It’s easy to forget that before Brooklyn was trendy – its streets lined with yoga studios, vegan bakeries, and shops bearing artisanal offerings – there was another, quite different borough in its place. Brooklyn Visual Heritage, an arts project that has amassed thousands of remarkable images of Brooklyn and made them available online, offers a fresh look at the borough through its past. This Brooklynite was enamored of the collection’s assortment of postcards from the early 20th century. The cards picture attractions such as Prospect Park, Bay Ridge, Greenwood Cemetery, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Brighton Beach, and the correspondence on the other side ranges from simple quotidian messages to well-wishing and Brooklyn love. … Read More
Brooklyn Museum
An Interactive Map of Keith Haring's Work in NYC
Yesterday, the Brooklyn Museum opened its doors for the first large-scale exhibition of pop artist Keith Haring’s early work, covering 1978 through 1982. The exhibition includes “155 works on paper, numerous experimental videos, and over 150 archival objects, including rarely seen sketchbooks, journals, exhibition flyers, posters, subway drawings, and documentary photographs,” tracing Haring’s artistic development in his first years in New York City. During his time there, Haring created hundreds of pieces of public art, sometimes slapping up as many as 40 subway drawings in a single day. Unfortunately, there aren’t many left. So to complement the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit, we’ve created an interactive map of the existing Haring murals around New York City. Happy hunting! … Read More
Take a Peek Inside of Keith Haring's Journal
You may have heard that there’s a huge Keith Haring show opening tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum. While we are super excited to see his early work in person, non-New Yorkers can get in on the fun too, thanks to the Keith Haring Foundation. They’ve scanned the journals featured in Keith… Read More
Beautiful Colorized Photos from the 1900 Paris World’s Fair
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. … Read More
The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories
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… Read More
The Top 10 Female Pop Artists You’ve Never Heard Of
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. … Read More
Fred Tomaselli’s NYT Drawings Highlight Global Issues
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. … Read More
The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories
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… Read More
Daily Dose Pick: Kiki Smith
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. … Read More
Last Night’s Bash: Brooklyn Ball Mixes Vanitas and Paper-Mâché
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… Read More
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