“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys “ at the Brooklyn Museum

As Black History Month draws to a close, we shine a light on one of New York's remarkable exhibits celebrating Black culture and its profound connection with art. This exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum is the product of the vision of two influential figures in the music industry: Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) who have been passionately collecting works for over two decades, and who are now eager to share their extraordinary collection with the world. This collection, which features 98 artworks by Black American, African, and African diasporic artists including Gordon Parks, Kehinde Wiley, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Hassan Hajjaj to name a few, explores many themes including Black identity and creativity. This celebration of Black artists and culture, according to Ms. Keys  “want(s) you to see that you are also a giant, that you are special, incredible, unique, one of a kind.” Make sure you experience the exhibit before it closes on July 7th!

Future Fashion

Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion at the Brooklyn Museum is the first New York retrospective in forty years of the famous couturier. The exhibition covers the designer’s decades-long career and showcases the daring futuristic looks of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and includes prominent pieces that Cardin designed for “a world that does not exist yet.” Featuring over 170 objects from his atelier and archive, the exhibition presents luxury designs from the 1950s; samples from the 1964 “Cosmocorps” collection, which aimed to streamline menswear by getting rid of excessive detailing; colorful unisex outfits; jackets based on Japanese origami, Chinese architecture, and American football uniforms; “illuminated” jumpsuits and dresses (a favorite of ours); couture eveningwear; and much more. We wanted to try on pretty much everything. The security guards, however, were not too keen.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

American People Series #18: The Flag is Bleeding by Faith Ringgold

Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, features the work of over sixty black artists from 1963 to 1983, “one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history.” Over 150 artworks in the exhibition address the unjust social conditions facing black Americans. These include Faith Ringgold’s painting of a “bleeding” flag (above). Ringgold, who was inspired by Amiri Baraka, one of the key leaders of the Black Arts Movement, developed a style that she called “super realism” to accurately depict the “oppression faced by Black people as viscerally as possible.” The exhibition is at the Brooklyn Museum through February 3, 2019.

Radical Women

Les veines / Las vecinas (The Neighbors), 1980 by Marcia Schvartz

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985 at the Brooklyn Museum is the first exhibition to "explore the groundbreaking contributions to contemporary art of Latin American and Latina women artists during a period of extraordinary conceptual and aesthetic experimentation." Featuring 123 artists from fifteen countries, the works in the exhibition often use the female body as a means of political and social critique and artistic expression. Much of the artwork, which includes paintings, sculptures, videos, and work in other mediums, was created under difficult and often oppressive political and social environments, and "complicated or compounded by the artists’ experiences as women." The exhibit is at Brooklyn Museum through July 22, 2018.

Soulful Creatures

An ibis coffin at Brooklyn Museum.

In honor of Halloween this week, I checked out Brooklyn Museum's new exhibit Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt. This exhibit, the first major one to focus on the mummification of animals in ancient Egyptian culture, draws on the museum’s renowned collection and displays thirty mummies alongside related Egyptian art. The reasons for mummification are not entirely known but there are theories: owners mummified beloved pets to perhaps join them in the afterlife; others mummified animals to provide a food source for the deceased in the next life; and still others paid for the mummification to receive the favor of the god associated with that animal. The exhibit also shares the scientific tests used to discover how the Egyptians performed animal mummification. The animal mummies on display were fascinating, and I especially admired the craftsmanship in the elaborate ancient gilded ibis coffin (pictured above) that contains a simple ibis mummy. Check the exhibit out, but be careful: at night all the mummies come to life and wander the museum. Don't get locked in!

Coney Island Dreamland

Nicknamed Cy, this sculpted Cyclops head hung above the Spook-A-Rama in the 1950s in Coney Island.

While summer seems a long way off now in the midst of an unpredictable and cruel winter (yesterday, twenty-five mile-per-hour bone chilling winds), Brooklyn Museum's exhibit, Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008, will remind you of warmer and sunnier weather soon to come. This colorful and fun show, the first major exhibition to explore the kaleidoscopic visual record of this iconic beach, documents the "historic destination’s beginnings as a watering hole for the wealthy, its transformation into a popular beach resort and amusement mecca, its decades of urban decline culminating in the closing of Astroland, and its recent revival as a vibrant and growing community." Featuring numerous artistic styles and subjects, the exhibit includes everything from 19th century paintings of the Coney Island shore by William Merritt Chase and John Henry Twachtman to iconic photographs and videos by Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Weegee, as well as contemporary works by Daze and Swoon. See it now before it closes March 13 and remember what George C. Tilyou, a prominent Coney Island developer, said: "If Paris is France, then Coney Island, between June and September, is the world."