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).

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 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!

About Deirdre Lawrence

Deirdre Lawrence has been the Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum since late 1983. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, she was Associate Librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her M. L. S. from Pratt Institute in 1979 and has studied art history on the graduate level. At the Brooklyn Museum she has established the Museum Archives and implemented many projects to preserve and make accessible the research collections. Deirdre has overseen a major renovation project, implementation of an online catalog and several collaborative projects with other libraries. She has written articles on the collections and lectured frequently on the research collections held in the Libraries and Archives as well as Brooklyn Museum history. Deirdre has curated several exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. She is a visiting professor at Pratt’s School of Information and Library Science and serves as a board member at the Center for Book Arts in New York.

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A Recent Donation from Camille and Luther Clark

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Deirdre Lawrence

The Brooklyn Museum Library collection has recently been enriched with the donation of several rare items of African American art given by Camille and Luther Clark. This donation is one of many in response to the Museum’s collecting initiative that began in 2010 to focus on collecting art by African American artists who worked between the mid-nineteenth century and pre-contemporary times. To parallel the growth of the art collection, the Museum Library has tried to increase its holdings on African American artists and this recent donation is an excellent addition to the research collection.

Fifty books, periodical articles and other primary documents have been received from this major donation and several items are now featured in the Library Display Cases at the entrance of the Museum Library. On display are rare books such as the catalog for the seminal exhibition entitled The Negro artist comes of age; a national survey of contemporary American artists which was held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1945. According to the Brooklyn Museum Bulletin (November 1945, No. 2), the exhibition consisted of fifty-three paintings and nine sculptures “by the leading young Negro artists of the United States. A few of these, such as Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin, have been widely shown but the work of the large majority is only now beginning to be recognized as an integral segment of our native art.”

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This was an influential exhibition and led the way in how the Museum’s collection developed in later years. For example, the Museum acquired a work of art by Eldzier Cortor that was included in the 1945 exhibition.

Many of these items are illustrated essays found in periodicals such as the very rare periodical entitled Survey Graphic. The March 1925 issue showcased Harlem with a beautifully illustrated cover bearing the title Harlem: Mecca of the new Negro. The entire issue contains many interesting articles such as “The Making of Harlem” by James W. Johnson and is illustrated by several artists, including Winold Reiss. This and other journals in the Clark donation are not only of great interest textually, but also visually.

Other illustrated covers of periodicals are on display such as The Black Scholar, Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, and The Negro in Art Week exhibition catalog with its visual reference to Egyptian culture.

In addition to these historical materials, the donation includes key recent works such as Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century and Artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Camille and Luther Clark donation has greatly enhanced the Brooklyn Museum Library’s documentation on African American art and we are honored to have these important research materials here.

About Deirdre Lawrence

Deirdre Lawrence has been the Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum since late 1983. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, she was Associate Librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her M. L. S. from Pratt Institute in 1979 and has studied art history on the graduate level. At the Brooklyn Museum she has established the Museum Archives and implemented many projects to preserve and make accessible the research collections. Deirdre has overseen a major renovation project, implementation of an online catalog and several collaborative projects with other libraries. She has written articles on the collections and lectured frequently on the research collections held in the Libraries and Archives as well as Brooklyn Museum history. Deirdre has curated several exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. She is a visiting professor at Pratt’s School of Information and Library Science and serves as a board member at the Center for Book Arts in New York.

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Filed under: Arts of Africa, Libraries & Archives
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Project CHART at the Brooklyn Museum

Posted on November 14, 2011 by Deirdre Lawrence

The Institute of Museum and Library Services has been an important supporter of several initiatives to make the Brooklyn Museum’s collection much more accessible to a wider audience. One good example of this initiative is the M-LEAD Project which has brought 30 students from Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science to the Museum to train as interns in the Libraries, Archives and Digital Lab. The M-LEAD Project was funded by the IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program that supports projects to recruit students from diverse cultural backgrounds and to educate the next generation of librarians, archivists and digital managers. We was delighted to participate in this collaboration with Pratt Institute that allowed the Museum to be a training ground for their students.

We’ve now embarked on another project with Pratt Institute, also funded by IMLS, entitled CHART that is focused on digitizing historic photographs of Brooklyn. Project CHART (Cultural Heritage, Access, Research and Technology), is a cross-institutional collaboration between Pratt Institute, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Public Library and us. At the end of this 3-year grant funded project, Project CHART will provide online access to historical documentary photographs of Brooklyn that were previously only available on-site at each institution.

Views: U.S., Brooklyn. Brooklyn, Packer Institute. View 007: Packer - view from the garden in winter. Lantern slide, 3.25 x 4 in. Brooklyn Museum, CHART_2011. (S10_21_US_Brooklyn_Brooklyn_Packer_Institute007.jpg)

You can follow along and see some of the images the Brooklyn Museum CHART interns have already scanned which are presented on the Museum’s website. We are uploading new images almost daily and eventually these images will be linked to others being digitized by the collaborating institutions.

We will be reporting on the progress of our CHART Project as it progresses. We hope that this project, already beneficial to the interns as a learning experience, will become a digital resource to the local, national and international research community and anyone else interested in the history and preservation of Brooklyn’s history.

About Deirdre Lawrence

Deirdre Lawrence has been the Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum since late 1983. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, she was Associate Librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her M. L. S. from Pratt Institute in 1979 and has studied art history on the graduate level. At the Brooklyn Museum she has established the Museum Archives and implemented many projects to preserve and make accessible the research collections. Deirdre has overseen a major renovation project, implementation of an online catalog and several collaborative projects with other libraries. She has written articles on the collections and lectured frequently on the research collections held in the Libraries and Archives as well as Brooklyn Museum history. Deirdre has curated several exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. She is a visiting professor at Pratt’s School of Information and Library Science and serves as a board member at the Center for Book Arts in New York.

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Tagged: brooklyn, CHART, imaging
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Help us pin Brooklyn to the map!

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Shelley Bernstein

If you know and love Brooklyn we need your help to get 300+ images from our collection pinned to Historypin’s map before their launch on July 11, 2011. If we don’t get cracking, Brooklyn is going to be woefully under-represented and that’s just not okay. Current Historypin totals have 1,358 images pinned to Manhattan with just 103 pinned to Brooklyn.

Brooklyn, we can do better than that!

Historypin launches July 11 with our without Brooklyn. Let's rally BK pride to make sure the borough is well represented!

Historypin is a social sharing site meant to bridge the generation gap by encouraging its users to map historial images to modern day locations in order to show then and now comparisons and get people sharing more about history in the process. The site has been in beta for a year or so and we’ve been interested in participating, but we didn’t have enough hands around here to take some of our most interesting materials and get them onto the map because while they have been digitized, they’ve not been geotagged. That’s a major stumbling block and we need your help to get over this hump and ensure the borough of Brooklyn is well represented.

To get started we are going to begin a slow release of some amazing images of Brooklyn from the late 1800s to the Flickr Commons in the hopes that you can help us identify them and place them on a map.

In some cases, it will be very clear where these should be placed, but in others it will be a bit more of a mystery and require some sleuthing. Images that are geotagged by you will get placed on Historypin’s map for their launch on July 11 and we’ll be releasing more images every Tuesday and Thursday.

If you have a few minutes, help us out by mapping a few of these gems and you can continue to chart the project’s progress on our #mapBK leaderboard. Let’s represent!

About Shelley Bernstein

Shelley is the Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum where she works to further the Museum's community-oriented mission through projects including free public wireless access, web-enabled comment books, projects for mobile devices and putting the Brooklyn Museum collection online. She is the initiator and community manager of the Museum's initiatives on the social web. She organized Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition, Split Second: Indian Paintings, and GO: a community-curated open studio project. In 2010, Shelley was named one of the 40 Under 40 in Crain's New York Business and she's been featured in the New York Times. She can be found biking to work or driving '74 VW Super Beetle in Red Hook, Brooklyn with her dog Teddy. ::contact::

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Skylar Fein and Abraham Lincoln: a look into Brooklyn’s collections

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Deirdre Lawrence

With the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War it is a good moment to look back through time and how Americans have been depicted over the years in both the objects we live with and through the popular press. Those of us who work here at the Brooklyn Museum are keenly aware of the depth and breadth of the encyclopedic collections that have been amassed over the years. Every once in a while we have the opportunity to dip into these collections and look for items that circle around a similar theme.

We just had that opportunity when Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, came looking for objects to support a small installation built around a wonderful new acquisition.

Skylar Fein (American, born 1968). Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase, 2010. Acrylic on plaster and wood , 68 x 44 in. (172.7 x 111.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, 2010.66. © Skylar Fein. Image: Jonathan Ferrara Gallery

The new work is entitled Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase by Skylar Fein acquired through a purchase gift from Stephanie Ingrassia (a Brooklyn Museum Board Member) and her husband Tim. As the Museum Librarian, I was delighted when Eugenie selected three items from the Library collection to be included in this installation. Here was a great way to showcase seldom seen rare items from the Library collection and we jumped at the chance!

I encourage you all to come see this interesting installation located in the Special Exhibition Gallery on the Fifth Floor of the Museum. In addition to the Skylar Fein, you will see a small carte de visite of Abraham Lincoln with his son Tad looking at a photo album in Matthew Brady’s studio. The image, dated Feb. 9, 1864, was widely published and distributed especially after Lincoln was assasinated in April 1865.

One of my favorite magazines in the Library collection is Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Included in the installation is an issue of Harper’s dated June 1865 opened to Abraham Lincoln at Home. The beautiful wood engraving is surrounded by interesting text and advertisements that reflect what was happening when the magazine was published.

Pages from Copperheads by Moyra Davey. Images Bywater Bros. Editions.

The third item from the Library collection is a more recent publication—an artists’ book entitled Copperheads by Moyra Davey. Davey’s book presents close-up photographs of pennies found in the street. Her images highlight the oxidation and degradation of the coins, contrasting the effects of their daily use as currency with the ideals embodied by the image of Lincoln. “Copperhead” is slang for a penny, but it also refers to the term used in the nineteenth century for Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War and the policies of Lincoln’s administration.

There are many more objects to be seen including wonderful silhouettes from the Museum’s Decorative Arts collection and a Kara Walker entitled Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War.

This installation is visually and intellectually challenging as it shows how ideas and images have been communicated through time. A topic we can so easily build on through the extensive collections held here at the Brooklyn Museum!

About Deirdre Lawrence

Deirdre Lawrence has been the Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum since late 1983. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, she was Associate Librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She received her M. L. S. from Pratt Institute in 1979 and has studied art history on the graduate level. At the Brooklyn Museum she has established the Museum Archives and implemented many projects to preserve and make accessible the research collections. Deirdre has overseen a major renovation project, implementation of an online catalog and several collaborative projects with other libraries. She has written articles on the collections and lectured frequently on the research collections held in the Libraries and Archives as well as Brooklyn Museum history. Deirdre has curated several exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. She is a visiting professor at Pratt’s School of Information and Library Science and serves as a board member at the Center for Book Arts in New York.

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Filed under: Contemporary Art, Libraries & Archives, Newly on View
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