Results tagged “Brooklyn Museum” from Real Clear Arts

I've had the catalogue for Andy Warhol: The Last Decade, which went on view on Sept. 26 at the Milwaukee Art Museum, for a couple of weeks now, but something has kept me from writing about it. Now, I've figured it out.

First a description: Warhol made the 50 works in the show between 1978 and 1986, and the museum attempts to prove that this period was "arguably the most productive period of his life" as he mixed "forms and media with audacious fluency." Warhol "created more new series of paintings in the last decade of his life -- in larger numbers and on a vastly larger scale -- than during any other phase of his 40-year career." Among them are his shadow and "oxidation" paintings, self-portraits, yarn paintings, camouflage works, The Last Supper series, "black and white" ads, on and on. Hearing the list, you maybe buy the thesis. Paging through the catalogue, though, gave pause.

It's always hard to judge a show from afar, so today I looked up the review of Mary Louise Schumacher at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. After praising the opportunity to see the works on display, she hit the nail on the head:

But the show, organized by MAM's former chief curator Joseph D. Ketner II, reconsiders the artist in a way that lacks the ring of truth. It seems to overstate the importance of what may have been worthy but somewhat unsuccessful artistic experiments. It emphasizes the visual and painterly over Warhol's conceptual edge, which is what was always so interesting about him - particularly at the end. (More on that, shortly).

Ketner goes so far as to position the late paintings as expressive, personally revealing and, in the case of the Last Suppers, religiously fervent. This seems, at best, sentimental, the stuff better left to the pages of biographies and, at worst, a blasphemy against an artist who went to extremes to keep his art and persona impersonal.

Read the rest here. For a less judgmental account of the exhibit, by the Associated Press, go here.

MAM's thesis seems to be like a headline that overstates the facts in an article -- but that rarely stops news junkies from reading and it shouldn't stop art-lovers from going to this exhibit (which, btw, will travel to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art).

One of the catalogue's joys, meanwhile, is reading Andy's quotes.  

It may not be news at all that states are decreasing their arts funding. Nonetheless, a recent Associated Press article noted the same trend I did last week in corporate funding, namely, that it's getting worse. Here's the money quote:

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies estimates states reduced their arts funding an average of 7 percent in the fiscal year that began July 1. That average doubles to 14 percent when Minnesota is not included because the state almost tripled its art budget to $30.2 million thanks to a new sales tax.

In financially strapped states like Arizona, South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana and Florida, the reductions are steeper, falling 30 percent or more, forcing agencies to trim the amount or value of grants, shutter programs that provide arts education and lay off employees. In two states that haven't completed their annual budgets - Pennsylvania and Connecticut - lawmakers are considering eliminating their state arts agencies entirely.

The rest of the article can be read here.

On the other hand, yesterday The Gap showed that corporate sponsorship is still alive, announcing that it will sponsor the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum's spring show: American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity.  

Considering the trouble Gap Founder and Chairman Emeritus Don Fisher has had trying to build a museum for his extensive contemporary art collection in San Francisco, written about here, that may be a wonder. It's a natural marketing match for The Gap, of course. 

The show, by the way, makes use of the "newly established Brooklyn Museum
Costume Collection" at the Met, according to the press release. The clothes were transferred to the Met from Brooklyn last year, because Brooklyn had neither the room to exhibit them nor the ability to care for them. 

Details about the Gap sponsorship and the spring show are here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum

Is this what art museums want? Now that virtually all of them have expanded, many far beyond what their constituency would want, some will do anything to get people in the door. Even if it's not about art at all.

So I wasn't all that surprised when I read a report about Untitled 24 at the Denver Art Museum, published on Sept. 1, on Examiner.com. (Examiner.com, in case you have not come across it, is a site owned by Philip Anschutz for local news written by anyone who wants to write for it, free. It has a presence in 109 cities at the moment.)

Here's how it described the event:

If you ever wondered what Denver Art Museum is like after dark, the monthly Untitled events may just be your ticket to find out. In addition to cash bar and finger-lickin' good complimentary appetizer buffet, the museum brings in DJs, live bands, and hosts a variety of entertaining activities.

...this Friday people were treated to dark art, ghost stories, paranormal research presentations and even a seance where they could attempt to contact dead artists and ask them questions....Bad Luck City and Legendary River Drifters played at the Duncan Pavilion, while DJ The Postman played some music to set the mood at the Hamilton Building Atrium. Meanwhile, you could decorate plastic bones, run into Denver's own Ghostbusters, or check out a presentation by Colorado X Case Files, where paranormal research experts talked about some of the most haunted places in the Denver area.

The article (here) also included a slide show.

As I understand Examiner.com, there's little or no editing, or checking on veracity. So I went to the DAM's website for its description of Untitled events, and found this:

On final Fridays through September, the Denver Art Museum feels less like a field trip and more like a night out.

A field trip? Is that how museums feel about their regular offerings?

If art museum directors and curators aren't enthusiastic about the art they show, how they possibly expect others to be? 

When was the last time you went to the movies on a weekday between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.? How about a concert, a dance performance or a play? If you can't remember, I am not surprised. Most of us are working during those prime hours. We simply don't have the luxury of taking time off from work to go to a matinee. 

So why is it that 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (or, worse, 4 p.m.) are the most common hours for art museums to be open?

To save money, many museums are trimming back hours -- incredibly, some are cutting out evening hours. The Cincinnati Art Museum (left), for example, recently announced that it would no longer be open on Wednesday nights and said the decision was taken "to maintain the highest possible levels of service in programming and exhibitions."

Sorry, but I can't fathom decisions like that, which seem to me to be more for the convenience of staff than for the convenience of visitors. Traffic patterns at museums probably vary from city to city but, except for school groups, I'd bet that most museums see the bulk of their visitors on weekends and in the evening, if they are open. The Brooklyn Museum recently disclosed numbers showing that nearly 20% of its visitors come to the museum on just 11 nights of the year -- its Target First Saturdays, when the museum remains open until 11 p.m.

Cutting back on evening hours seems clueless, and self-defeating.

A few museums do seem to get this basic fact. When Seattle Art Museum recently cut hours, it announced that it will be closed on Tuesdays, beginning the week of Sept. 7 -- but according to its website, SAM remains open on Thursday and Friday nights until 9 p.m.

Who else is on this honor roll?  

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

Over the weekend, I visited the Brooklyn Museum, specifically to see Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea but also to check in on the museum as a whole. I left with several impressions:

• The Caillebotte (seen here in his 1892 self-portrait, from the Musee d'Orsay) show reveals definitively one of the best things about his work: his wonderfully unusual perspective. Whether he paints from inside the boat of his rowers, at the head of the table where his mother and brother are eating, a balcony overlooking a Parisian intersection and so on, the angles give his works a marvelous newness, a freshness.
• His many other talents, as well as his well-known wealthy background, "distracted" him from painting and, possibly, from becoming a greater artist. His yacht models, on view in Brooklyn, are sleek and modern, perhaps more so than his paintings.
• Still, what's clear from the show is that he's an experimenter.
• While his best paintings are not in this show, sadly, it's still a worthy effort.
• For people who read labels to see who owns what, it's noticeable that the vast majority of the works in Brooklyn are drawn from private collections. 

A final not-so-positive observation: on a Sunday afternoon, prime time for museums, the Caillebotte show was nicely crowded, which is to say that you could still see the pictures, but the galleries were far from empty.

That did not seem to be the case for the rest of the museum. The permanent collection galleries, while not empty, had few visitors.

And that, I think, is a problem, not just at Brooklyn, but at many museums. They simply should be doing more, much more, to engage people's interests in their permanent collections.

For more about the show, here's a link to the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, which includes several pictures; for more about Caillebotte, here's a website with many of his works (though the reproduction quality there leaves much to be desired).
 

The National Endowment for the Humanities gets far too little attention, imho. So I took some time this past weekend to look at its most recent round of grants, which were announced earlier this month. Nearly 200 awards worth a total of $20 million were made to cultural institutions, universities and libraries in 36 states and Washington, D.C., plus a couple of scholars working overseas. The grants cover digital humanities, preservation/access, educational and public programs, research and collections.

The biggest award -- $1 million -- will go to the Asia Society for a traveling exhibition, plus website, symposium, educational and public programs, catalogue and film on the life of the Buddha. The traveling show focuses on the "art of Buddhist pilgrimages" to sites important in the Buddha's life. The Asia Society hasn't issued a press release about this, yet at least, nor is there any further information about it on its website, so the show must be a ways down the road. But it sounds like an interesting show.

The Newberry Library in Chicago actually received more money in this grant round, just over $1.2 million, but that total covers five separate projects involving educational programs, archives, fellowships, and so on. One grant will pay to plan an online and traveling exhibition called "Make Big Plans: Daniel Burnham's Vision of An American Metropolis," about the 1909 Plan of Chicago, which is said to be America's first comprehensive urban plan.

There are plenty of other interesting awards on the grant list. For this post, I focused on those that will aid exhibitions:

• $250,000 to the Brooklyn Museum for a traveling exhibition on the Plains Indian tipi
• nearly $350,000 to the Frick Collection to digitize "deteriorating" photographs of American paintings 
• $300,000 to the Oakland Museum for a permanent gallery on California history
• $350,000 to the University of Illinois at Chicago for a new core exhibition at the Jane Addams-Hull House Museum
• $380,000 to the Peabody-Essex Museum for a traveling and online exhibition called "Fiery Pool: Maya and the Mythic Sea," plus a catalogue and public programs.

The rest are listed on the NEH website. I know several cultural groups -- not just museums, but orchestras and theaters -- who say they've never applied for an NEH grant.

Depending on the project, they may or may not qualify. But I think there's more there than many people realize. In 2006, for example, the Frick received a $750,000 challenge grant toward a $3.75 million endowment for a senior decorative arts curator. I mentioned that grant to another museum director recently, who was stunned.

When budget time comes around, the NEH deserves as much support as the NEA.  

Photo: Standing Buddha, Afghanistan, 1st Century