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The Big Birthday
John Haberin New York City
The Brooklyn Museum at Two Hundred
The Brooklyn Artists Show and the American Wing
Count on the Brooklyn Museum to throw quite a party. Count on it, too, to celebrate the institution by celebrating the borough.
On its two hundredth anniversary, it extends an open call to Brooklyn artists and invites them in. It fills the lobby rotunda with roughly two hundred works, chosen from four thousand submissions, just in time for its birthday. It is "The Brooklyn Artists Show," 
with every pretension of the definitive—the Brooklyn artists and the show. Upstairs, the American wing can hardly wait to see you. It cannot hold off long enough for a conventional sign announcing the exhibition and welcoming you in. Now if only the museum were half as good at celebrating a great collection and itself.
Instead, the space off the elevator greets you with signs picked right off the street, like one for a bus stop that might have just left off a full load of visitors like you. To its side, a living room set contains seating, shelves, and what the museum politely calls antiques. Not that collectors often treasure some cheap furniture, embarrassing carvings, and an old TV, and not that a museum often displays them. Make yourself at home as best you can. Inside the American wing, the mad rush never stops. Just try to sort out the period for many a period piece hung high and low amid others. Just try to identify them at all, some without so much as wall labels.
You can rest assured of one thing: this rehanging will emphasize BIPOC—black, indigenous, and other people of color. It claims that opening room for African American families of a certain age, and that should already have you wondering. Do its contrasts and disorder enhance or diminish the museum's most esteemed collection? Does it honor blacks and women or trivialize them that much more? What is art, what is trash, and who gets to say?
Brooklyn art now?
Who gets to decide, for that matter, the state of Brooklyn art now? Who could define Brooklyn or contemporary art once and for all? But hey, it's only a party. It is also an excuse not to worry too much about art. If "The Brooklyn Artists Show" falls a bit flat, such is the Brooklyn Museum. One may as well enjoy every bit of Brooklyn sunlight and not dwell on the details, no more than does the museum itself. It may even lie about its age—like that eternally young elderly relative, but the other way around. What is the oldest, continuously operated art museum in the United States? That would be the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut. What about New York? The Met opened on Fifth Avenue in 1870. The Brooklyn Museum began instead as a public library, but then the New York Historical Society Museum and Library entered the picture earlier still, in 1804.
Upstairs, the rehanging of American art only adds to the confusion, as you will see in a minute. The borough, though, has a way of reinventing itself, and the museum itself rolls out a new logo, as a "new visual identity"—a delightfully clean one at that. Back downstairs, things look weighty and tight. The café has moved forward from a long hallway to the underused lobby, near large paintings by Cecily Brown and Kehinde Wiley, with still larger sculpture by KAWS. If Wiley, KAWS, and the KAWS collection are as glib as ever, they still ask for space. Outside the museum, a newly acquired sculpture in rusted steel by Mark di Suvero looks more formidable still.
The show of Brooklyn artists takes things down a peg. Each artist gets just one work apiece, organized loosely by subject if at all. Instead of wall labels, one has only the artist's name stenciled on the wall, not even a date and title. As the saying goes, that's all she wrote. The show could almost pick up where a private collection last season left off in the very same space, only with fewer iconic artists. But then this is about not iconicity but belonging. Two views of bridges between the boroughs hang side by side, neither the Brooklyn Bridge.
Portraiture hangs more or less together, but then portraiture dominates the show. This is, after all, about diversity, what could boost that aim more than faces? One might expect no less than currency and diversity from an eclectic set of contemporary artists as curators—Jeffrey Gibson (a Native American), Vik Muniz (born in Brazil), Fred Tomaselli (a Californian), and Mickalene Thomas (an African American woman). In the American wing, her self-portrait lacks her usual glitter, and her face looks a bit dour as well. In the rotunda, things are looking up. Gibson makes sculpture, and the show has allusions to non-Western totems and household trash, but painting predominates.
All this makes it hard indeed to identify a work, to give it context, or to remember an artist. Anonymity has an upside, though, leaving space to enjoy a leisurely stroll. I am, I know, not really doing my job, but I felt on vacation, a nice one at that. A young woman, in a photo by Jasmine Clark, might be on vacation, too, seated in a perfect wildness in a pristine white dress. Isis Davis-Marks might be on vacation from Yale with her books still on her desk. I always liked those translations—but onward to more than two hundred years of American art.
Celebrating the gaps
The Brooklyn Museum has rehung its American wing before, though never as thoroughly. Not two years ago, as I reported then, it rolled out these very rooms to great fanfare. It put the emphasis on Native American art, with a first room for just that and the name of the Lenape nation in large type outside. It made a greater effort throughout to find parallels between tradition, but nothing like this. The latest comes just in time for the museum's two hundredth birthday, so you will forgive it if the curator, Stephanie Sparling Williams, and her team boast, in the rollout's subtitle, of "New Frameworks for American Art." The entirety is "Toward Joy."
Not that it has anything like an obvious framework or much cause for joy. The opening stress on indigenous art is gone, and samples of it are not so easy to find. Nor indeed is anything else. My eye first fell on small paintings by Winslow Homer and Martin Johnson Heade, with all their precise observation and near supernatural color. Look around, though, and the magic is gone, along with whatever else was going on between the Hudson River School and the threshold of modern art. Not far away lies Georgia O'Keeffe, amid an awkward mix of prim academics and garish color.
What, then, do they reveal about an artist? The room also includes a wonderful piece of Native American pottery, but what is that doing here? You may need the room's introductory text to spot what they have in common: these are about troubled waters, from seascapes to the stories that a culture tells only to itself. Other themes include flowers, backs, and "Surface Tension." These are not exactly recognized genres in art's history.
This is not a way to celebrate inclusion. Rather than welcoming diversity, they take the life out of almost everyone. Georgia O'Keeffe seems closer to native symbolism than abstraction, which is interesting, but also stiff as a board in a company of stiffs. Albert Bierstadt, once on a partition to himself, shares a wall in the next room with lengthy text about, well, I am not sure what. Rather than breaking away from so much garish art into majesty, he looks just plain overblown. Artists this electric deserve better.
Rooms without wall labels do have touch screens for greater access, if you dare and if you care. Two alcoves feature the conservator's hand, as "Radical Care," which sounds promising, but I could not detect it. A shed acts as a study room, where paperbacks by Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and bell hooks tell you know what you are supposed to study, and it is not art. A long succession of nineteenth-century portraits, starting with John Singer Sargent, hangs at knee level as if on an assembly line. Chairs rest on high shelves as if someone forgot to take them out of storage. One more chair, facing a tea set, is by Frank Lloyd Wright—perhaps the least likely artist to take tea.
One sad result of the new hanging is to call attention to the collection's gaps. Good as they are, Al Held and David Diao will have to stand for postwar abstraction. Still, if one group defies the rehanging's limits and its strictures, it is women, especially black women One can discover portraits by Laura Wheeler Waring in 1940, akin to Fauvism, and Lily Martin Spencer, holding court with ripe cherries in 1856. Faith Ringgold has a rare place of honor at the start of a room with For the Woman's House. It may take women to keep a major museum on a major anniversary on the map.
"The Brooklyn Artists Show" ran at the Brooklyn Museum through January 26, 2025. The American wing reopened October 4, 2024.