In 1900, the Brooklyn Museum‘s first curator William Henry Goodyear traveled to the Paris Exposition — a celebration of the past century’s achievements, highlighting cutting edge art, science, and technology. Fifty million visitors witnessed the first full-screen projections of several films (with sound), experienced the first moving walkway, saw the emergence of a style that would become known as art nouveau, and much more.
Goodyear brought photographer/colorist Joseph Hawkes with him for the six-week trip, in order to capture a slice of Parisian life and scenes from the World’s Fair for people in the States. Traveling to Europe wasn’t unheard of at the time, but many folks still couldn’t make the trip. Once they returned, Goodyear conducted a series of lectures, where he showcased a collection of colored lantern slides that brought the normally grainy, black and white images to life. At that time there was no color photography or film, so the tinted highlights added an exciting dimension to the images.
The effect is largely the same for viewers today, as you’ll see in our gallery past the break. The colorization creates a beautiful bejeweled, watercolor-type fluidity, making something like a normal street scene appear absolutely dreamy.
1. Art in the Streets — the enormous street art exhibition which is currently on view at the MOCA — will not be coming to the Brooklyn Museum later this year, as was previously planned. The official reason being cited is budget cuts, but as a source told LA Weekly: “I think it could be a combination that the museum is afraid of the show and the negative press it could bring them. Why would New York not want this show? I don’t believe that someone would not pay for this exhibit.”
2. Page Six reports that Columbia Records is hoping to put together a Destiny’s Child reunion album to help offset the money that they’re expecting to lose on Beyoncé’s new album, 4.
3. In the week leading up to the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2, AMC Theatres has announced that it will screen a marathon of the previous seven films from the series in 29 cities nationwide. Click here to see if your town made the cut. [via EW]
4. NBC has decided to give Donald Trump a raise for his work on Celebrity Apprentice, to an estimated $65 million a year, which makes him the highest paid reality star on TV. Considering that the President makes a mere $400K annually, suddenly his refusal to run for office makes a lot more sense. [via Daily Intel]
5. Happy news: Jon Hamm just signed an eight-figure deal for three more years of Mad Men; since the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, recently locked down a similar contract, it sounds like we’ve got a few more seasons of our favorite show to look forward to. [via Deadline]
History is written by the winners. As Meghan O’Rourke’s recent Slate essay points out, in the literary and cultural worlds, those winners still are — more often than not — men. That’s not because of any native advantage in intelligence or ability, but because of what O’Rourke calls “unconscious gender bias” and our unwillingness to accord “accomplishment and authority” to women as freely as we recognize these qualities in men.
Nevertheless, unequal status notwithstanding, there is more room at the cultural table today than there was in the chauvanist world of 50 years ago. Indeed, blatant sexism is why so many of the artists in Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, up through January 31 at the Brooklyn Museum (and originally organized by Sid Sachs at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts), received little attention when they were actively making work. But O’Rourke’s “unconscious gender bias” is why so few institutions, academic or otherwise, have paid them any mind in the decades since. We spoke to Catherine Morris, the Curator of the museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, about ten fantastic women Pop Artists from the show that you’ve probably never heard of.
A practitioner of psychedelic dreams, artist Fred Tomaselli turns mindscapes into visual landscapes. Layering print media, marijuana leaves, pills, and paint under layers of resin, Tomaselli constructs networks of awe-inspiring elements that come together to form a transcendental vision of parts of the universe. Fascinated by youthful experiences, spiritual allegories, and current events, Tomaselli takes on big and small issues, not ruled by size.
1. It’s official: Sam Raimi has been hired to direct Robert Downey Jr. in Disney’s Wizard of Oz 3D prequel; Downey will play the Wizard, pre-Oz. [via Deadline]
2. Perez Hilton tweeted a link to an upskirt photo of Miley Cyrus, who’s still a minor. Because it’s legally considered child pornography, he could face serious charges. [via Salon]
3. Will Brett Ratner step in to direct The Hobbit? That’s the threat studio execs are hoping will convince Peter Jackson to take the job instead. [via Vulture]
4. Whitesnake is bottling its own wine — a “bodacious, cheeky little wine, filled to the brim with the spicy essence of sexy, slippery Snakeyness.” [via AVClub]
5. Despite efforts to make its programming more accessible than its Manhattan counterparts’, attendance at the Brooklyn Museum continues to drop. [via NYT]
A prolific sculptor and printmaker, New York-based artist Kiki Smith is renowned for her feminist works that present the female form in vital ways.
Mining myths, fairy tales, stories of saints, and concepts of self as subject matter, Smith creates visual narratives that express the poetic nature of life, death, and regeneration. A master at manipulating materials — particularly ink, paper, bronze, and glass — she is seemingly without artistic limits.
Cater waiters: so 2009. DIY food orgies, though? The Brooklyn Museum’s Brooklyn Ball has convinced this writer that a little viscerality and self-service never hurt anyone, especially when it comes to the usually-stuffy dinner gala format. Celebrating its partnership with The Met to create the largest costume collection in the world, the museum threw a fundraising bash featuring an installation series by Jennifer Rubell, all of it edible.
Rubell (if that name rings a bell, it should: she’s the daughter of renowned Miami art collectors Don and Mera Rubell) last made a splash in New York at the Performa09 benefit dinner with a biblically-inspired feast that New York Times art critic Roberta Smith described as “meld[ing] installation art, happenings and performance art with various Old Testament overtones, while laying waste to the prolonged ordeal that is the benefit-dining experience.” Get the scoop Rubell’s “Icons” and see who we ran into at the cheese table, after the jump.
File under: wow. Brooklyn Museum is busy hyping its yearly gala the Brooklyn Ball with the help of a twenty-foot-tall piñata in the shape of Andy Warhol’s head. If a museum party hosted in conjunction with The Met with special guests Zac Posen, Stefano Tonchi, and Mario Batali didn’t contain enough details to excite us (it does), a gigantic arts-and-crafts version of Andy’s noggin sure does the trick. According to the Brooklyn Museum blog, the contents of the Warhol piñata will be kept a secret until revelers succeed in breaking it open on April 22, but we have a few ideas — plus the paper-mâché reveal and a ticket giveaway — after the jump.
Even if you haven’t wandered up to 5th Avenue at 89th Street recently, chances are you’ve heard whispers of something unusual afoot. That something is courtesy of performance artist Tino Sehgal, whose ephemeral pieces rely on empty space and spectator involvement. One such piece in his current solo show at the Guggenheim, titled “The Kiss,” involves a couple embracing on the floor of the rotunda in a “changing, slow-motion, amorous” entanglement. We at Flavorpill love staging elaborate photo shoots in museums and decided to reinterpret Sehgal’s performance piece in five New York City art institutions: The Metropolitan Museum, New Museum, Rubin Museum, P.S.1, and the Brooklyn Museum. Could we choreograph the same magic?
Fred Tomaselli may be best known for amassing and using copious amounts of pills and herbs in his paintings. But the Brooklyn-based artist is a collector at heart — acquiring, archiving, and assembling not only pharmaceuticals, but also images of flowers, feathers, anatomical illustrations, and other ephemera. In his classically beautiful and psychedelic paintings, he painstakingly rearranges his objects; from afar, individual items are barely distinguishable, but up close, the details are mesmerizing. Read More »
