12.16.24 — The Big Birthday
Count on the Brooklyn Museum to throw quite a party, however embarrassing. Count on it, too, to celebrate the institution by celebrating the borough. On its two hundredth anniversary, it extends an open call to Brooklyn artists and invites them in. It fills the lobby rotunda with roughly two hundred works, through January 26, chosen from four thousand submissions, just in time for its birthday.
It is “The Brooklyn Artists Show,” with every pretension of the definitive—the Brooklyn artists and the show. Who could define Brooklyn or contemporary art once and for all? It is also an excuse not to worry too much about art. 
Hey, it’s only a party. If it falls a bit flat, such is the Brooklyn Museum. One may as well enjoy every bit of Brooklyn sunlight and not dwell on the details, no more than does the museum itself.
It may even lie about its age—like that eternally young elderly relative, but the other way around. What is the oldest, continuously operated art museum in the United States? That would be the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut. What about New York? The Met opened on Fifth Avenue in 1870. The Brooklyn Museum began instead as a public library, but then the New York Historical Society Museum and Library entered the picture earlier still, in 1804.
Upstairs, a rehanging of American art only adds to the confusion—and I turn to that next time, rounding out a longer review and my latest upload. The borough, though, has a way of reinventing itself, and the museum itself rolls out a new logo, as a “new visual identity”—a delightfully clean one at that. Back downstairs, things look weighty and tight. The café has moved forward from a long hallway to the underused lobby, near large paintings by Cecily Brown and Kehinde Wiley, with still larger sculpture by KAWS. If Wiley and KAWS are as glib as ever, they still ask for space. Outside the museum, a newly acquired sculpture in rusted steel by Mark di Suvero looks more formidable still.
The show of Brooklyn artists takes things down a peg. Each artist gets just one work apiece, organized loosely by subject if at all. Instead of wall labels, one has only the artist’s name stenciled on the wall, not even a date and title. As the saying goes, that’s all she wrote. The show could almost pick up where a private collection last season left off in the very same space, only with fewer iconic artists. But then this is about not iconicity but belonging. Two views of bridges between the boroughs hang side by side, neither one of them the Brooklyn Bridge.
Portraiture hangs more or less together, but then portraiture dominates the show. This is, after all, about diversity, what could boost that aim more than faces? One might expect no less than currency and diversity from an eclectic set of contemporary artists as curators—Jeffrey Gibson (a Native American), Vik Muniz (born in Brazil), Fred Tomaselli (a Californian), and Mickalene Thomas (an African American woman). In the American wing, her self-portrait lacks her usual glitter, and her face looks a bit dour as well. In the rotunda, things are looking up. Gibson makes sculpture, and the show has allusions to non-Western totems and household trash, but plain old painting still predominates.
All this makes it hard indeed to identify a work, to give it context, or to remember an artist. Anonymity has an upside, though, leaving space to enjoy a leisurely stroll. I am, I know, not really doing my job, but I felt on vacation, a nice one at that. A young woman, in a photo by Jasmine Clark, might be on vacation, too, seated in a perfect wildness in a pristine white dress. Isis Davis-Marks might be on vacation from Yale with her books still on her desk. I always liked those translations—and again, the story continues next time with more than two hundred years of American art.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.