7.1.24 — A Passion for Brooklyn
Last week I featured a show at the Brooklyn Museum of black collectors in the arts, so how about a show earlier this year of much the same, but ever so different? This review somehow slipped through the cracks at the time, but here it is. I would be insulting Spike Lee if I said that his collection is more about him than about art. What else should guide a collection but passion? The alternative is what someone thinks will sell.
Of course, that passion should extend to the world around him, but no problem there. If one thing holds together four hundred items at the Brooklyn Museum, through February 4, it is a passion for New York. It may not be much as, strictly speaking, an art collection, but this is his New York and very possibly yours as well—and I work this together with a recenter report on Henry Taylor, the black community, and his local heroes as a longer review and my latest upload.
Not that Lee’s sense of what matters is any less real. It just happens to filter through African American eyes in Brooklyn. He grew up there, though born in Atlanta—first in Crown Heights, just blocks from the Brooklyn Museum, and then in Cobble Hill, when it was still Italian. In every sense, he is returning home. He bases his production company there, too, Forty Acres and a Mule in Fort Greene. His first film, She’s Gotta Have It, is about a graphic artist in Brooklyn.
This is a filmmaker’s collection through and through. It opens with posters for his movies (the first in Haitian Creole, also spoken in Brooklyn) and returns often to movies. One room has posters for the classics that were just changing minds when he was growing up, from Rashomon and global cinema to The French Connection on the streets of New York. It has music, including musical numbers from his films. Lee’s father was a jazz bassist, while his mother taught. It has no end of sports figures and their uniforms, especially his beloved New York Knicks.
What it does not have is much art worth remembering. It has Deborah Roberts and Michael Ray Charles, African American painters with a style rooted in folk art of the South, and Kehinde Wiley with a sitter in Jackie Robinson uniform. Mostly, though painting appears, often as not anonymous, as designs for prints—whether posters or the cover of Time featuring Toni Morrison. Not that it downplays the visual arts in favor of Lee’s development. While the curators, Kimberli Gant and Indira A. Abiskaroon, call it “Creative Sources,” he is not giving anything away. Everything on display is complete except for America itself.
That is cause for celebration and a reminder of struggle, racial struggle, just as in his movies. No one appears as often as Malcolm X. In show’s first video, Malcolm speaks at a rally, he explains, not as Democrat or Republican, Christian or Jew, because blackness preceded them all. Am I crazy, then, or an arrogant white male if I say that this is my history as well? I have not taken a show so personally since “Analog City” in 2022, and Lee, I think, would approve. This is the city that shaped me, too, only starting with Lee’s work itself.
These are the books I read, the vinyl I heard, the movies I saw. I cannot tell you how much time I spent alone in my room listening to Knick games in 1969 and 1970, the year of their coach and starting five in a portrait here. When Brooklyn burns in Do the Right Thing and good intentions die, my city was burning, too. Anyone who grew up in those years might feel the same way. Who would not envy a first edition from Zora Neale Hurston? Who could not envy guitars from David Byrne and Prince—or brass from Branford and Wynton Marsalis?
If the story can also be yours, credit Lee’s passion and open mind. Gordon Parks and Richard Avedon photograph cultural icons, black and white (while Carrie Mae Weems photographs Lee himself). A thematic arrangement avoids a single story as well, requiring one to double back on one’s tracks to exit. That has the advantage of avoiding an unhappy ending, with a clip cutting from a Klan march to Donald J. Trump’s talk of “fine people”—and a bat from Aaron Judge the year the Mets and Yankees imploded. If the show still sucks up to celebrity, with too few surprises and too little art, I can understand. This is a museum with its own weak spot for the neighborhood.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.