Upcoming Exhibits

Artist and Artifact: Re|Visioning Brooklyn's Past

Artist and Artifact Artist and Artifact: Re|Visioning Brooklyn's Past is an amazing project that is partnering BHS with local artists and writers who are exploring the Society's collection for inspiration for original art work.  Read the project's timeline below written by Kate Fermoile, BHS Vice President for Exhibits & Education who is overseeing the exhibition.

We’d like to thank the Getty Foundation and the Greenwall Foundation for their generous support of Artist and Artifact: Re|Visioning Brooklyn's Past.

February 2008
BHS issued an open call for the project. To our delight and surprise, we received 300 proposals from all over the world.  All applicants were asked to provide samples of their work and to address the reasons that they were interested in creating art in response to the collections.  Artists working creatively in any media were considered for the project including, but not limited to, visual and installation artists, photographers, writers, composers, and playwrights as well as dancers and performance artists.

We brought on a panel of expert colleagues to select the 10 participants. The panelists were Marilyn Kushner, Curator of Prints at the New York Historical Society; Elizabeth Ferrer, Director of the Rotunda Gallery; Alice Quinn, Director of the Poetry Society of America; Donald Breckenridge, Editor at the Brooklyn Rail, and Joe Melillo, Artistic Director at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This team was committed to choosing artwork that represents a range of subject matter and takes the form of varied artistic media.  The project will culminate in an exhibition that will launch in 2010 based on the work created through Interpreting Brooklyn.  The exhibition,  in cooperation with the artists in the project, will present BHS art and artifacts, juxtaposed with the newly-created work by the participants. 

Spring 2008
To help create their work, the artists were provided access to the Brooklyn Historical Society’s collections, professional staff expertise, library and archive resources and work space. BHS staff members provided the artists with an overview of BHS’ diverse collections in workshops and tutorials. All of the artists explored our storage facilities and, in many cases, discovered work that had not been seen by the public in years, in order to identify items that will inspire their individual works.

June 2008
After a great deal of debate, we selected ten artists and three alternates to participate in the project based on the following criteria: project pertinence to the BHS collection, the creative impact of the proposed work, coherence and clarity and the quality of work samples. The awardees were:

Visual Artists
Andres Vera Martinez is a comic book artist, writer, and illustrator residing in Brooklyn who completed the Masters of Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts in 2007. Vera Martinez’s poignant illustrations have appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Times; he also worked on the animation in the 2006 feature film A Scanner Darkly.

Kristin Posehn is a conceptual artist currently based in the Netherlands who primarily uses photography to create sculptural installations that re-interpret architecture. Posehn is drawn to the Brooklyn Historical Society’s collections as they relate to early Dutch houses to explore Dutch heritage and influence in Brooklyn through the residential architecture, both existing and demolished.  She will travel to Brooklyn to participate in the project.

Terry Adkins describes himself as, "a sculptor, musician and a latter-day practitioner of the long-standing African–American tradition of ennobling worthless things." Adkins’s "recitals," which combine sculpture with live musical/text oriented events, have been performed at venues throughout the country and internationally. His work is part of many major collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

Meredith Bergmann is a New York-based poet and sculptor who frequently works in bronze and marble to create powerful figurative works of monumental scale. Bergman’s evocative public sculpture is exemplified by her Boston Women’s Memorial in Boston and her Memorial to Countee Cullen, now permanently installed in Harlem in the Countee Cullen branch of the New York Public Library.

Stanley Greenberg is a photographer known for his stunning black-and-white shots of infrastructure and architecture including the depths of New York City’s water system. With a knack for gaining access to the hidden guts of the city, Greenberg has brought fascinating tunnels and other hidden structures to light for the rest of us. Greenberg’s photographs are included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Xiaoze Xie’s ongoing series of paintings depict close-up views of newspapers and books as they are stored on the shelves of libraries and archives. Born and trained in the People’s Republic of China, Xie’s earlier works dealt with censored books. His paintings focus on the objects yet often suggest the politics represented by literature and newspapers, alluding to the content within. A 2003 recipient of a Pollack-Krasner Fellowship and currently a professor at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, Xie turned his attention to the Museum of Modern Art’s library and archives for his most recent paintings.

Writers
Elizabeth Gaffney is a native of Brooklyn whose short stories and historical novel Metropolis have won her a devoted following in Brooklyn and around the world. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines such as the Brooklyn Review and Metropolis was touted as "a thrilling Brooklyn Bridge of a novel" by Michael Chabon.

Michael Schwartz has produced, directed, composed, and played characters in both his recent full length play, Coney Island Last Stop, and in his seven-character, one-man play, In the Shadow of the Third Rail. Schwartz has performed his award-winning poetry at such venues as the Bowery Poetry Club. In addition, Schwartz has a long history of sharing his gifts through education, working with adults and children with disabilities.

Musician
Daniel Jose Older is a composer, storyteller and community-organizer. He has been creating original musical narrative projects about the intersections of urban history, collective memory and mythology for the past six years. While studying music composition under the guidance of jazz legend Yusef Lateef for a semester in Havana, Cuba, Mr. Older composed his first short opera- Cartas de la jaula, a mythological treatment of his family’s history and its relation to the tumultuous Cuban political world. He has created a soundtrack for a fictional Mexican horror movie and also worked as an organizer, working closely with young people from Bushwick and Flatbush on a number of artistic projects and events. Mr. Older says his work as a Brooklyn-based 911 paramedic intimately involves him with the inner workings of Brooklyn after dark and has inspired much of his recent creative work.

December 2008
The artists returned for a meeting to report back on their inspiration for their projects:

Andres Vera Martinez will create a graphic novel that will look at the past, present and future of Brooklyn. For the present, he has looked to the BHS’ 1679 journal written by a Dutch explorer, Jasper Danckaerts.  For the present-day story, he will use as his inspiration the personal story of Michael Schwartz, another Interpreting Brooklyn artist and for the future; Andres will tell the story of a Brooklyn boy who finds the cure for cancer.

Kristin Posehn Using images of Dutch Colonial houses, Kristin plans to create a large model of one of the houses.

Terry Adkins Looking at the 19th century city directories, a precursor to the phonebook, Mr. Adkins noticed that African-American merchants were listed with asterisks next to their name.  Terry decided that he would create a large-scale reproduction of a city directory with the names of the “asterisked” merchants.

Meredith Bergmann  Coming in and out of the building Meredith noticed that around the outside of the BHS building there are busts of Mozart, Columbus, Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Michelangelo, men representing music, art, literature and scholarship.  None of the people who stare down on passer-bys represent the borough.  After a visit through our exhibits, Meredith learned about Sally Maria Diggs, known as “Pink” or “Pinky,” who became well-known in the 19th century Brooklyn as an enslaved woman freed with the help of Henry Ward Beecher.  Henry Ward Beecher drew attention to the issue of slavery by holding “mock auctions" in Plymouth Church to raise money to purchase freedom, usually for young, fair-skinned African American women. Congregants donated money and jewelry to the cause. Sally Maria Diggs was sold in the pulpit of Plymouth Church. Meredith is creating a bust of her.


Nora Herting After exploring our portrait collection, Nora was struck by the lack of diversity. She set out to remedy that by setting up street portrait studios at eight Brooklyn Parks.  She invited more than 200 Brooklynites to sit for their portraits alone or with their family and friends.  Ms. Herting also collected data about the sitters.  As a part of the project, Nora donated all of the photographs to the Brooklyn Historical Society along with the metadata (that’s the technical term for data about data).  How lucky are we for her donations?!


Xiaoze Xie During his first visit, Xiaoze became intrigued by the contemporary local newspapers stacked up by the archivist’s desk.   He photographed them and painted three beautiful paintings based on the photographs.



Elizabeth Gaffney is working on a novel set in Brooklyn during the period between WWII and the Vietnam War.  The story will be told from the perspectives of two friends, one black and one white.   

Michael Schwartz  interested in his native Coney Island, Michael was inspired by our extensive Coney Island collection that includes postcards, photographs, wax heads, and carnival gamesto write a one-man play about Coney Island.

Check back for project updates
The project will culminate in an exhibition that interprets the Brooklyn Historical Society’s fine art collection through the artists’ diverse and contemporary perspectives.

We’ll be posting updates as the project progresses with more images of works in progress and more information on public programs with the artists.

Artist and Artifact: Re|Visioning Brooklyn's Past has been funded by the Getty Foundation and the Greenwall Foundation.

BACK TO TOP