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Ida Applebroog: Everything is Fine

DATES January 29, 1993 through April 25, 1993
ORGANIZING DEPARTMENT Contemporary Art
COLLECTIONS Contemporary Art
  • December 1, 1992 New York artist Ida Applebroog will create in The Brooklyn Museum’s Grand Lobby an installation that addresses man’s misuse of power and the danger it presents to individual lives, to the ecosystem, and to our survival as a species. Entitled Everything Is Fine, the installation is the Museum’s thirty-second Grand Lobby Project and will be on view from January 29 through April 25, 1993.

    Everything Is Fine will consist of a number of recent figurative paintings and works on paper hung on the back wall of the Grand Lobby and approximately twenty-five free-standing canvases on the lobby floor around which viewers may walk. Ten to twelve of these will represent African monkeys, some standing as tall as seven feet.

    The installation was partly inspired by an article by Richard Preston in The New Yorker (October 26, 1992), which suggests that HIV-2, the virus that causes AIDS, emerged from the African rain forest when hunters touched the bloody tissue of infected monkeys, and proposes that the disease is “the revenge of the rain forest.”

    Ida Applebroog aligns herself with painters of social protest. Her work has also been inspired by the work of Old Masters such as Francisco de Goya. The artist’s feminist sensibility expresses itself in her compassionate portrayals of women and children placed in situations of uncertain outcome. These narrative works, with neither beginning nor end, compel the viewer to imagine the missing links and the suggested stories.

    This Grand Lobby project was organized by Charlotta Kotik, Curator of Contemporary Art, with the assistance of Pamela Johnson and Vesela Sretenovic, curatorial interns funded by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. The exhibition and its associated Artist-in-Residence programs are made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.

    Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1989 - 1994. 01-06/1993, 078-79.
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