I am really looking forward to November’s Target First Saturday, which takes place on November 7th and highlights our special exhibition Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present. Rock music and rock journalism are two of my passions and I’m excited to see them coming together with the programming around this exhibit.
As a public programmer I’m always looking for new entry points into an exhibition’s content and how to make that content accessible and engaging for Museum visitors. In conversations about public programming for the exhibit with Gail Buckland, the guest curator, she discussed how one of her goals with the exhibition was to focus on the photographers and the images they have created, not only on the musicians and bands featured in them. She also wanted to have an event that captured what up-and-coming rock photographers are doing now and invite them to participate.
Inspired by Gail’s idea, and because we love Brooklyn photographers, on First Saturday we are inviting local photographers to come and shoot the bands that are playing and post their photos to the Brooklyn Museum’s flickr group. Afterwards, Bob Gruen, a rock photography legend who is featured in the exhibition and has shot the likes of Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and The Clash, will look at the photos and blog about his favorites here!
The Beets. Photo by Aubrey Stallard. All Rights Reserved.
In addition, I couldn’t be more thrilled about the lineup of bands: The Beets, Grass Widow, and Crystal Stilts. In choosing the bands, my colleagues and I wanted to try to capture the feeling and energy of the Brooklyn indie scene that’s really taken off over the past few years. To select the bands and capture the feeling of shows in clubs alternative spaces around the borough we teamed up with New York City indie show organizer extraordinaire Todd Patrick (aka Todd P.). I first went to one of Todd’s shows in Portland, Oregon in the late 1990’s, and felt there was something special and community oriented about it. Since then, he and I have both moved to New York and he’s been organizing shows in Brooklyn for years. He really has his finger on the pulse of the scene here and able to spot talent as it emerges, while keeping that community vibe to his shows.
As a final note, even if you don’t take pictures you can participate by dressing up as your favorite rock star. I look forward to seeing you here with your camera and your outfit! You’ll know me, I’ll be the Brooklyn Museum staff member ensuring the bands have sound checked, the photographers are happy while dressed like a 1960’s French popstar.
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!
Are you a fan of the materials being uploaded to the Flickr Commons? Well, we are huge fans and that got a few of us wondering about a way to thank the community of people who’ve rallied around our materials by tagging, commenting, investigating and looking. Paula Bray (Powerhouse) was thinking it was high time to take community favorites, do slideshows on our buildings and have a giant global meetup to celebrate! Sure sounded like a good idea to us, so save the date of October 2nd and 3rd—each institution will be posting more information about their hosted meetup as we get closer. For our part, we are teaming up with the New York Public Library at Target First Saturday for a joint event—stay tuned.
In order for us to have a slideshow, we need your help. Ryan Donahue at the George Eastman House created a way you can go and vote for which images you’d like to see during the meetup. So, you’ve got until September 16th to tell us which of your favs should be in the slideshow.
We’ve been so jealous of @museummodernart for so long because they’ve had multiple visits from Monkey and we’ve had none. We watched as Monkey got famous and took in Shakespeare in the Park, the High Line, the AIC—all the time hoping Monkey would one day cross the river to visit us. Then yesterday….there was a tweet and we knew Brooklyn’s time had come!
It’s clear that Monkey had a good time in Caillebotte, so we’ll mention one last reminder that show closes today and if Monkey managed to catch the exhibition before it closed, you should too. Need more convincing? Be sure to read Judith Dolkart’s 5 Reasons to see Caillebotte before 5 July. All we can say is ‘yay’ and this is the kind of thing we always want to hear!
All images courtesy josespiano via Flickr. All Rights Reserved.
Seeing the response to historic photographs that we have posted on Flickr Commons begs a look back on why we have these images and who created them. Being an art museum library and archives our mission is to collect and make accessible research collections that serve to document the objects held in the Brooklyn Museum’s encyclopedic collection. We also preserve the research documents created or collected by the Museum staff who have acquired objects since the founding of the Museum as a library back in 1823. What that means is that we have a rich historical legacy of text and images that allow us to look back in time and recall the period in which the objects were created–where, when, how and why.
Susan A. Hutchinson, Founding Museum Librarian, with William Henry Goodyear, Founding Curator of Fine Arts in the Library Reading Room circa 1910.
Since the images collected by William Henry Goodyear (1846-1923) are generating interest today we thought it would interesting to look back at Goodyear and several of his colleagues who built the Museum’s collections over the years. So let’s declare 2009 the year of looking back and learning from history. Hopefully this exercise will educate us all as we move forward and learn about each other and our cultural heritage. Who knows maybe we will end the year in a more peaceful way than we started.
Let me start with a quote from artist John La Farge to William Henry Goodyear: “You have opened the window that has been closed for centuries, and have let in the light”.
I believe that La Farge was referring to Goodyear’s intense interest in photography as a tool to document the world he saw. A Yale graduate and student at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, Goodyear devoted himself to teaching and lecturing about the history of art and architecture. After graduating from Yale in 1867, he traveled to Germany, Italy, Palestine and Syria to pursue his interest in architecture. It was in Pisa in 1870 that he began to focus on architectural details and later published in an article entitled “A Lost Art” in Scribner’s Magazine, the first of many essays he wrote about architectural refinements. Goodyear started his museum career in 1882 as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in 1899 came to the Brooklyn Museum as the first curatorial appointment made by the newly founded museum. At Brooklyn, Goodyear led a series of research and collecting expeditions with a mission to build an art collection. He oversaw the growth of the American, European and ancient art collections including the casts of Ancient and Renaissance sculpture as well as designing and installing exhibitions of newly acquired art.
Hall of Sculpture with Casts, circa 1904.
In addition to his curatorial mandate, Goodyear dedicated time to developing his architectural theory that historic buildings were planned with irregularities which he referred to as refinements. This study focused on architectural monuments found around the world from the Cathedral of Pisa to the temples of Egypt with stops in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece and Turkey. Like his colleague Stewart Culin, founding curator of Ethnology from 1903 to 1929, Goodyear seems to have been interested in everything and this is evidenced in his photographs of people and places around the world from a street vendor in Istanbul to the vivid depictions of the world fairs of Chicago and Paris. Goodyear recognized the importance of these fairs as an educational tool to introduce cultures from different parts of the world. He, like Culin, also saw objects at the fairs and recommended their acquisition for Brooklyn. These photographs by Alfred Percival Maudslay were exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Exposition and collected for Brooklyn after Goodyear and Culin saw them at the fair. Indeed, Goodyear worked obsessively using photography as a tool to educate and a method to document his findings in the field in addition to his writings.
Maudslay photographs on view in the Chicago Columbian Exposition, circa 1893.
It seems that throughout his long life he developed theories that explored new themes in the history of art starting with his “Grammar of the Lotus” documenting continuing use of the lotus form in decorative art since its use in Ancient Egypt. He also wrote several popular histories of art and was one of the first to use actual photographs, as opposed to engravings, to illustrate these texts. He took and collected photographs and used them in the form of lantern slides to illustrate his many lectures–over 130 for the Brooklyn Museum alone–ranging from the art of ancient civilizations to the art of the nineteenth century. In addition to being known as an architectural historian, Goodyear was a scholar of anthropology, archaeology and ethnology with a focus on America, Egypt, Greece and Rome. All of this is evidenced in the photographs (lantern slides, negatives and prints) and his research (published and unpublished) found in the Museum Libraries and Archives.
His photographs offer detailed images of historic structures before the devastation of world wars and rampant twentieth century architectural “redevelopment.” His documentation of many buildings has served as guideposts to reconstruction of several monuments that have been destroyed or renovated over the years. But his influence went beyond architecture since it was his vision that laid the groundwork for two major art museum collections–the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was responsible for recommending the acquisition of several important objects including the antiquities collection and library assembled by Charles Edwin Wilbour, America’s first Egyptologist. Goodyear also established the first children’s museum in America – the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. Today we all benefit from Goodyear’s scholarship and foresight as we see the world before us through his photographs and writings.
More to come about these early visionaries in Brooklyn, but today we are honoring Professor Goodyear by releasing more images from his archives of street scenes and mosques in Turkey in response to comments on Flickr Commons.
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