. The artist had specified not only the total number of tires he needed, but also the required diameter of each tire - ranging from 13″ to 26″ - and these precise instructions made it much more difficult to locate exactly what he wanted. We were very lucky that Anton Junicic Ent., Inc., a Brooklyn auto parts shop, was willing to collect the tires for us, and made three trips over with our big truck to transport them to the Museum. Special thanks to Robert Barclay, our dedicated truck driver, for all his help with this! The artist was very pleased, and so were we. The finished piece, which incorporates audio/visual elements, makes quite an imposing statement.

Tires for Kawtchou, by Maxence Denis, fill the Brooklyn Museum truck.

Another great accomplishment involved furniture-shopping for Spirit of the Caribe, an installation by Tirzo Martha. For this, all the credit goes to Dasha Chapman, our wonderful research assistant with an eye for a bargain. Like Kawotchou, this installation was completely recreated for the exhibition, and the artist needed new materials that matched his vision for the piece. Kudos to Dasha for biking around Brooklyn on the hottest day of the year in search of the perfect chair, loading coffee tables into the backs of cabs, and riding the truck out to New Jersey to pick up the bed frame she found on Craig’s List.

Chair and rug for Spirit of the Caribe, by Tirzo Martha.

Art handlers assemble the bed, to be used in Spirit of the Caribe, by Tirzo Martha.

Though this post focuses mainly on raw materials, I would like to include a sneak peak of the installation of Tirzo Martha’s work - I think you’ll be surprised to see what became of that bed:

Installation detail of Spirit of the Caribe, by Tirzo Martha.

That’s right; all the furniture now hangs on the wall, creating a vertical bedroom 12 feet high. I will leave the rest of the piece to your imagination for now; come and visit us to see the completed piece!

From 1200 batteries to 1000 feet of black cord, 85 cubic feet of packing peanuts to 7 cubic feet of beach sand, Infinite Island certainly breaks ground in its ingenious use of materials. We have just a few finishing touches to put on the show before we welcome you this Friday, August 31^st! Mark your calendars for the opening!

We are well into August, and things are really heating up here at the Brooklyn Museum. Six artists will be coming to the Museum this week to install their works for Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art - joining us from as nearby as Manhattan, and as far away as Haiti, Curacao, and Suriname! With just 18 days until the opening of this exhibition, we are moving quickly.

Last week we welcomed Charles Campbell, a Jamaican-born artist living in Canada, who was here to install his work Aperture - Middle Passage. The installation of this work began with a transparency, which the artist first projected onto a wall (see image below):

Artist Charles Campbell centers the projection of his work Aperture - Middle Passage.

Once projected and sized, the image was painted directly onto the wall using tempera paint. It is roughly 13 feet high and took the artist three days to complete.

Campbell paints the projected image onto the wall.

Using geometric patterns and symmetry in this piece, Campbell fuses the image of the mandala, the traditional Buddhist and Hindu symbol associated with harmony and equilibrium, with that of a slave ship, representing violence and suffering. In combining these two opposing ideas, Campbell’s work aims to confront and reconcile the past.

Detail from Charles Campbell’s Aperture - Middle Passage.

I won’t show you the finished work - yet. You’ll have to visit the exhibition to see it….