Birthday Bash in Brooklyn

ANDY WARHOL TOLD US, “All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” Both institutions are reflections of our culture, bellwethers of who we are and the way that we live. They don’t define our culture – they herald it, document it and celebrate it in moving and inspiring ways. As visual merchandisers and store designers, we find inspiration everywhere, from the Broadway stage to the movies and the street to current events and, certainly, in the most esteemed museums, both large and small.

The Brooklyn Museum is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. Growing up in Brooklyn, the grand dame on Eastern Parkway was my cathedral of sorts, my go to place to spend time with the likes of Georgia O’Keefe, Richard Diebenkorn and Albert Bierstadt. It inspired me as an ambitious young art student and continued to do so as I plied my art as a visual merchandiser.

The venerable hall of culture has been housed in its current location at 200 Eastern Parkway since 1928. Its storied reputation as a world-class institution began in 1823 with the founding of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library in Brooklyn Heights. It continues today in its magnificent 19th-century Beaux Arts palace designed by McKim and White. Its spectacular façade serves as an enticement, welcoming all who pass by on Eastern Parkway.

This Oct. 4, the Brooklyn Museum marked its 200th anniversary with the launch of a grand bicentennial celebration that included a week-long extravaganza celebrating the Museum on Wheels, a new Café, and two exhibitions that speak to the institution’s history while casting an eye toward its future.

The first exhibition, “Toward Joy: New Frameworks in American Art,” showcases the Museum’s rich collection of American art while connecting history to contemporary sensibilities. The exhibition presents the collection in a transformative manner that changes and updates the ways in which the viewer interacts with the art. Warhol understood that as museums and department stores move forward, principles of presentation evolve as one institutional venue cross-references another.

According to Stephanie Sparling Williams, the Brooklyn Museum’s curator of American Art, “We wanted to think about this moment and how to create bridges between our historic collection and contemporary audiences. There was a little bit of a lag, and the community told us as much. We wanted to create new experiences for the collection and to experiment with representation.”

In so doing, the complete reinstallation of the Museum’s American Art galleries bridges the gap between a celebration of the aesthetics and beauty of each work of art and the entanglement of turmoil and strife surrounding its creation. The thoughtful curation recognizes the turbulent path of civilization as humans navigated through calamitous missteps and misdeeds such as colonialism, slavery, genocide, racism and the continued exploitation of the environment.

The other celebratory exhibition is “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition.” A major group show of more than 200 local artists, the installation demonstrates the vision and creativity that is alive and well in my hometown, Brooklyn, N.Y. The exhibition showcases the diversity of the borough, highlighting artists who have lived or maintained a studio in Brooklyn during the last five years. A wide range of artistic disciplines is represented, including drawing, painting, sculpture and video.

In documenting historical and current events, both on a global scale and a focused local level, both exhibitions clearly project the essence of this place we call Brooklyn.