Field Trip 4: The Brooklyn Museum
For our fourth field trip, we visited the Brooklyn Museum. Although this is one of the largest and oldest Museums in the country, it holds inside many different and distinct works of art that will leave you amazed. From all the exhibitions inside this museum, there were three that were of importance to me and the class. These include “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties”, “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk-An Introspective”, and “Timothy Greenfield Sanders: The Latino List”.
From the “Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” there were many paintings that were as the title states from the twenties and illustrated ideas of life from that time period. These arts included paintings from environmental getaways to a women relaxing nude on a sheet, all the way to commonly used masculine products. The work of art that caught my eye in this exhibit is called, “The Beach” which was completed in 1924. It consists of three paintings (triptych), all of the same size and perfectly lined up next to one another as each picture continues where the other left off. They illustrate a large group of people, both men and women just talking and socializing in a mature and proper way while enjoying the beautiful ocean breeze, sunny day, and overall just relaxing. The men are fully dressed and the women are in stockings and skirted bathing suits and the artist describe this painting as on that suggests the social encounters that were newly possible in America at that time. The idea of identity in this work seems to be cultural since all these people that have gathered at the beach as a mini society and all began to mingle.
From the “Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk-An Introspective there were many works of art that were as the title states, Funky or weird. The one that stuck out to me is titled “Blossom, and was completed in 2007. This was pretty much a classical wooden piano that was intertwined with the center of a tree and also played music by itself. The purpose of this is that of 1930’s Blues singer, Billie Holiday. The tree and piano represents her popularization of the song, “a protest against lynching” which was usually racially motivated. It is also the center of this exhibition, and shows a sense of cultural identity since this was an all around problem faced by society back in the 1930’s.
From the last exhibition I visited, “Timothy Greenfield Sanders: The Latino List”, there were also a hand full of interesting things here. To start it off, this exhibition was located in a giant white room and had four large cloth columns at its corners. This all seemed like a very pure, and natural way of displaying art as well as culturally oriented through the constant use of the color white which is favored by Hispanic families. On the inside of theses columns however were large photographs of well known, famous people of Latin heritage from the worlds of culture, politics, business, and sports. They were framed in white frames and were in high resolution. Upon walking around these picture, one that caught my eye was that of hip hop rapper Pitbull, also known as Armando Christian Perez who is of Cuban descent. This caught my eye because he is one of my favorite rappers, and I was not expecting to see a picture of him at a museum.
Although I was not at the Brooklyn Museum for too long, I got to see many interesting works of art by going there. I am looking forward to going back there since there is still many exhibitions I have not witnessed yet and am hoping to see everything this second time around. The Brooklyn Museum was very fun adventure and well worth my time. I recommend it to anyone who has an interest in art, as well as sculptures, and fine displays.
Guy Pene du Bois (American, 1884-1958)
“The Beach”
1924
Sanford Biggers
“Blossom”
2007
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
“The Latino List”
2011
