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The current exhibition of paintings by Francisco Oller at the Brooklyn Museum, Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World, is a provocative and difficult show — a collision of curatorial strategies and recalcitrant artwork that defies the interpretive armature.
Agitprop! ought to be an outstanding exhibition of politically engaged art. A feverish amalgam of historic and contemporary artwork, the exhibition is undermined by an ambitious but poorly executed curatorial strategy.
Starting September 3, the Brooklyn Museum will be free for visitors under 20, while the suggested general admission fees for adults will go up to $16 (previously $12), and $10 (previously $8) for adults 62+ and students with valid ID.
NYC Cultural Institutions Have Pension Payments Withheld While City Examines “Anomalies”
Brooklyn Museum
The New York Times reported yesterday that New York City is withholding payments this fiscal year into a pension system for many cultural centers with city contracts, such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Basically, the city is asking if the amount they have to pay into the retirement system has been overstated in the bookkeeping of these places.
Last September, Arnold Lehman announced that he would retire from his position as the director of the Brooklyn Museum. The news was big: Lehman had been at the helm since 1997, and over the course of those 17-plus years, he reshaped the institution in his image in many ways.
This evening the Brooklyn Museum revealed that Anne Pasternak will succeed Arnold Lehman as the institution’s director. Pasternak has been the president and artistic director of Creative Time, the nonprofit known for presenting major art commissions in unconventional spaces, since 1994.
We received the following image in our inbox from a reader who spotted this a few weeks ago. It’s a flier created in response to the Brooklyn Museum’s decision to cancel the Art in the Streets street art/graffiti/skateboarding exhibition next year “due to the current financial climate”:
I live … across the street from the Brooklyn Museum. I was just cleaning out a pile of papers on my desk and saw this flyer I had saved. A few weeks ago I was walking my dog on Eastern Parkway and saw these fliers all up and down the stretch in front of the museum. I support my neighborhood musuem, but thought you guys might be interested in a snapshot before I threw it out.
The California-born, Yale-educated, Brooklyn-based painter Kehinde Wiley is an oddly polarizing artist, whose massive figurative paintings inspire both rage and adoration from his viewers. The retrospective Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, is an exhibition that elicits and reflects the biases of its viewers, and forces us to address what Kehinde describes as the “politics of perception.” Trapped inside ornate frames, his colorful depictions are inspired by the tropes of art history, and he provocatively replaces traditional sitters with the supple bodies of black or brown youths, men and women alike, from all around the globe: Brooklyn, Haiti, India, Africa, Brazil, Israel, Palestine. “I like to be uncomfortable in art,” Wiley said, and it is unsurprising that his viewers find themselves uncomfortable when looking at his work.