Inquiring Minds

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Sara Devine

Over the summer months you may notice an increased number of staff stationed in the museum lobby. One of these staff members may approach you, asking questions. “How nosy,” you might think to yourself. And you would be right. These staff members are part of a 4-month-long visitor study about the new Connecting Cultures exhibition.

Connecting Cultures

In our visitor survey, we have two main objectives: to learn if you recognize and understand the main idea of the exhibition, and to determine how you are using the exhibition.

Visitor studies are nothing new here and we’ve been doing them regularly for several years; they help us understand who visits us and why. Every three years we complete a general visitor survey in order to keep track of trends in our visitorship. We have also been known to do exhibition-specific studies, and this is one such study.

We have two main objectives with this study: to learn if you recognize and understand the main idea of the exhibition, and to determine how you are using the exhibition. Is the main idea clear? Are the WikiLink QR codes noticeable? Are people engaging with the staff person stationed in the exhibition? How is this introduction to the museum collection changing (or not) the visitor experience? We want to know what works and what doesn’t so that we can improve upon our current efforts.

Interview in Progress

Sarah Sonner, Associate Manager of Interpretive Materials, interviews a visitor for the Connecting Cultures survey.

The study has two parts: a survey administered via laptop and an interview with a Museum representative. The survey and interview will not happen simultaneously, but alternate weekdays and weekends, so one portion is going on every day the Museum is open during the duration of the study. The survey will be available at a desk in the lobby to anyone who wishes to provide feedback on the exhibition. Questions will focus on the first objective: to determine if you recognize and understand the main idea of the exhibition. The interview portion of the study will focus on the second objective: to determine how you are using the exhibition. The interview will consist of two parts: an entrance interview and an exit interview. For the interview portion, a respondent is only eligible to participate if they’ve not yet seen Connecting Cultures so that we might get a clearer “before” and “after” picture of a visitor’s experience.

So if you are approached by a nosy staff person the next time you step through our doors, I encourage you to share your thoughts so that we might satisfy our inquiring minds.

Posted in Interpretive Materials | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Paris and Puerto Rico Unite in Brooklyn Acquisition

Posted on May 29, 2012 by Richard Aste

On June 6th, our recently acquired painting by Francisco Oller (1833-1917), the most important Puerto Rican artist of the nineteenth century, will go on view in the Museum’s 3rd-floor Beaux-Arts Court alongside Impressionist landscapes by Oller’s Paris masters and peers, Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley.

Hacienda La Fortuna

Francisco Oller (Puerto Rican, 1833-1917). Hacienda La Fortuna, 1885. Oil on canvas, 26 x 40 in. (66 x 101.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband John W. Brown, by exchange, 2012.19

Hacienda La Fortuna is the second Oller painting to enter a New York public collection—the first, his sublime still life Platanos Amarillos, was acquired by the Museo del Barrio in 2009. Brooklyn’s newest acquisition is, however, the only Oller hacienda painting (he executed six in total) to enter any collection, public or private, outside of Puerto Rico. Brooklyn acquired the Oller, as well as a colonial Mexican folding screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl, with funds from last year’s sale of Vasily Vereshchagin’s Crucifixion by the Romans. I am currently pursuing additional key acquisitions for the Museum’s European and Spanish colonial collections with these funds.

Francisco Oller

Francisco Oller (Puerto Rican, 1833—1917). Self-Portrait, circa 1889-92. Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 17 1/2 inches. Museo de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Francisco Oller was a privileged member of Puerto Rico’s upper middle class. As was common practice with young men of his social status, he traveled to Europe to complete his formal education, first in Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando and then in Paris in the studios of Thomas Couture and Charles Gleyre. In Paris Oller also studied informally at the Académie Suisse, where he painted and drew alongside Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. It was in fact Oller who would later introduce Cézanne to Camille Pissarro, a fellow Caribbean-born painter of the Paris avant-garde. In France the young Puerto Rican painter exhibited at the Paris Salons as a “disciple of Courbet” and at the Salon des Refusés of 1875 before returning to San Juan, where he introduced Realism and Impressionism through several art academies he would establish in the island’s capital.

Oller is at his most Impressionistic in Hacienda La Fortuna, which he painted when the avant-garde movement was still at its height in Paris. Here, the artist deftly captures nature’s fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, including in the foreground the morning mist of a Puerto Rican winter, with quick, broken brushstrokes. Oller completed this painting in the winter of 1885 for the Barcelona émigré José Gallart Forgas, who had commissioned him to paint portraits of all five of his Puerto Rican sugar mill complexes. Oller completed only this one, and the local painter and freed slave, Pío Casimiro Bacener (1840-1900), painted three: La Reparada, La Luciana, and La Serrano. Oller’s early morning view of Hacienda La Fortuna features the planter’s colonial mansion, his warehouse at left, and his sugar mill with a smokestack at right. It was in such mills that sugar cane was semi-processed into raw sugar and then shipped off to Brooklyn, which since 1860 was the world’s leading center of sugar refining. Throughout the second half of the century New York’s “sugar barons” traded extensively with both Puerto Rico and Cuba, by then Spain’s only remaining colonies in the Americas. Puerto Rico and Cuba would remain colonies through the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Oller painted Hacienda La Fortuna in Puerto Rico in early 1885, thirteen years before the island was liberated from four centuries of Spanish rule. By October of that same year Gallart had taken the painting back with him to Barcelona, where it remained with his descendants through 2004. That year the family sold Oller’s hacienda painting through the Barcelona auction house Balcli’s, and Brooklyn acquired it from the private collector that had purchased it in that sale.

When you come to the Museum, you will be able to fully experience Oller’s Hacienda La Fortuna in both its French avant-garde and Spanish colonial contexts. The painting will first go on view June 6th on the Museum’s modern French landscape wall in the European gallery as a masterwork of high Impressionism. And in September 2013 it will join 160 works of art from several Brooklyn and New York collections in the Museum’s Behind Closed Doors Spanish colonial exhibition.

Stay tuned for more on Brooklyn’s future European and Spanish colonial art acquisitions.

Posted in Newly on View, Recent Acquisitions | Tagged | 1 Comment

Let’s GO

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Shelley Bernstein

Over the years many people have asked me if we’d do Click! again and my general response has been to say that we wouldn’t do a repeat; that our answer would be to take the lessons we learned and do something different.  Four years later, our answer is GO: a community-curated open studio project and we hope you will participate in this ambitious undertaking. During GO, we are asking Brooklyn-based artists to open their studios, so that you can decide who will be featured in an exhibition, which will open here at the December Target First Saturday.

GO: a community-curated open studio project

During GO, artists across Brooklyn will open their studio doors, so that you can decide who will be featured in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

You’ll find that some things about GO are similar to Click!—namely this is a Brooklyn-focused initiative where audience participation results in an exhibition at the institution—but this is where the similarities end.  Click! was much more about the “crowd” and, in that, we were specifically looking at the wisdom of a group of people unknown to each other creating something and exploring the end result of that aggregated data.  Simply put, what would happen when we applied James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds to art?

GO is much more people focused; it spotlights community and aims to foster personal interaction throughout the process to come to an end result that is a collaborative effort between artists, the public and the Museum’s curatorial staff.  The web will be used to help connect everyone and drive these ideas home, but it’s the people that will fuel this project, not the technology and this is a very important distinction.

During GO, artists open their studios and, as part of the guidelines, must be present during the open studio weekend to meet with visitors.  The public is asked to create profiles online, check in at studios and then nominate artists for inclusion into a group show at the Museum. Curators will use the same profile structure to open up the process of creating the resulting exhibition.

GO is about getting out into the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and seeing where art making is taking place, talking to artists, discovering spaces in your communities that you’ve never had access to before.  You’ll be using web and mobile technology to help you find the studios you’d like to see, but this project is about actually seeing art—in person, not online—and meeting artists prior to making up your own mind about it.  GO focuses on what’s happening within the communities of Brooklyn, fostering personal interaction and thinking about the Museum differently; more as a facilitator and a hub for your interaction.

Throughout GO, we’ll be blogging about how we’ve designed this project for participation, our inspiration and more.  We sincerely hope you’ll join us during this journey.

Let’s GO.

Posted in Contemporary Art, Technology | Tagged | 4 Comments

Meet Another Charming Lady

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Yekaterina Barbash

All of us were a little sad to see “Bird Lady” go, even if it is only for a brief period of time, but we were able to take this opportunity to conserve another female figurine and introduce her to you.

Figurine of Woman

Figurine of Woman, ca. 3650 B.C.E. - 3300 B.C.E. Terracotta, painted, 8 3/4 x 1 9/16 x 2 in. (22.2 x 3.9 x 5.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 07.447.501.

Like our “Bird Lady,” the “Female Figure with Stump Arms” was also made five and a half thousand years ago, and comes from a nearby tomb in Ma’mariya. Although this female figure is missing her head, she is just as delicate and charming as the better known “Bird Lady.” You may notice that her arms are stubbed rather than upraised. She’s an example of another type of figurine from the site of Ma’mariya that have these particular abbreviated “stub-arms.”

You’ll find her in our Egypt Reborn galleries in May, and she will remain on view with her more complete partner, the “Bird Lady,” when she returns from her venture across the river in August.

Posted in Egyptian Art, Newly on View | Tagged | 1 Comment

Santi Moix

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Eugenie Tsai

Perched high on a lift in the fourth floor contemporary galleries, Brooklyn-based artist Santi Moix is drawing directly on the wall with charcoal to create a striking piece entitled Huckleberry Finn, “I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.” A lush tree resembling a fish is already visible. The final drawing will depict Huck Finn sitting on a hammock strung between two trees.

Santi Moix

Brooklyn-based artist Santi Moix is drawing directly on the wall with charcoal to create a striking piece entitled Huckleberry Finn, "I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway."

Once Moix completes the wall drawing, art handlers will hang colorful Moix’s watercolor, Fishing Day (Huck and Tom) directly over it. This piece was recently acquired by the museum and is being presented here for the first time with the addition of the wall drawing. Both are part of a series that was inspired by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain’s novel about a boy’s coming of age on the Mississippi River in the mid-nineteenth century.

Photos and video are being posted to Flickr as Santi continues to work.

Posted in Contemporary Art | Tagged | Leave a comment

Advances in Exhibition Casework

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Matthew Yokobosky

In my last post, I discussed the wall murals and the state-of-the-art photo enlargements in Connecting Cultures. Today, I’d like to talk about a few other firsts that make this a cutting edge Museum display.

Connecting Cultures is the first museum installation to utilize Optium for every vitrine and glazed surface. Optium is an anti-reflective, anti-static, abrasion-resistant and clear-coated acrylic produced by Tru Vue. Unlike regular Plexiglas glazings which mirror and reflect adjacent surfaces, these Optimum cases appear completely transparent. Optium has various coatings and is not easy to fabricate into 5-sided vitrines, but Allen Blum at Grewe Plastics had developed a fabrication method. The second challenge was that Optium is produced in very small quantities and when Allen contacted Tru Vue about our project, the President of Tru Vue personally called Allen to assure him that they would guarantee enough material to complete all 32 vitrines and glazing for the Pitcher Wall.

Casework in Connecting Cultures

A visitor activates a Smartglass case to view the light-sensitive object inside. Optimum is used on other casework (like the Buddha tower in the upper left), so the vitrines are anti-reflective.

Working with Van Wood at the Small Corporation (SmallCorp), we were able to develop a new type of exhibition case for light sensitive materials using Smartglass as an electronic curtain for art. Smartglass is often used in architecture for privacy; it looks white or grey, but when activated it diffuses light or becomes transparent. Many people have also seen it used for unique applications, such as the dressing room doors at Prada in Soho. Smartglass is composed of two sheets of iron-free glass, with a 1/64″ film between that contains microscopic particles. When opaque, these particles are scattered; when electrified, the particles align vertically to allow light to pass through. At the Museum, our Conservation lab tested the Smartglass and found that when opaque it only allowed less than 1% of light diffusion, and less than 1% UV. For light sensitive works on paper and textile, these Smartglass curtains will extend the exhibition period of fragile works and do away with the need for fabric coverings and light locks.

Smartglass case

Smartglass curtains will extend the exhibition period of fragile works. Visitors push a button to reveal the object sitting inside the case.

Label troughs are not an area that would seem to be terribly innovative, but if you think about it, most labels are either on walls or on the sides of cases. There is also the variation of having a label installed on an angled deck inside the case. Though it has its advantages, I always felt that having angles above the collar line read too much with the artwork and changed the shape of the casework. My solution was to sink the label rail into a trough below the deck and collar line. This retains the casework’s squareness, doesn’t compete with the shape of the artwork, and perhaps surprisingly is very easy to read especially through reflection-free Optium.

Together these three advances in casework design give Connecting Cultures a state-of-the-art look and feel.

Posted in Design, Newly on View | Tagged | 1 Comment

Connecting Cultures Through Books!

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Deirdre Lawrence

The presence of three books in the new Connecting Cultures installation  gives me a welcome opportunity to talk about these key works that are in the Library collection. This is the first of a series of blogs that will discuss the books on view as well as other ways information has been culled from the Libraries and Archives to enhance this installation.

Art books have an advantage over other books since they offer many components that have an intrinsic quality. Hand colored images, good paper quality, innovative typography, overall design, types of binding—these are all elements that make art books a physical experience ranging from touching, holding, reading, smelling and of course understanding the message that the author intends. We are very fortunate to have many wonderful examples of the art book in the Museum Libraries and to have the opportunity to showcase some of these in exhibitions both held inside and outside the Museum walls.

Three great examples of the art book—ranging in dates from 1692 to 2011—are on view in Connecting Cultures and they each offer an opportunity for us to think about what the physical book offers in terms of textual and visual information (credible or not). Let’s start in 1692 with the Atlas nouveau : contenant toutes les parties du monde … (Paris: Chez Hubert Iaillot …,1692).

Sanson Atlas Table of Contents

Atlas nouveau : contenant toutes les parties du monde ou sont exactement remarquès les empires, monarchies, royaumes, estats, republiques & peuples qui sy trouuent á present.

Known as the father of French cartography, Nicolas Sanson (1600-1667), was the patriarch of a famous mapmaking family who dominated map publishing in the seventeenth century. Hubert Jaillot, another most important French cartographer had a partnership with the Sanson family and re-published and re-engraved many of their maps. This rare atlas had been in the collection of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library Association founded in 1823 and the first free and circulating library in Brooklyn. The Library was the nucleus of the Brooklyn Museum and this book is an excellent example of the original institutional vision as it documents a need to know about the world and the desire to share information. This book documents a view of the world in 1692 through French eyes and is a powerful example of how information has been created and circulated over time.

Sanson Map

Sanson map is used as background imagery on one of the walls in Connecting Cultures.

In addition to being on view in a specially designed low light case, one of the maps has been reproduced on the gallery wall. This is one of many examples of how the Libraries and Archives add to the life of exhibitions here at the Brooklyn Museum!

Posted in Libraries & Archives, Newly on View | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A Sunset for 1stfans

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Shelley Bernstein

It’s been roughly three and half years since Will Cary and I started the 1stfans Membership program at the Museum; come July, the program will come to a close with a sunset—quite literally.

Sunset from the Brooklyn Museum roof.

How do you end a program with personal ties? You throw a party and, in the case of 1stfans, that will be our annual rooftop ice cream social where we watch the sun go down; this was the scene at last year's event.

The program was announced in December of 2008 and was created for the Brooklyn Museum visitor who wanted something a little different than the traditional Membership structure.  That very idea was the program’s greatest strength, but also its biggest weakness.

1stfans allowed us to see that most individuals looking to truly support us are interested in a deeper and more personal connection with the Museum and, often, people are looking for a more social experience within the structure of events and their relationship with the institution.  It was the deep engagement of the program that was incredibly successful, but 1stfans was its own entity that was never fully integrated into the Membership structure. This separation made it difficult to gain awareness for the program and, as such, the growth rate stalled.  Most importantly, this separation made it difficult to move 1stfans up the membership ladder—something that’s incredibly important in development and the lifecycle of membership growth. Simply put the program was too separate for its own good; keeping the program in a silo was the primary reason the program couldn’t succeed.  The challenge for us moving forward will be to take what we learned about deep engagement and create new programs that both scale well and will be more a part of the institution as a whole—we’ve got some news on that coming next week.

I’ve already written a lot about our use of various social platforms to run 1stfans.  If you remember, we found utilizing Facebook and Twitter to be overwhelmingly time consuming and shifted to Meetup.com in late 2010. The shift to Meetup made the administration of the program much easier for us and solved many issues, but in the end the choice of platform didn’t matter much outside of the administration of it.  The growth rate was pretty much consistent from one platform to the other and the personal nature of the program remained as successful no matter which site we used.  The age old finding that different people are on different platforms rang true—as we moved from one setup to the other, we saw a lot of new faces while many from the original disappeared. Moving platforms did shift the membership base, but the personal nature remained the same and the growth rate almost parallel.

At conferences, people always ask me how do you end something like this when you’ve got all these personal relationships and strong ties.  My response has always been, “with transparency…and then you throw a heck of a party.”  As 1stfans comes to a close, we’ve written each Member personally and our final event will be the ice cream social on the roof where we gather to watch the sunset from one of the best views in the borough.  This event is the party that 1stfans look forward to all year and we’ll be sunsetting the program with a literal sunset.

For those of you who have supported the Museum by becoming 1stfans at one point in our program’s history, we can’t thank you enough; your support over the years humbles me personally.  So many of you have become friends and are faces that I’ve come to look forward to seeing at our monthly meetups.  I’m looking forward to sharing the roof with you one last time.

Posted in 1stfans, Membership, Technology | 4 Comments

Where is our Bird Lady?

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Yekaterina Barbash

Many of you may be wondering where our beloved Female Figurine, nicknamed the “Bird Lady” is. One of the stars of our Egyptian collection, she normally greets visitors to the Egyptian Galleries’ Predynastic section and she’s the signature image for the second phase of our reinstallation, which opened in 2003. For this reason and because she is the most complete example of this type of figurine, the “Bird Lady” traditionally does not travel on loan to other institutions for special exhibitions, but she has taken her first voyage out of the Brooklyn Museum to be part of The Dawn of Egyptian Art, a very exciting exhibition on Predynastic art at the Metropolitan Museum.

07.447.505

Female Figure, ca. 3500-3400 B.C.E. Terracotta, painted, 11 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 2 1/4 in. (29.2 x 14 x 5.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 07.447.505

In addition to being stunningly beautiful and graceful, our “Bird Lady” is one of the most ancient objects in the Museum. She was excavated by Henri de Morgan in 1907 from Tomb 2 at the site of Ma’mariya in Egypt, which dates to about 5,500 years ago. Female Figurines of this type are extremely rare and this is the best preserved example. That is why we very much wanted her to be part of The Dawn of Egyptian Art exhibition.

The Dawn of Egyptian Art

The Dawn of Egyptian Art is on view at the Met from April 10 to August 5, 2012.

Several other important objects from the Predynastic (circa 4400-3100 B.C.E.) and Old Kingdom (circa 2675-2170 B.C.E.) sections of Egypt Reborn accompanied our Bird Lady across the river, so be on the lookout for Brooklyn Museum objects just across the way.

Posted in Egyptian Art | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Big Picture(s)

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Matthew Yokobosky

As Kevin mentioned in his last post, Connecting Cultures is presented in thematic sections: Places, People, and Things, in addition to an Introductory Center. Since the artwork was curated cross-collection, the question for me as a designer was how to visually unify artworks that spanned 5 millenia, and were products of so many unique artistic practices from around the world.

The easy solution would have been to choose one color for each section, but since the room is 24-feet high, and most of the art is under 4-feet tall, that would have left a lot of empty visual space, even after double-hanging. And so I began to explore the idea of using over-sized murals as backgrounds, and asking myself questions like, “what is something visual that connects all of these works together?” Immediate answers for the place section for example would be to use the weather or landscape. I even thought about things like seismographs or lightning, which are universal experiences. Then, I moved to think about what structures, or frameworks, could hold each group together. I began to think map, and then met with the Museum’s librarian Deirdre Lawrence who showed me our 1680 Sanson Atlas, and its beautiful world map. Taken to greyscale, and then with a white-to-transparent overlay, the Sanson map clearly indicated Place and gave the artwork installed on top of it an instant cohesion; the greyscale then allowed the artworks’ color to pop forward.

Installation of Map

One of the first things you'll notice upon entry are the gigantic murals that we've installed on the walls as background images, each one relates to the themes we are highlighting. Here, a world map from the 1680 Sanson Atlas is getting installed in the "Place" section.

I then extended this idea of structure and greyscale to the other sections. One common framework of all people is the skeletal system, and so I worked with a skeleton drawing by Daniel Hungtinton from our American collection. Skeletons and anatomy also being one of the first subjects you draw as an art student. For Things, I met with the planning department, and paged through decades of old blueprints produced for the Museum. A drawing of one of the Museum’s staircases from 1954 by Brown, Lawford & Forbes, became the background for a display of historical and contemporary mirrors.

Egyptian Eye

The Egyptian eye that you see upon entry is just a mere 2.5 inches in real life, but has been digitally captured and rendered in hi-definition. Enlarged to 19' wide x 22' tall, its 1000% enlargement makes the statement, "look."

And last, was the question of what to use as an “entrance” for an installation about new ways of looking at out collection. Our common structure for looking is the eye, and in our Egyptian collection we have a life-size eye made 3,500 years ago, from Obsidian, limestone and blue glass. This 2 1/4″ eye was photographed in HD by Karl Rudisill from Duggal, in 6 parts, re-assembled into an 18GB file, and then enlarged to 19′ wide at 1,000% enlargment, without pixellation. A miracle of photography.

Together, these monumental murals form a dramatic set of indicators that provides unity for all of the places, people and things that artists in our Permanent Collection, have created as records of our amazing world . . . A world in Brooklyn.

Posted in Design, Newly on View | Tagged | 2 Comments

Say Hello

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Kevin Stayton

Yesterday, Arnold Lehman, our Director, initiated a new initiative that coincides with the opening of the installation Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn. He was the first Brooklyn Museum staff member to occupy a desk in the installation in order to provide the visitor with a human connection to the Museum within the context of this introductory gallery.

Arnold Lehman at the Connecting Cultures Desk

Director Arnold Lehman greets visitors at the staff desk in Connecting Cultures. Each staff member at the Museum will act as a "connector" at the desk for two hour shifts once every two months. When you come visit us, you'll meet a different person each time and be able to give us your feedback about the installation and your visit with us.

At this desk, visitors will have the opportunity to meet diverse Museum staff and to interact with them about many different aspects of the Brooklyn Museum. Whether the conversation is as simple as getting directions to the cafe or as complex as discussing favorite works of art in the collection, the point is to provide a human connection between the visitor and the Brooklyn Museum. The conversation goes both ways. Not only can the visitor learn about the Museum, but the staff members, or “connectors,” can learn what it is the public needs to know, and what they are thinking about, so that we can better tailor what we provide to meet those needs.

Arnold reports that he had a great time during his term as a “connector.” Yesterday was a lively day at the Brooklyn Museum, and he talked to visitors from around the country and around the world. I happened to have a group of visitors from another American museum for a tour in the afternoon, and they were impressed to find our Director greeting visitors in the galleries, and they took full advantage of the opportunity to learn more about the institution. They went away astonished at the friendly and open spirit of the Brooklyn Museum.

Yesterday was a trial run for this program. It begins in earnest on Wednesday, May 2, when Brooklyn Museum staff “connectors” will rotate shifts at the desk in Connecting Cultures. You never know who you will meet, so come for a visit. I hope to see you there!

Posted in Newly on View | Tagged | 3 Comments

Vetting Wikipedia for WikiLink

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Edward Bleiberg

In Shelley’s previous post, she announced the installation of QR codes installed in exhibitions that lead visitors to Wikipedia articles for further information. These QR codes are now found in Egypt Reborn and the Hagop Kevorkian Gallery of Ancient Near Eastern Art, both on the third floor of the Museum.

As a curator I have always wanted our visitors to have access to more information about the collection than is usually available. I’ve long been frustrated that the 100-word label provides only the briefest introduction to an object. So when Shelley suggested that there was a way to bring in-depth information into the gallery for those who want it, I was happy to help find appropriate material. For example, the code on the label for the Museum’s statue of Senwosret III will take you to an article about the king’s reign. There you will find information on his building projects, his appointment of his son as co-regent—a sort of co-king-in-training—and his pyramid. All of this information is drawn from the latest scientific studies of the reign. The QR code with the faience shabti called “The Lady Sati” leads you to an article describing the process of making this material drawn from a basic Egyptology source—Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw’s Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology.

Senwosret III

Senwosret III, on view in Egypt Reborn (now with QR code), was one of the most powerful kings of the Twelfth Dynasty.

All of the articles linked to the Museum’s objects have been vetted by curators. When we read an article, we could see from the footnotes whether or not it was based on standard interpretations by professional, scientific scholars. Ancient Egyptian art is the object of interest for both scientific scholars and a wide variety of other researchers using non-scientific means. The Museum adheres to scientific standards, so curators insured that all the linked articles are part of our interpretive tradition.

Senwosret III Wikipedia

QR code in the gallery links to Senwosret III's Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia’s reputation with scholars and teachers is a mixed bag. Many teachers forbid its use because students are not always ready to read the articles found there critically. I was also wary about linking the Museum’s objects to a source that varies greatly in quality. But with proper vetting, Wikipedia offers additional background about the Museum’s objects based on the best information. I hope that this experiment with QR codes will help enhance the visitor’s experience in visiting the Egyptian and Ancient Near East collections.

Posted in Egyptian Art, Technology | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

WikiLink (QR Redux)

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Shelley Bernstein

You may remember my blog post a while back, QR in the New Year?  In it, I talked about our QR code testing and reported on some rather alarming #fails that we were seeing like five to ten fold drops in traffic.  Never one to give up on a problem, this comment from Lori Phillips sparked my interest. I took a look at the stats around the Indy Children’s Museum project and was pretty impressed.

I had to wonder if the reason QR was getting good take up in Indy was its pairing with Wikipedia.  In our own experiments with putting Wikipedia in the galleries, we’ve seen a great deal of success.  You may remember WikiPop: the Wikipedia resource for Seductive Subversion?  As I reported in a subsequent post, WikiPop, was one of our most popular in-gallery interactives to date with 1/3 visitors to the exhibition spending ten minutes at a time looking at approximately 11 articles.  After all, we all know the power of Wikipedia’s statistics—in just a month, Wikipedia sees an extraordinary amount of traffic…482 million unique visitors, 18.1 billion pageviews.  Simply put, Wikipedia is a well-used resource and it’s likely something that visitors find incredibly familiar because of the daily presence in their lives. What we know of QR is almost the opposite.  QR is dominated by technical frustration, marketing interests, low scan rates and user confusion.  Could Wikipedia get visitors over QR code hump of technical hurdles and poor user experience?

WikiLink

WikiLink installed in Connecting Cultures on Coffin in the Form of a Nike Sneaker.

Today we embark on a new trial project called WikiLink that pairs Wikipedia articles with QR codes on objects in two of our galleries—the new Connecting Cultures exhibition and the Egyptian and Near East galleries.  With WikiLink, curators have selected Wikipedia articles that are relevant to certain works of art and may be helpful to visitors as extended information.  After scanning a few codes, visitors are surveyed about the project on their mobile devices.

My hope is that by leveraging the most accessible platform for information (Wikipedia) that we see QR code use increase, but why do we care about this?  Well, as frankly as I can put this, we can spend a lot of time and money devising all the fancy location-aware apps we can muster, but the fact remains that QR is an incredibly lightweight and compelling way to get visitors more information.  For those institutions on limited budgets and staffing, this equation is one that we have to pay attention to and if we can increase use in general, then anything we put behind QR will benefit.  In this trial, we are going to be looking at metrics across all QR use in the building to see if we can  get these numbers up across the board.

WikiLink will be installed through the summer for a three to four month trial.  At the end of it, curators, technologists, and interpretive staff will be looking at the statistics and the visitor feedback we’ve received to determine if the project is worth continuing or expanding upon; stay tuned for our findings.  In the meantime, Ed Bleiberg, one of our Managing Curators and Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art will blog tomorrow about the complexities of selecting the Wikipedia articles for this project.

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Shifting the Paradigm in Connecting Cultures

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Kevin Stayton

Connecting Cultures, a new installation that includes works from the Brooklyn Museum’s many diverse collections, has now opened on the first floor in the Great Hall. For the first time, museum visitors will be presented with a taste of what is to come during their museum visit in an introductory gallery.

Nick Cave's Soundsuit, 2008

Art Handlers install Nick Cave's Soundsuit, 2008, one of several works by contemporary artists in the Connecting People section of Connecting Cultures. Soundsuit transforms the human body and allows the wearer to assume new identities by alluding to a range of rituals, from ceremonial African dances to Christian liturgy.

If you think about past visits to the Brooklyn Museum—or to any art museum, for that matter—you probably remember galleries divided into traditional categories. For instance, you might go to the Asian galleries or the African galleries, which are organized by geography. Or you might go to the ancient galleries or the contemporary galleries, which are organized by chronology or time; or you might visit paintings galleries or silver galleries, or period rooms, which are organized by medium or type. These organizational principles have been standard in museums for over a hundred years. We can learn a lot about objects and the cultures, eras and types they represent by seeing them organized in this way. But such a standard organization can also be limiting. It can prevent us from making new and exciting connections between geographical locations, time period and types of objects. It is these connections that often help us understand what it is to be human and how the arts express that.

Wall of 90 Pitchers

Electricians test lighting in the wall of 90 pitchers in Connecting Cultures. These pitchers show the depth of the collections at the Brooklyn Museum and suggest what can be learned from assembling large numbers of objects together. The basic form of things is often defined by their purpose; pitchers, across time, place and cultures are meant first to hold liquid and then to pour it. As a result, pitchers have certain similarities no matter where or when they were made, but they also reveal, in their details, a great deal about their time and place.

So, Connecting Cultures breaks down traditional categories to challenge the viewer to see things in a new way and to make new connections. There are three very simple and straightforward themes in the installation—connecting people, connecting places, and connecting things. I hope that the new installation will do two things—first, introduce the visitor to the wide range of riches available at the Brooklyn Museum, and, second, stimulate some thinking about how to make connections between the museum galleries, as well as within them.

Many different themes could be developed using Connecting Cultures as a model: how does dance appear throughout time and among cultures; does the color blue mean the same thing in all cultures; how are concepts of death expressed in the arts? The possibilities are endless. Connecting Cultures can help us to begin to explore them.

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Doodling as Communication

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Maya Valladares

One of my favorite discoveries since Keith Haring: 1978-1982 opened is how much Haring thought. Journals dating back as far as his middle school years are open for reading both in the galleries and via Tumblr (where the Keith Haring Foundation uploads a new journal page daily), and seeing them them is like being shown a window into his brain as he painstakingly worked out the “visual language” he would use for the rest of his life. More than other shows I’ve seen that feature his work, this one is about his process.

Keith Haring Journal

Page from Keith Haring's journal NB-0 c.1971 (age 13). The Keith Haring Foundation is uploading a page a day to Tumblr.

In the exhibition there is one room towards the back of the gallery set apart as a place to draw, sketch, or doodle. The goal of this room was to allow visitors to think and respond visually to the work on the gallery walls, to experience, in a way, the artist’s process. Haring’s journals are filled not only with words but also with marks familiar to many of us, artists or not: doodles. Doodles often get a bad rap as being signs of distraction, when in fact they are often one of the best sources of creativity. In art school I was once given an assignment to doodle until something good emerged, even if that meant drawing for hours and hours. For most people in my class, the work that came out was some of the most interesting of the term. The symbols that emerge, and reemerge, when you are not trying to make a perfect drawing often tell us a lot about what’s in our heads. Think of doodling as a form of communication, as a conversation between your dreams, your thoughts, and your pencil.

Keith Haring Interactive

Visitors to Keith Haring: 1978–1982 use Boogie Board LCD tablets to doodle.

Keith Haring Interactive

Visitors to Keith Haring: 1978–1982 use Boogie Board LCD tablets to doodle.

Keith Haring Interactive

Visitors to Keith Haring: 1978–1982 use Boogie Board LCD tablets to doodle.

Keith Haring Interactive

Visitors to Keith Haring: 1978–1982 use Boogie Board LCD tablets to doodle.

This past Saturday I went to peek in on the people drawing. The space had a calm yet busy energy; it was quiet despite being filled with people. The drawings on these boards are temporary; they will disappear at the press of a button, so I think it’s more for the experience of drawing than the outcome that visitors spend time in this room. To me, it felt both meditative and really challenging to draw with no specific outcome in mind. I saw moments where drawings stood on their own, the spaces around them blank, and places where drawings came together, touching at points, or spread across many boards at once. I wonder if this is how Haring felt when working; I wonder if his drawings are like records of conversations he had with himself.

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