Your Ten Nominated Artists
After approximately 147,000 studio visits to 1,708 artists, and then 9,457 nominations, we have our top ten nominated artists.
In alphabetical order:
- Aleksander Betko, Cobble Hill, painting and drawing
- Jonathan Blum, Park Slope, painting and printmaking
- Adrian Coleman, Fort Greene, painting
- Oliver Jeffers, Boerum Hill, painting, illustration, and drawing
- Kerry Law, Greenpoint, painting
- Prune Nourry, Boerum Hill, photography, video/film/sound, and sculpture
- Eric Pesso, Ditmas Park, sculpture
- Naomi Safran-Hon, Prospect Heights, painting
- Gabrielle Watson, Crown Heights, painting
- Yeon Ji Yoo, Red Hook, mixed media sculpture
We are pleased to have such a mix of artists represented in this group, including painters, illustrators, sculptors, and installation artists. Painting clearly ruled with seven of the ten artists being self-identified painters. At the same time, we note the absence of design, fashion, and textile arts, and also that photography, video, and performance are represented only in Nourry’s work.
The results were also a bit surprising in terms of the weekend activity, as was hinted at in Shelley’s post on unexpected traffic patterns. Nine neighborhoods are represented, but they are not the neighborhoods that most people were predicting to be the hot spots. Shelley will be delving into these results to show how visitation may have shaped nominations, so stay tuned as we report on this more.
As we have discussed along the way, this project aimed not only to bring artists and their communities closer together, but also to open up the curatorial process. While most of our exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum have the standard model of being curator conceived and organized, we recognize the value in considering other models. Most recently, our Raw/Cooked series features under-the-radar Brooklyn artists nominated by an artist advisory committee and then selected by Eugenie Tsai, our Curator of Contemporary Art.
With GO, we established a collaborative process where we invited the public to visit studios and then nominate artists before Museum curators would visit the top artists and make the determination of those to be featured in the exhibition, and the work to be included. This will undoubtedly be a difficult task, particularly given the great range of work and the strong support for these artists. Nonetheless, we are committed to creating the best exhibition possible within these parameters, and that will mean making some tough choices.
Over the next month, we will visit these ten artists’ studios and begin highlighting them one by one on our website. By November 15th we will announce the featured artists for the exhibition, which will open on December 1, 2012 during our Target First Saturday evening.
