#bkmcontemporaryart

[brooklynmuseum]

We warned you, the BKM Staff loves their Art Memes. Thus, Art Meme Monday—Brooklyn Artists Ball Edition!

Join in by browsing our digital collections and memeing one of your own—and don’t forget to tag us @brooklynmuseum​!

Tom Otterness (American, born 1952). Head, 1984. Bronze, 35 1/2 x 33 x 25 in. (90.17 x 83.82 x 63.50 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Henry and Cheryl Welt, 85.176. © artist or artist's estate. Memed by Roko Rumora.

[brooklynmuseum]

If you ask someone to name five artists, they will likely name prominent male artists, but how many people can list five women artists? Throughout March’s Women’s History Month, we will be joining institutions around the world to answer this very question posed by the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NWMA). Together we hope to draw attention to the gender imbalance in the art world, inspire conversation and awareness, and hopefully add a few more women’s names to everyone’s lists.

Kenojuak Ashevak is possibly the best known and acclaimed Inuit artist. The Enchanted Owl from 1960 is probably her most popular print and in 1970 it was reproduced on a Canadian postage stamp. This work exemplifies her graphic style and her ability to capture the essence of an animal in simple forms and vivid colors.

Can you name #5WomenArtists?

[brooklynmuseum]

We hope that you made it to this month’s Target First Saturday celebrating Radical Black History here at the Brooklyn Museum and we invite you to continue to celebrate Black History in our galleries. See Aaron Gilbert’s The New One and the Figure of Mother and Child from the Kongo. These works reflect intimate moments of motherhood.

In The New One a woman is giving a child a bath. She cups a bar of soap with her right hand and with her left she holds the child’s head above water with the tip of her fingers. The ripples are few and far between, which indicates her gentle handling. She stares blankly at the infant, seemingly in a daze or unfamiliarity with this engagement. She may be consumed with thoughts of this new role. The models for these figures were Gilbert's wife and son. He was thinking about the day when his newborn son came home from the hospital, “the complex nature of their first interactions, and the powerful and strange dynamic with a new human—both intimate and completely foreign.”

The Figure of Mother and Child on the other hand is a woman seated cross-legged cradling and breastfeeding an infant. With the child latched onto her breast there is a physical attachment and closeness between the two. She bears scarification marks, indication of her considerable strength. There is a mirror-covered cavity in the infant’s abdomen and the mother’s back. These reflective surfaces are a reference to the surface of water, a symbolic link to the ancestral realm. These Kongo cosmology posits water as the median that separates the living world from the afterlife. Rather than representing a particular woman, this sculpture represents and celebrates womanhood as the Kongo’s archetypal source of power.

The presence and suggestion of water in these works speaks to the reflective nature of parenting in general and mothering in particular. Their similar gestures show their carefulness with this new fragile life. Although the infant represented in both works look more like a small adult they seem vulnerable. The artists may want us to think of the passing of time and how quickly children grow or the mother/child relationship throughout life. These intimate moments between mother and child are both individual and universal.

Posted by Stephanie Cunningham

[brooklynmuseum]

This weekend, spend time with art—old and new, like Salvatore Albano's marble sculpture, Fallen Angels (1883-1893) and KAWS's brightly colored painting, Glass Smile (2012).