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To pick up from last time on the Brooklyn Museum at age two-hundred, the American wing can hardly wait to see you. It cannot even hold off long enough for a conventional sign announcing the exhibition and welcoming you in.

Instead, the space off the elevator greets you with signs picked right off the street, like one for a bus stop that might have just left off a full load of visitors like you. To its side, a living room set contains seating, shelves, and what the museum politely calls antiques. Not that collectors often treasure some cheap furniture, embarrassing carvings, and an old TV, and not that a museum often displays them. Make yourself at home as best you can. Inside, the mad rush never stops. Just try to sort out the period for many a period piece hung high and low amid others. Just try to identify them at all, some without so much as wall labels.

You can rest assured of one thing: this rehanging will emphasize BIPOC—black, indigenous, and other people of color. It claims that opening room for African American families of a certain age, and that should already have you wondering. Do its contrasts and disorder enhance or diminish the museum’s most esteemed collection? Does it honor blacks and women or trivialize them that much more? What is art, what is trash, and who gets to say?

The Brooklyn Museum has rehung its American wing before, though never as thoroughly. Not two years ago, as I reported then, it rolled out these very rooms to great fanfare. It put the emphasis on Native American art, with a first room for just that and the name of the Lenape nation in large type outside. It made a greater effort throughout to find parallels between tradition, but nothing like this. The latest comes just in time for the museum’s two hundredth birthday, so you will forgive it if the curator, Stephanie Sparling Williams, and her team boast, in the rollout’s subtitle, of “New Frameworks for American Art.” The entirety is “Toward Joy,” opened October 4.

Not that it has anything like an obvious framework or much cause for joy. The opening stress on indigenous art is gone, and samples of it are not so easy to find. Nor indeed is anything else. My eye first fell on small paintings by Winslow Homer and Martin Johnson Heade, with all their precise observation and near supernatural color. Look around, though, and the magic is gone, along with whatever else was going on between the Hudson River School and the threshold of modern art. Not far away lies Georgia O’Keeffe, amid an awkward mix of prim academics and garish color.

What, then, do they reveal about an artist? The room also includes a wonderful piece of Native American pottery, but what is that doing here? You may need the room’s introductory text to spot what they have in common: these are about troubled waters, from seascapes to the stories that a culture tells only to itself. Other themes include flowers, backs, and “Surface Tension.” These are not exactly recognized genres in art’s history.

This is not a way to celebrate inclusion. Rather than welcoming diversity, they take the life out of almost everyone. Georgia O’Keeffe seems closer to native symbolism than abstraction, which is interesting, but also stiff as a board in a company of stiffs. Albert Bierstadt, once on a partition to himself, shares a wall in the next room with lengthy text about, well, I am not sure what. Rather than breaking away from so much garish art into majesty, he looks just plain overblown. Artists this electric deserve better.

Rooms without wall labels do have touch screens for greater access, if you dare and if you care. Two alcoves feature the conservator’s hand, as “Radical Care,” which sounds promising, but I could not detect it. A shed acts as a study room, where paperbacks by Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and bell hooks tell you know what you are supposed to study, and it is not art. A long succession of nineteenth-century portraits, starting with John Singer Sargent, hangs at knee level as if on an assembly line. Chairs rest on high shelves as if someone forgot to take them out of storage. One more chair, facing a tea set, is by Frank Lloyd Wright—perhaps the least likely artist to take tea.

One sad result of the new hanging is to call attention to the collection’s gaps. Good as they are, Al Held and David Diao will have to stand for postwar abstraction. Still, if one group defies the rehanging’s limits and its strictures, it is women, especially black women One can discover portraits by Laura Wheeler Waring in 1940, akin to Fauvism, and Lily Martin Spencer, holding court with ripe cherries in 1856. Faith Ringgold has a rare place of honor at the start of a room with For the Woman’s House. It may take women to keep a major museum on a major anniversary on the map.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

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.

To wrap up from last time on 100 Famous Views of Edo, I began with the changing city, because the museum does. The curator, Joan Cummins, makes a point of it, with wall text and a map, rather than changing colors, line, and light.

Despite herself, though, she sticks to tradition. An opening room introduces Hiroshige and pairs one print apiece by him and Shigemasa, but then the show moves on. (The older artist has a scratchier line, greater detail, less poetry and humor, and little color.) It saves Takashi Murakami for last.

Separate rooms for the two principal artists do not interrupt the flow of a series. It is up to you to compare and to contrast. Still, a small room between the two brings Tokyo into the present. In photographs by Alex Falcón Bieno, shops have become skyscrapers, and an elevated train follows the curve of a street. They look familiar from Hiroshige all the same. He is still the traditionalist and the visionary.

Had he visited the West, he would have had adjustments to make, ever the urban explorer. I can imagine him in Paris, heading up the Seine with Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir to be sure that he had seen it all—and that brings one to Takashi Murakami. He speaks of Renoir and Vincent van Gogh as influences. Does he really need to reach Hiroshige by way of Paris, and can he? A more obvious influence is Pop Art. Surprisingly, it may add to his respect for the past.

Perhaps it must, if you associate Pop Art with Andy Warhol and quotation. And Murakami takes quotation seriously. So much for the originality of the avant-garde. I kept waiting for modern Japan or Mickey Mouse to drop into his “famous views,” but they never do. You may struggle to figure out what, if anything, has changed between one series and the next. But then, if Warhol is right, what can change?

For one thing, painted views have become larger, and the series in full fills its single wall in three tight rows. At the same time, they have become flatter, as has to happen in blowing them up to poster size. They look all the brighter for that. They also call attention to the older artist’s attachment to the picture plane. Did Hiroshige allow a tree branch to loop over itself? With Murakami, the closed loop is that much harder to miss.

The flatter colors echo Pop Art, of course, along with the current fashion for anime and cartoons. The sheer pace of his work may make him sound glib, and so he is. There is nothing like Hiroshige for his stillness and humor. Will Murakami’s Edo ever be a famous view? Can quotation alone serve for the vitality of a changing city? Should Hiroshige vanish again for another twenty-four years, for preservation, it may have to do.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

When Utagawa Hiroshige named his prints 100 Famous Views of Edo, he could have been describing the many faces of a modern city. A lifelong resident of Edo, in Japan, he could see it changing beneath his feet and always came back for more. A New Yorker would know the feeling even today. You can tally the precious gains and losses in the course of a lifetime, from favorite haunts to entire neighborhoods.

Hiroshige, though, seems to have felt only the pleasures, and he took equal joy in seeking them out, from 1856 to 1858. A map at the Brooklyn Museum marks the spot of each and every print, and they cover the city. Their scope and density are impressive indeed for a city still on the brink of modernity, and so is his ever-shifting point of view. He juxtaposes nature and culture, change and tradition—and not even their clash can disturb the stillness. Some of the handmade impressions have since vanished or faded, but the museum has a fine complete set, and it is on display for the first time in twenty-four years. One can walk alongside it, on all four walls of a large room, to share in their continued discoveries and the silence.

The museum asked a popular contemporary artist, Takashi Murakami, if he had on hand a response to the city—or would like to make one. Yes to both, and he has contributed not just one painting, but several, as tall or taller than he. Their size alone pulls Hiroshige into present. And then, as he always does, Murakami got carried away by his subject and his own facility. In a matter of months he created a complete series after the original—and I work their two views of Edo together with a recent report on still more of Asian art, in the art of India, as a longer review and my latest upload.

Hiroshige (and no one calls him anything else) was not the first to title a work Famous Views. Kitao Shigemasa, for one, had adopted it in 1770, and it had already come to stand for a genre as well as a boast. And Hiroshige’s series quickly earned its name. By the time he was done, it had grown to well over a hundred views in the face of demand, which also drove the multiple impressions. It found itself at the center of Japanese tradition, and no wonder. He rendered Edo day and night, in all weathers, and in every season, with an eye on both past and future.

Cities everywhere were changing fast, as urban economies brought expansion and commercialization. Hiroshige includes wood beams and towers as signs of construction. He moves easily between distant mountains and streets lined with stores and the craft that fed them, along with window-shoppers. The museum recreates a storefront in the center of the room. It was a low-rise city all the same. Towers tilt precariously and streets curve gently, with modern bustle and old-world charm.

Then, too, Edo had its own drivers of change. It had been growing for at least two centuries, but now feudal lords and shoguns had taken over. Samurai, their private armies, make a point of their discipline in close procession. Tourists showed up, too, for picnics, antiquity, and shopping. This was no longer a rural backwater, although it sits beside waters with views of a temple and its pagoda. Just ten years after this series of prints, the emperor moved in as well, and the city became Tokyo.

Hiroshige’s prints run in no particular order, through August 4, although he dates every one. Rather, he keeps the emphasis on discovery and variety. The simplest compositions proceed step by step into depth, marked by people, terraces, a herd of deer, more distant isles, mountains, and sky. Increasingly, though, he plays against expectations. The foreground cuts off architecture, leaving nowhere to stand. A ferry rider’s hands rest on a rail, but what he sees may or may not match what you see.

He is playing with scale and point of view. A cat sits on a sill, looking out along with you, but with the better view. A kite or bird seems way larger than life as it swoops down and into the picture plane. He plays, too, with strong color and gentle gradations. Wood blocks all but demand uniform colors, but not for him—from the intensity of sunset to boxes for each work’s title. If Japanese art makes you think of the monochrome of Chinese calligraphy and screens, think again.

A changing light adds still greater variety and drama. Tiny stars fill the night sky, and newly fallen show brightens the day. Sheets of rain in parallel streaks further define the picture plain and dare you to penetrate. And still the mood is peace. The exhibition opened just as cherry trees blossomed outside the museum. One banner shifts in the breeze, but others do not, and the cat lies still—and return for Murakami’s side of the story next time.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

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.

What makes for a thoroughly dispiriting exhibition? Not just weak art or forced curatorial themes, but the smell of money. You could, after all, find that you were mistaken about the first two or, if not, waltz right through and forget it. The smell of money is harder to escape. It clings to your senses and to the entire state of the art.

You know the stench from museum displays of private collections, the owners angling for their name on the wall, the museum for a gift. You know it, too, from shows of fashion and celebrity, with no more relevance to art than the ticket sales they hope to achieve. Now the Brooklyn Museum manages both, with the Dean collection—from the family name of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, stars who know how to make music and how to dress for it. You know who they have in mind when they call the exhibition “Giants,” through July 7. And yet, for all that, the artists are names as well, with large works that themselves might hang beside giants. It could serve as a full-scale survey of contemporary black art, a lively one at that, if you do not mind the limits of stardom, sparkle, and trends, and I work this together with an earlier report on black portraiture by Marcus Leslie Singleton as a longer review and my latest upload.

Collectors, fashion, and celebrity need not rule out diversity—not to judge by past shows in Brooklyn of Virgil Abloh and Spike Lee. And these collectors know how to stick up for blackness and how to please. The curators, Kimberli Gant with Indira A. Abiskaroon, open with a glittery assemblage by Ebony G. Patterson that could pass for a store window at Christmas, were it not for the pink background and black children’s faces. Then the giants themselves kick in, with their BMX bikes and Yamaha piano, painted with Freedom and Love. Bikes return later, too, in paintings of wheelies by Amy Sherald. And then the collectors pose for Kehinde Wiley, as heavenly beings in an oval of flowers.

All fashionable, well, and good, but those black faces belong to real children and wheelies to the street. Forget the heavens this once. Wiley made his name taking his flattery to black men on the street. Here he also paints a woman lying down, on a still larger scale. If Beatz and Keys bring their precious possessions, they want you to relax, too, amid Bang & Olufsen speakers and soft black chairs. This is not, they are saying, just about them.

It is about people and politics, even if it does land in the museum’s Great Hall. The collectors pose again for Jamal Shabazz, in a photo hung with Eldridge Cleaver by Gordon Parks. They trace their ancestry to Africa, with a street scene from Ernie Barnes in 1957 and abstractions by Esther Mahlangu based on patterns that one could mistake for Native American. They have crossed the sea, like Barkley L. Hendricks to Jamaica for quaintly framed landscapes. Shabazz and Parks face off again in a long hall—the first for some of his most politically charged images, the second for the streets of Brooklyn. They could almost be debating what “Giants” is all about.

More often than not, it is about home, on or off the streets. Deana Lawson and Toyin Ojih Odutola have figures in suggestive interiors—although Lawson’s just happen to include a naked “Soweto queen.” Meleko Mokgos devotes a full room to families in Botswana. He says that he wants to know “how the subject is constituted,” but (postmodern rhetoric aside) he is in search of community. Fancier matters, like conceptual art and new media, take second place. Lorna Simpson places her photos above text for future and past, perfect and imperfect, but the operative word comes first, the present.

Still, “Giants” sees them all as stars. Mickalene Thomas, Kwame Brathwaite, and Nick Cave have their undying flattery and glitz, while Lynette Yiadom-Boakye brings her camera to the dance. Derrick Adams and Nina Chanel Abney span four canvases apiece. Politics itself takes a back seat, although portraits by Henry Taylor and Jordan Casteel plead for food and just plain respect. When Hank Willis Thomas makes a geometric abstraction from worn prison uniforms, he could almost be erasing it, along with one by Odili Donald Odita to its left. When his silvery arms cross in a worker’s protest, their sheen reflects on the entire show.

Still, “Giants” comes down to its collectors. Like them, it is self-assured and catchy. Like them, too, it returns again and again to the names and trends you know. If portraits of pomp and circumstance pass over a still greater adventure, perhaps the artists themselves could suggest alternatives. Meanwhile, Arthur Jafa all but knocks down the entire edifice. A truck tire laden with chains and suspended like a pendulum is heading for you.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.