A new installation at the two-hundred-year-old Brooklyn Museum presents a moving and persuasive rethinking of American art.
If it were in any other city, the Brooklyn Museum would be a world-class destination—and for the savvy museumgoer it already is. Despite the looming presence of the Met to its north, the museum has always embraced its outer borough status. Founded in 1824, long before Brooklyn ceded independence to become part of the City of Greater New York in 1898, the museum continues to celebrate its singularity, as the events surrounding its two hundredth anniversary on October 4 emphatically attest. One of those events, the reinstallation of its American collection, will occupy me here because, for all its surprising innovations, it is of a piece with the museum’s adventurous history.
But first a brief overview: situated on Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn’s Champs-Élysées, the McKim, Mead, and White beaux-arts building completed in 1926 has been messed about over the years, often making the arrival sequence something of a surprise even for this Brooklynite. Once inside, the renowned collections of everything from Egyptian art to contemporary photography are spaciously displayed, making gallery visits more relaxing and contemplative than in either the Louvre or the Met. For the anniversary, a new logo with a sans serif typeface and interlocking Os, created in collaboration with museum staff by the Brooklyn-based design studio Other Means, announces a new day in museum going. Actually, that day dawned years ago with party nights the first Saturday of every month, the opening of the museum as a polling place and as a site for speeches and demonstrations and the kind of programming that lit the fuse of former mayor Rudy Giuliani, who wanted to shut the place down.
From a revelatory exhibition of Sargent’s watercolors (2013) to the incendiary Sensation exhibition (1999–2000), Brooklyn has always been both grounded and daring. And now we have the reinstallation of the American collection, Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, an exhibition that links beauty to resistance through the lens of a Black feminist perspective. Most visitors will begin with a gallery that invites them to sit down and relax, a good thing because what is in store will require a willingness to shed ingrained habits of museum going.
Before it was fully installed, I toured what could be seen with Stephanie Sparling Williams, who led a team of seven curators across the departments of American art, decorative arts and design, and Indigenous art. Her catalogue essay about the undertaking will be a welcome addition to anyone’s library. The joy begins in the gallery entitled “To Give Flowers,” where I acknowledged my ignorance of the phrase and its significance in Black culture, but surrounded by floral wallpaper by Loïs Mailou Jones, and confronted with Laura Wheeler Waring’s arresting canvas Woman with Bouquet, I began to feel the joy of honoring the living—giving them flowers—whenever and wherever they thrived. Georgia O’Keeffe is here, as is a beaded buckskin shirt by an Indigenous maker; here, too, as elsewhere, are examples of the arts of all the Americas.
Our next stop was “Several Seats,” a gallery of portraits. Visitors sit on a park bench opposite a line of welcome addition to anyone’s library. The joy begins in the gallery entitled “To Give Flowers,” where I acknowledged my ignorance of the phrase and its significance in Black culture, but surrounded by floral wallpaper by Loïs Mailou Jones, and confronted with Laura Wheeler Waring’s arresting canvas Woman with Bouquet, I began to feel the joy of honoring the living—giving them flowers—whenever and wherever they thrived. Georgia O’Keeffe is here, as is a beaded buckskin shirt by an Indigenous maker; here, too, as elsewhere, are examples of the arts of all the Americas. Our next stop was “Several Seats,” a gallery of portraits. Visitors sit on a park bench opposite a line of traditional portraits lowered to eye level so you are face to face with John Singer Sargent’s Aaron Augustus Healy, Charles Willson Peale’s Mrs. David Forman and Child, and a nineteenth-century quillwork chair seat and back by an artist of the Mi’kmaq people of eastern Canada and the US. It’s a surprising exercise in leveling that I found joyful and intriguing for the ways in which the viewer feels included. Overlooking it all is a line of chairs from the museum’s superb collection of decorative arts, including a side chair by Charles-Honoré Lannuier (1815), and two seated figures by an unknown Jalisco artist (c. 200). Part of the mission of Toward Joy is to care for the audience as much as the art, something palpable in this gallery.
Some of the works in the reinstallation have never been on view before, and a few of these have found their way into “Surface Tension,” a gallery devoted to the human form, especially the nude. Of the more familiar works here are Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana of the Tower (1895), Mikalene Thomas’s Madame Mama Bush in Black and White (2007), and even a sculpture by Beatrice Wood, Chalice (1975). The stated goals of the curators for this installation
are especially useful: “Culture, religion, and society have always shaped how artists depict the human form—and dictated whose bodies are worthy of artistic study. This framework illuminates depictions of the human form and sets them in conversation with contemporary questions of power, agency, and embodiment.” It’s a refreshing experience to be immersed in the depictions of the human body without regard to the hierarchies of art history. There is more, much more, but I began by suggesting that these innovative ways of displaying American art are not so much a departure for the Brooklyn Museum as a continuation of its mission. Here the work of former curator Teresa A. Carbone on the museum’s history has been especially influential. Beginning with its founding on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights by Augustus Graham as a library to promote literacy and culture for mostly white male immigrants, the institution has evolved; its audience has widened considerably, and yet the mission to care almost as much about that audience as about the collections has not changed.
There is more, much more, but I began by suggesting that these innovative ways of displaying American art are not so much a departure for the Brooklyn Museum as a continuation of its mission. Here the work of former curator Teresa A. Carbone on the museum’s history has been especially influential. Beginning with its founding on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights by Augustus Graham as a library to promote literacy and culture for mostly white male immigrants, the institution has evolved; its audience has widened considerably, and yet the mission to care almost as much about that audience as about the collections has not changed.
If you subscribe to the pendulum theory of cultural representation, you will assume that this moment in the Brooklyn Museum’s history will be followed by a swing back to a more a conventional display of American art. I would not bet on that. The Black feminist values of “coalition building, representation, and accountability,” where everyone has a seat at the table and is nourished there, are a natural outgrowth of everything this museum stands for. Joy despite pain and adversity will always be powerful medicine.
