The Brooklyn museum is an art museum that is located in
Brooklyn, New York. It is New York’s second largest museum and holds about 1.5
million pieces of art works. Collections of this museum include, American,
Egyptian, Classical, Africa, Pacific Islands, European, and Islamic World art.
It holds one of the oldest and finest collections of American art in the world.
It was built as a part of a larger central point of culture in the growing city
of Brooklyn in 1897. It holds many pieces of artwork that were created by
women, so it is a great place to learn about women artist’s that are not so
well known, as well as the artwork they continue to produce.
The first exhibit that caught my interest was The Dinner
Party by Judy Chicago. Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, educator,
and intellectual for the last five decades. By the 1970’s she had coined the term
“feminist art” and had founded the first feminist art program in the United
States. Her influence is inside and outside of the art world throughout the
world. Her art has been showed in exhibits in countries including the United
States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand. Other popular works of hers
include the Birth Project, PowerPlay, The Holocaust Project, and Resolutions.
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| Judy Chicago |
The Dinner Party executed between 1974-1979 and was first
exhibited in 1979 is regarded as the first epic piece of feminist artwork. It
functions as a symbolic history of women of the Western civilization. The goal
of this piece was to “end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were
written out of historical record”. With the use of hundreds of volunteers, the
exhibit is comprised of a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged in a triangular
table, including thirty-nine place settings. With 13 place settings on each
side. Each place setting commemorates an important woman from history
including, Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Sojourner
Truth and others. Each place setting includes a hand-painted china plate,
ceramic flatware, and chalice, and an embroidered gold edge napkin with the
woman’s name and images relating to her accomplishments. It has been a
permanent exhibition within the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art of
the Brooklyn Museum since 2007.
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| Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party |
The second exhibit I focused on is called the Wish Tree by
Yoko Ono. She was born in Tokyo, Japan to a wealthy aristocratic family. She
developed an interest in art and began writing poetry after moving to
Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. At first her work was not well received,
however, after working with Anthony Cox who later became her husband, she became
more well-known after a few of her interactive conceptual events in the 1960’s.
Her work usually demands the viewer’s participation in odd ways.
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| Yoko Ono |
The Wish Tree includes instruction paintings that she
started to produce since 1961. These paintings only include words that rely on
the viewer’s actions for completion, either by physically following the
directions or by participating in their minds. It has been an exhibit that has
been presented across continents and through out the last decades has been seen
by more than one million people. After each presentation, all the wishes are collected
and buried at the Imagine Peace Tower, which is a monumental outdoor light
installation in Iceland created by Yoko in memory of her deceased late husband,
John Lennon. Yoko created this exhibit to encourage others by believing in the
power of their hopes and dreams for the future.
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| Yoko Ono, Wish Tree |
The third exhibit from the Brooklyn Museum is called Votes
for Women by Melissa Messina. She earned her MFA from Pratt Institute where she
received the Presidential Merit Award in Painting. She also coordinated the
2005 Visiting Artist Lecture Series and created and executed several regional
and national group exhibitions for the City of Atlanta Bureau of Cultural
Affairs. Her artwork has been exhibited in museums in New York, New England,
and the Southeast.
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| Melissa Messina |
Votes for Women, is found in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the Brooklyn museum and explores Susan B. Anthony, and eight other important American suffragist’s contributions towards the American suffrage movement. Susan B. Anthony has been called the legs of the early women’s movement because she toured the country for more than thirty years speaking publicly for women’s rights. It draws on the previously mentioned exhibit, The Dinner Party, and the lives of women who contributed to the fight for women’s rights in America. From 1848 to 1920, suffragists challenged conventional ideas about women’s roles for equality between the sexes. The tactics and methods used throughout the generations of the suffrage movement are shown in this exhibit with more than sixty objects and images.
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| Melissa Messina, Votes for Women |
The fourth exhibition I viewed was I Wanna Be Loved By You
from the Leon and Michaela Constantiner Collection. Leon and Michaela are
married and decided to do an art collection together. They are committed to
supporting the arts culture and education by collecting photography and by
donating to museums and loaning works from their collections.
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| Leon Michaela |
Leon and Michaela Constatiner’s extensive collection was
created based on their love for Marilyn regarding her talent and beauty. This exhibit
was shown from November 12th, 2004 to April 2005. The point of this
exhibit was to broaden the perception of Marilyn Monroe by examining how her
public persona obscured her true self by photographers. It includes more than two hundred photographs
of Monroe by thirty-nine photographers in different scenarios. The photographs date back from the time
Marilyn was 19 years old, to the time of her death at 36. Although many popular
pictures of Marilyn are presented in an audacious manner, the artist’s wanted
to show that this was not all she was capable for. They present photographs
that have rarely been seen; yet these are the images that reveal the
complexities of her.
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| Leon and Michaela, I Wanna Be Loved By You |
The last exhibit is called Gathered by Lorna Simpson. Lorna
was born in Brooklyn, New York, and attended High School of Art and Design and
School of Visual Arts in New York. She
began exploring ethnic divisions since the 1980’s. Lorna is known for
challenging viewers to think critically about how they understand images and
words. Through her innovative works of video, film, and photography she explores
how African American culture has been manipulated by culture at a large.
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| Lorna Simpson |
Gathered is an exhibit that was present in the Brooklyn Museum
from January28th to August 21th 2011. Lorna juxtaposes images of African
American woman who pose for pinups in 1957, with her own self-portraits
mimicking the pose. It is comprised of 123 vintage and contemporary black and
white photographs. This link between the two pictures appears as a link across
history in a shared identity. Individual stories that are drawn from these
photographs become a part of a larger exploration of cultural identities and stereotypes,
creating a dialogue for history.
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| Lorna Simpson, Gathered |
Works cited:
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/lorna_simpson/
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/marilyn_monroe/
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/votes_for_women/
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2012/12/07/yoko-onos-wish-tree/
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/dinner_party/
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