Results tagged “Arnold Lehman” from Real Clear Arts

Just so you know -- a news collection that needs little or no comment (the boldface is mine): 

• The Arkansas Democrat Gazette reported on the construction of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art: "Museum officials on Friday opened a temporary lookout and a 1 1 /2-mile pedestrian and bicycle trail that crosses the museum property...the museum expects people to realize the scope of the building and be more patient for it to open, said Sandy Edwards, the museum's associate director." (more)
• From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: "Shorewood's Atwater Park will soon be home to a sculpture by one of the world's most respected public artists, Jaume Plensa, best known for his interactive "Crown Fountain" in Chicago's Millennium Park. The purchase and installation of the 8-foot-tall sculpture, in the shape of a human body and crafted from stainless steel letters, is being made possible by an anonymous donor who wants to draw attention to Shorewood's new public art program." (more)
• The Brooklyn Museum reports a record of more than 80,000 people during the past year of its First Saturdays, the free art-and-entertainment evening from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. -- which take place every month but September. That's more than 7,200 per month/night. And it's almost 20% of the entire year's attendance on just 11 nights. Director Arnold Lehman has insisted not only that First Saturdays are critical to attracting new audiences but also (he told me) that the visitors actually do look at the art. (more) 

Photo Credit: Courtesy Jaume Plensa/Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Back to my lunch with Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum,* which ensued after I noted here that on a recent visit the special-exhibition galleries were full but the permanent collection galleries were empty.

This is a problem of museums' own making. Over the years, they, aided by media coverage, have trained people to come for the special shows and nevermind the treasures they actually own. Now, with many museums cutting back on traveling shows because of financial woes, the problem is growing.

Brooklyn, it turns out, recently held a retreat on the subject. One obvious answer, hardly unique to Brooklyn, has curators devising "special" shows from their permanent collections -- AKA "shopping in your closet." In October, for example, Brooklyn will open James Tissot: "The Life of Christ" -- an exhibition of 124 watercolors drawn from 350 that were acquired by the museum in 1900, at the urging of John Singer Sargent.

None of these watercolors (that is a detail from Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray, 1886−94, above) has been on view in at least 20 years; some haven't been seen since the 1930s. They were first shown in Paris in 1894, and then went on the road to London, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and -- Brooklyn. Lehman plans to peddle the show to four other museums, earning fees from them that will pay for conservation.

In a similar vein, To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum, which has been traveling for about a year and is going to about a dozen museums, will return to Brooklyn in mid-stream (next Feb. 12 through May 2) for a visit. By then, the museum will have readied a special gallery for several mummies in its permanent collection (which has 11 humans and several animals, all told) that are not in the traveling show; it will focus on the after-life. That's a mummy of Hor at left, entering the CT scanner at North Shore Hospital.

All of this makes sense, and none is controversial. But it doesn't address the problem squarely. There's more.

At the Brooklyn Museum* on Friday, I stopped in to see the just-opened Yinka Shonibare MBE exhibition, which runs through Sept. 20. Unbeknownst to me, it beautifully illustrates one of the strategies I was going to bring up at my lunch with Director Arnold Lehman for getting people interested in seeing museums' permanent collections. Lehman and the museum's curators were one step ahead of me: they had already displayed some of Shonibare's works within the permanent collection galleries.

Most of the Shonibare show is on view in the fourth-floor special exhibitions galleries, with a couple pieces on the first floor, too. But Brooklyn also asked him to make site-specific works that are on display -- surprise -- in its period rooms.

Retailers have used this strategy for years -- setting up boutiques for, say, Coach leather goods in a department store. When shoppers go in to buy a Coach bag, they stay to shop for other merchandise. (Well, they did.)

What Brooklyn did isn't unique in the museum world, but it's not common, either; other museums can take a lesson from its example. The execution in the Shonibare show is brilliant.

Brooklyn has wonderful period rooms, ranging from the Milligan House Parlor (above) to a Rockefeller House Moorish Room, yet I'd venture that they get little traffic compared with the rest of the museum. For this installation -- called Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play -- Shonibare made seven figures of children, headless as usual and dressed in Victorian costumes of the same Dutch wax fabrics he uses in the rest of his show. 

I come to praise the Brooklyn Museum* today. Over the past couple of weeks, I've obliquely mentioned a few of its failings: the lack of people in its permanent collections here and its American art galleries, which I consider to be woeful, here. Over the years, I've also disliked its penchant for mounting shows on the edge of art, or beyond it, like "Hip-Hop Nation" and "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth." There's more, but I won't catalogue my quibbles here.

But I give Director Arnold Lehman a lot of credit. After my post about the permanent-collection galleries, instead of getting angry or annoyed, he asked his PR chief Sally Williams to call me, say he agreed, and invite me out to talk about it. That's where I'll be later today. 

Arnie has made Brooklyn a leader in outreach, in some ways. At the Museums and the Web conference earlier this year, the "Brooklyn Museum flat out swept the Best of the Web awards and their main website won the overall award," the Indianapolis Museum of Art reported here. I just learned from a blog called Museum Marketing, where Jim Richardson reported here on the "Top Museums on Twitter," that Brooklyn comes in second only to the Museum of Modern Art among the top 50. When I checked the speakers at the 2009 Communicating the Museum conference, taking place in Malaga right now, I learned that two of the four keynote speakers are from the Brooklyn Museum -- Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology, and Will Cary, membership manager. I'm sure there's more, and these are all good things. (The CT scanning of four mummies from its permanent collection earlier this week, at a nearby hospital, was pretty cool too. One, always thought to be a female, turned out to be male.)  

What else can be done, or considered, to get more people interested in art -- especially permanent collections? If we come up with anything creative, I'll let you know.

Photo Credit: Brooklyn Museum of Art

* Disclosure: a foundation I consult to supports the Brooklyn Museum