The Brooklyn Museum is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, embarking on a year-long series of projects and exhibitions including focuses on work by Marilyn Minter and Georgia O’Keefe, among others.  “The project recognizes feminism as a driving force for progressive change and takes the transformative contributions of feminist art during the last half-century as its starting point,” the museum said in a statement.  “[It] then reimagines the next steps, expanding feminist thinking from its roots in the struggle for gender parity to embrace broader social-justice issues of tolerance, inclusion, and diversity.” (more…)

Following in the footsteps of MoMA and the Met, The Brooklyn Museum has announced a round of employee buyouts to address possible budget issues.  “The cost of running the museum has substantially grown over the past few years,” says Anne Pasternak. “The museum is therefore being proactive.” (more…)

The Brooklyn Museum has appointed Nancy Spector to the dual positions of deputy director and chief curator, making her the first senior staff member hired by new director Anne Pasternak.  “The Brooklyn Museum’s past is rooted in vision, courage, and a good measure of chutzpah,” Pasternak says. “With Nancy Spector as our chief curator, we can count on a trailblazing future that charts new territory for our museum. We can expect Nancy to explore the important questions of the role of art and museums for the twenty-first century, shaking up old canons and proposing new ones, while sharing our love of art and artists with ever-expanding audiences.” (more…)

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum is Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks, the first major exhibition of the writings and sketches from Jean-Michel-Basquiat’s’ rarely seen personal archives. Without a doubt one of the most influential artists of 1980’s Neo-Expressionism, Basquiat worked with music, poetry, and  graffiti before finally arriving at painting. Tagging the walls of downtown New York, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz presented socially conscious graffiti under the tag name SAMO.  Straying from the visual attributes of popular graffiti, these tags were often full of sayings, quotes and poems in plain script that replaced graffiti’s showmanship with intellectual thought.  Navigating viewers into the personal thoughts of Basquiat with two video documentations and many rarely seen paintings,The Unknown Notebooks is a satisfying mixture of both seeing and reading.

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Basquiat’s cultural plurality and vivid paintings begin with the socially investigative phrases, symbols and thoughts on these carefully curated pages.  Each of the 160 pages in the exhibition hold a single composition, with blank pages framing the words to a strong effect.  Intent on speaking with political and socio-economic strength, corporate symbols, quotations, crowns, skeletons and teepees hang above words, and at the end of sentences, altering these everyday phrases, while visual techniques, suggesting dichotomies in familiar linguistic comprehension, open more room for unique interpretation.

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Accompanying the notebooks are a series of paintings that possess a freedom and fearlessness directly related to the artist’s graffiti background.  Words fill the canvas from top to bottom, transforming text into texture and letters back into gestural marks.  Acting as much as a carrier of language as a layer of paint, Basquiat’s words successfully  imported graffiti’s aesthetic energy and social awareness into the white cubes of the art world. The anonymous foundations of his early craft embrace this energetic freedom, vandalism, and self-expression that have come to define youth culture. A contributing figure in the impact of the practice in contemporary art proper, Basquiat’s dedicated approach to symbols and lettering transform this anonymous art form into a new format inside his burgeoning artistic repertoire. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

Jean-Michel Basquiat The Unknown Notebooks (Installation View)

The Unknown Notebooks reveals  the underlying elements that made expression a larger concern for Basquiat than fitting into the previously determined aesthetic standards of high art. The primitive and socially aware foundations that have defined his work, and kept its impact almost thirty years later are here at Brooklyn Museum in an almost elemental form, on display through August 23rd.

— R.Williams

Read more:
“Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” at Brooklyn Museum [Exhibition Site]
“Review: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Unknown Notebooks’ at the Brooklyn Museum” [New York Times]
“‘Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks’ Gives a Window Into Basquiat’s Mind At Its Most Relaxed” [Forbes]

FAILE, FAILE Temple (detail) (2015) via Brooklyn Museum

FAILE, a Brooklyn-based collaboration between artists Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, is currently presenting their exhibition Savage/Sacred Young Minds at the Brooklyn Museum, continuing the artists’ practice in obscuring the boundaries between fine art and street art through techniques of both traditional and rebellious creative processes within predominantly institutional settings. (more…)

The New York Times reports that the Brooklyn Museum will offer free admission to visitors under twenty, beginning on September 3rd. The museum also plans to raise the suggested general admission from $12 to $16, the first increase since 2011. The decision to admit children and teenagers for free is part of an effort by the museum to make the institution more available to a younger audience, whom director Arnold Lehman believes “represents the future of all museums”.  (more…)

The Bruce High Quality Foundation, which opens its first ever museum retrospective tonight at the Brooklyn Museum, is profiled in the most recent issue of the Village Voice.  Speaking with two members of the amorphous collective, the interview covers the group’s history of art world subversions, their efforts towards a more populist art world, and their take on the economic value of art.  “Art’s most radical quality is that it’s useless,” says one member. “People have used art for lots of purposes throughout history, but artists have to protect its uselessness—it serves as a shield against corruption.”  (more…)

The Brooklyn Museum is currently attempting to overturn an agreement made in 1931 that specified that a large donated collection be kept together after the owner’s death, despite the issue that a quarter of the works have since been determined forgeries, misattributed, or “not of museum quality.”  The case highlights the thorny issue of donor intent, which can occasionally hold an institution to untenable standards with regards to its collection and gifts.  “A respect for donor intent is essential for philanthropic integrity.” said Adam Meyerson, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable.  However, “You’re not serving donor intent if you go bankrupt.”

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Image: Jean-Michel Othoniel, My Bed, 2003, via Brooklyn Museum

In a collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, The Brooklyn Museum is currently showing a large-scale retrospective of the work of French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, whose colorful glassworks and sculptures stand between tangible reality and a reconstituted dream world.  Entitled “My Way,” the show provides an in-depth look at Othoniel’s 25 year career. (more…)

Janaina Tschäpe’s table installation, a giant squid with condom roe. All photos on site for Art Observed by Samuel Sveen.

The Brooklyn Artists Ball took place last night, the annual fundraising gala hosted by the Brooklyn Museum. A number of artists and celebrities were in attendance, including Judy Chicago, Aurel Schmidt and Dustin Yellin, as well as those honored with the Asher B. Durand Award: Martha Rosler, Amy Sillman, Mickalene Thomas. Between a lively cocktail hour and an after party sponsored by W Magazine sat an elegant dinner with one-night-only 40-foot-long “table environments,” created by 16 Brooklyn Women artists. The event was the fifth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, with Ms. Elizabeth A. Sackler present to receive the Augustus Graham Medal for strong commitment to the arts and the Brooklyn Museum.

Guests posing for the interactive video installation by Nicole Cohen

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Keith Haring, Matrix (1983). All images copyright Keith Haring Foundation.

On now at The Brooklyn Museum is ‘Keith Haring: 1978-1982.’ This dynamic multi-media exhibition provides a comprehensive survey of Haring’s early work. Best known for his “Crack is Wack” landmark mural, “The Radiant Baby,” and other stylistically similar cartoons made with thick lines of black Sumi ink, Haring also produced work in other mediums such as film and print. This show is comprised of 155 works on paper, multiple videos, and more than 150 personal objects of Haring’s, including notebooks, flyers, posters, subway drawings, and photographs; all of which, put together, capture and encapsulate the excitement and energy of New York City’s club and art scenes in the 1980s. The exhibition narrates viewers through the period in Haring’s career immediately following his arrival in New York City through the establishment of his studio space and the beginning of his interest in street art.

Kenny Scarf and Peter Schuyff, Untitled (1979)

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Robert Rauschenberg, Canto XIV [from XXXIV Drawings for Dante’s Inferno (including KAR)] (1959–1960)

HIDE/SEEK, the controversial exhibition that was first featured at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, is now on view at The Brooklyn Museum. Exploring issues of gender, sexual identity, concealment, and transgression in modern America, it simultaneously presents both a eulogy for the irreversible past and a radiant hope for the present and future. The works subtly meditate on universal themes of love, companionship, interaction, conversation, transience, transformation, dissolution, loss, and death.

Installation view

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Sanford Biggers, Chesire (2008)

The art of Sanford Biggers is a pastiche of cultural signifiers, stacking symbols and tropes from the African-American experience together for a wide contextual palette of juxtapositions. Such is the nature of Blossom, seeing its Brooklyn debut as part of Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective at the Brooklyn Museum. Referencing lynchings, Buddhist enlightenment, and the artist’s musical identity, all while making conscious aesthetic and situational ties to the early 20th century landscapes of the American West, the poetic piece functions as an example of Biggers’ densely multi-cultural work that speaks to both broad senses of American identity and the artist’s own personal experience.

Sanford Biggers, Blossom (2007)

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Installation view, Eva Hesse “Spectres 1960” at Brooklyn Museum. All images on site for Art Observed by Jen Lindblad unless otherwise noted.

Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum are nineteen small scale paintings by Eva Hesse. Completed at the age of twenty-four, the early figurative works are rendered in haunting golds and pale, muddled greens. The artist is best known for her fiberglass and polyester resin sculptures, but the paintings assembled for this exhibition shed new light on her work. Deeply personal, they offer a glimpse at the psychology of the tormented artist as she struggled to gain recognition in the New York City art scene of the 1960s before her untimely death at the age of thirty-four.

Eva Hesse, No Title, 1960, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in. Image via Brooklyn Museum.

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Untitled by Richard Diebenkorn, 1950. All images via Artnet unless otherwise noted.

Currently on view at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York, is an exhibition titled “Richard Diebenkorn: Paintings and Works on Paper 1949-1955″. Organized in cooperation with the Estate of Richard Diebenkorn, this exhibition features thirty-six works on paper  of this well-known American artist, whose early work is associated with Abstract Expressionism.

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Kiki Smith, Pilgrim, 2007-2010, leaded stained glass in steel frames, installation dimensions variable. All installation images courtesy G.R. Christmas courtesy The Pace Gallery.

Currently on view at The Pace Gallery‘s location on 545 W 22nd Street is Kiki Smith: “Lodestar.” A parallel narrative to this exhibition can be found in “Sojourn,” Smith’s concurrent solo show now on view at the Brooklyn Museum (through Sept 12). “Sojourn” marks the artist’s first major museum show in New York since a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 2006. “You have to hit the ground running,” Smith recently told the New York Times, in reference to her process. Ever busy, the artist has also recently been commissioned to design a 16-foot-high window for the Eldridge Street Synagogue in New York’s Lower East Side. The historic landmark is scheduled for completion later this year.

The west coast also welcomes the artist’s presence this year: through August 15, 2010, Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery is showing “Kiki Smith: I Myself Have Seen It,” which explores the role of photography in the development of Smith’s aesthetic. The exhibition will travel to the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in the fall and to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University in the spring of 2011.

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Ida Applebroog’ s ‘MONALISA” 2009 Installation View All images via Hauser and Wirth unless otherwise noted

Currently showing at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, 32 East 69 St., New York, NY is “MONALISA”, an exhibition of works by an American artist  Ida Applebroog. The present exhibition is a debut of the entirely new body of work, with a centerpiece of a rudimentary wooden structure that the artist’s calls “MONALISA’s House”. The structure’s walls are covered by one hundred drawings of the artist’s genitals that she produced in the seclusion of her bathroom, while living in California in 1969. The artist speaks about her work: “It was a certain period of my life and before I got into the tub I’d sit with a full-length mirror on the floor. It was before my own radicalization.”

Ida Applebroog’ s ‘MONALISA” 2009 Installation View

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