Building Worlds at the Brooklyn Museum
Alex Dolores Salerno. Pillow Fight, 2019-present. Used pillowcases and medical supplies. Courtesy of the artist. © Alex Dolores Salerno. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)
Over its 200-year history, the Brooklyn Museum has employed numerous diverse strategies to engage and represent its namesake community. On view through January 26, 2025, The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition showcases the work of 200 artists, organized in celebration of the museum’s bicentennial. The selection committee is led by artists Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli. The artists included must either live or work in Brooklyn and were selected either by invitation from the four leading artists or by open call. This rare format makes the exhibition feel exciting and novel, and the exhibition is greater than the sum of its parts. The question is not “Who are the Brooklyn artists making work that belongs in a museum?” but rather “What are Brooklyn artists making?” From felted portraits, photography, prints, garments displayed on dress forms, tapestries, paintings, a green sequined gorilla, and just about everything else, I have seldom seen such a varied show.
The exhibition paints a portrait of one of the world’s most artistically active places. The artists are both in dialogue with the institution and eschew institutional consideration altogether. United by the throughline of place and space, many of the works take on Brooklyn as a subject, building or recreating the scaffolding of not necessarily a discrete idea, but the many Brooklyns personal to the artists.
Josh Sucher’s Suite 2412 is a tiny office model, sized for a mouse, sandwiched between several black tomes. It is a replica of the artist’s father’s office, reconstructed through the haze of memory. A metal button on the work’s shelf triggers the grainy and muffled sounds of radio and typing when pushed, adding a cozy atmospheric background to the familiarly cluttered space. Similarly, in the assemblage Kent Ave, Brooklyn, NY, Lisa Ludwig uses recycled cardboard and house paint to rebuild a Williamsburg building since torn down. It serves as an elegiac tribute, conjuring both the specific structure and the neighborhood that used to be, now living primarily in the memories of those who witnessed its prior life.
Josh Sucher. Suite 2412 (detail), 2024. MDF board, PLA 3D prints, Raspberry Pi microprocessor with TFT and e-ink screens, speaker, and circuitry. Courtesy of the artist. © Josh Sucher. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)
Further spaces are imaginative and fantastical: Disquiet, an intricate porcelain tower by Rob Raphael, resembles a tiered cake and feels like something between a kind of sparse formal dollhouse and a fantasy ruin, with layered window walls acting as obscuring obstacles for inquiring eyes. Ruby Chishti’s oversized patchwork dress emerges as a mountain, a fabric assemblage stacked to form something sturdy. Small houses and windows are stitched onto the work, blending in to create what could be an entire village—a relocated community made of resilient recycled clothing. Cyle Warner’s chasing a second sunrise; it's no fun running alone is inspired by a breeze block, an ornamental concrete wall with a floral or geometric pattern of openings to let the breeze in, mostly found in warm climates such as the Caribbean. Here, Warner recreates the architectural feature as an open weaving, somewhere between a quilt and a rug, thereby making this homey architectural element portable, ready to set up in Brooklyn.
Cyle Warner. chasing a second sunrise; it's no fun running alone, 2024. Fabric, cotton twine, cotton rope, and clothespins. Courtesy of the artist. © Cyle Warner. (Photo: Timothy Doyon)
Cate Pasquarelli’s Small Town is a suspended, quaint suburban house; a home in transit is frozen in the timeless standstill of the museum. Alex Dolores Salerno’s Pillow Fight, a collection of pillowcases filled with their own and their friends' and family’s used medical supplies, evokes a different kind of traveling home, one of interdependence and togetherness. The pillowcases, once used for rest, now double as storage or baggage.
Some works incorporate nebulous familiar features as locators. A. R. Tran’s Untitled (Spa Scene, After Ana Mendieta) shows what appears to be the aftermath of a violent encounter in an Asian spa. Keeping with the work’s titular inspiration, the bodies are gone; all that remains is the leftover space where they once were. Code 09 by Juan Pablo Uribe is made of obsessively collected Chinese takeout menus, shredded and compiled to make an abstracted red-and-white paper slab. The collation of the ubiquitous menus from across the city both collapses and scatters instances of recognizable places. Instead of identifying specific restaurants and locations, the piece navigates this sense of space and urban landscape by tapping into the operative and the functional, evoking a sense of familiarity.
Juan Pablo Uribe. Code 09, from Ways of Forgetting, 2023. Paper on metal. Courtesy of the artist. © Juan Pablo Uribe. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)
The vast diversity of the works on display yields a vibrant tapestry. It is impossible for a single exhibition to ever truly capture the breadth and depth of communities, homes, and experiences living, breathing, and morphing in Brooklyn, but this show gives us two hundred creative voices, and that’s a start.
The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through January 26, 2025.
