Upcoming 2020 Exhibitions
We’re pleased to announce a selection of upcoming 2020 exhibitions. This winter, we welcome back our iconic Kehinde Wiley painting Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005), which for the first time at the Brooklyn Museum will be presented in dialogue with its early nineteenth-century source painting, Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1801). We also look at our collection from new perspectives with focused exhibitions that present historical works through a contemporary, multifaceted lens. Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection examines nearly 50 collection works using an intersectional feminist framework. Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas is an installation of the Museum’s Arts of the Americas collection which reconsiders indigenous art from the perspective of the prolonged and ongoing impact of climate change and colonization. Contemporary artist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Jeffrey Gibson mines our collection and archives to examine collecting practices and reinterpret historical representations of indigenous communities. We also present African Arts—Global Conversations, a cross-cultural exhibition pairing diverse African works with collection objects made around the world, and Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt, which examines the damage to sculptures and reliefs in ancient Egypt as a way of also exploring twenty-first-century concerns and struggles over public monuments and the destruction of antiquities.
In March, we celebrate the iconic history and trailblazing aesthetics of Studio 54 in a special exhibition featuring never-before-seen archival materials, video, photography, fashion, and more. We will also present the first solo museum exhibition dedicated to Brooklyn-based photographer John Edmonds, winner of our inaugural UOVO Prize for an emerging Brooklyn artist. And in the fall of 2020, we are proud to mount the first career retrospective of the work of Lorraine O’Grady, one of the most significant figures in contemporary performance, conceptual, and feminist art.
“We’re thrilled to present a roster of exhibitions next season that are in conversation with our collection in fresh and exciting ways,” says Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum. “As an encyclopedic museum, we’re always looking for new ways to examine our collection and open it up to include narratives that have historically been left out of the canon. In 2020, we’re committed to exhibitions that do just that: telling stories that are rarely told, through the eyes of contemporary artists.”
Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley
January 24–May 10, 2020
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 4th Floor
This exhibition brings an iconic painting from our collection—Kehinde Wiley’s Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005)—into dialogue with its early nineteenth-century source painting, Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1801). The two paintings, displayed together for the very first time, are on view in consecutive exhibitions at the Château de Malmaison from October 9, 2019, to January 6, 2020, and at the Brooklyn Museum from January 24 to May 10, 2020. This focused exhibition questions how ideas of race, masculinity, representation, power, heroics, and agency play out within the realm of portraiture. The presentation at the Brooklyn Museum is the first time David’s painting is on view in New York, and Wiley marks this momentous occasion by consulting on the exhibition design. It includes videos incorporating Wiley’s perspectives on how the Western canon, French portrait tradition, and legacies of colonialism influence his own practice. The exhibition represents an intimate conversation between two key artists of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries and illuminates how images construct history, convey notions of power and leadership, and create icons.
The exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and Musée national des châteaux de Malmaison and Bois-Préau. The Brooklyn presentation is curated by Lisa Small, Senior Curator, European Art, and Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.
Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection
January 24–September 13, 2020
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor
This exhibition presents more than 50 works from across our collections. Following the 2018 exhibition Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Out of Place also explores collection works anew through an intersectional feminist framework. Out of Place features more than forty artists from remarkably different contexts whose unconventional materials and approaches call for a broader and more dynamic understanding of modern and contemporary art.
Examining how contexts change the way we see art, Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection showcases artists who have traditionally been seen as “out of place” in most major collecting museums. The exhibition is organized around three distinct cultural contexts for making and understanding creativity—museums and art spaces, place-based practices, and the domestic sphere—and explores significant histories that have been, until recently, overlooked and undervalued, despite their influence outside of the mainstream. Out of Place traces how cultural institutions are challenged and changed by the ways artists work. Over half of the works in the exhibition are on view for the very first time, including important collection objects as well as significant new acquisitions, such as highlights from the recent Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift of works by Black artists of the American South.
Artists featured include Louise Bourgeois, Beverly Buchanan, Chryssa, Thornton Dial, Helen Frankenthaler, Lourdes Grobet, Louise Nevelson, Dorothea Rockburne, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Judith Scott, Joan Snyder, and May Wilson, among others.
Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection is curated by Catherine Morris, Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, and Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the Helene Zucker Seeman Memorial Exhibition Fund.
Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks
February 14, 2020–January 10, 2021
Arts of the Americas Galleries, 5th Floor
This exhibition presents new and existing work by artist Jeffrey Gibson alongside a selection from our extensive collection and archives. Gibson collaborated with historian Christian Crouch to organize this exhibition that examines nineteenth- and early twentieth-century museum collecting practices, and the historical representations of indigenous communities, through a contemporary lens.
Gibson, an artist of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, often incorporates elements of Native American art and craft into his practice. He regards these aesthetic and material histories as modern, innovative, global, and hybrid. The presentation includes collection objects such as moccasins, headdresses, ceramics, and parfleche, and examples of beadwork and appliqué, displayed alongside Gibson’s contemporary works, which take material and formal inspiration from these traditional artistic practices. The exhibition also includes rarely exhibited items from our archives that shed light on the formation of the Brooklyn Museum’s Native American collection in the early twentieth century by curator Stewart Culin. The archival selections by Gibson and Crouch aim to return the focus to the indigenous individuals represented within the archives, recovering those individuals’ previously overlooked narratives and presence.
By presenting his own work alongside key selections from our collection, Gibson offers a different perspective on historical objects within a museum setting—one that is not static or stuck in the past, but ever evolving and modern. He encourages visitors to question long-held categorizations and representations of Native American art and challenges our understanding of tradition, practice, craftsmanship, and art-making.
Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks is organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Christian Crouch, Curatorial Advisor, with Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, and Erika Umali, Mellon Curatorial Fellow, with support from Nancy Rosoff, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator, Arts of the Americas, and Molly Seegers, Museum Archivist, Brooklyn Museum. Major support for this exhibition is provided by Ellen and William Taubman. Generous support is provided by the Brooklyn Museum’s Contemporary Art Committee, the FUNd, and Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia.
Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas
February 14, 2020–January 10, 2021
Arts of the Americas Galleries, 5th Floor
Climate change is having a severe impact on indigenous communities across the Americas, but this situation has an even longer history. The European conquest and colonization of the Americas beginning in the sixteenth century introduced ways of using and exploiting natural resources that clashed with indigenous ways of understanding and relating to the natural world. This exhibition draws upon the strength of our renowned collection to highlight indigenous worldviews about the environment, and the ongoing threat of ecological destruction.
The installation includes work spanning 2,800 years, and explores how indigenous beliefs, practices, and ways of living are impacted by the climate crisis, ranging from the effects of melting sea ice and overfishing for Native peoples of the Arctic and Pacific Northwest to illegal logging and deforestation for indigenous communities in the Amazon. This environmental perspective reveals the fundamental disparities between the misuse of natural resources over the past five hundred years and indigenous communities’ profound relationships with their ancestral homelands. In addition, the exhibition incorporates voices of contemporary indigenous activists to underscore the work being done today to counter the climate crisis and protect the planet.
Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas is curated by Nancy Rosoff, Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator, Arts of the Americas, with Joseph Shaikewitz and Shea Spiller, Curatorial Assistants, Arts of the Americas and Europe.
African Arts—Global Conversations
February 14–November 15, 2020
Lobby Gallery, 1st Floor, and collection galleries on the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th Floors
African Arts—Global Conversations seeks to bring African arts into broader, deeper, and more meaningful and critical conversations about the ways that art history and encyclopedic museums have or have not included African artworks. It is the first exhibition of its kind to take a transcultural approach pairing diverse African works across mediums with objects made around the world―all drawn from our collection. It puts African and non-African arts from distinct places and time periods in dialogue with each other in an introductory gallery, as well as in “activation spaces” in the galleries dedicated to European Art, Arts of the Americas, American Art, Ancient Egyptian Art, and Arts of Asia. Duos, trios, and other groupings of objects from a wide variety of locations worldwide prompt conversations about history, art, race, power, design, and more. Approximately 33 artworks are presented (including 20 by African artists), as well as a selection of historical books. Highlights include the celebrated eighteenth-century sculpture of a Kuba ruler, a selection of fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Ethiopian Orthodox processional crosses, and a midtwentieth-century mask from Sierra Leone’s Ordehlay (Ode-Lay) society. Also on view are works by contemporary artists Atta Kwami, Ranti Bam, Magdalene Odundo OBE, and Taiye Idahor.
African Arts—Global Conversations is curated by Kristen Windmuller-Luna, Sills Family Consulting Curator, African Arts, Brooklyn Museum.
Studio 54: Night Magic
March 13–July 5, 2020
Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, 5th Floor
Studio 54: Night Magic is the first exhibition to trace the groundbreaking aesthetics and social politics of the historic nightclub, and its lasting influence on nightclub design, cinema, and fashion. Though it was open for only three years—from April 26, 1977, to February 2, 1980—Studio 54 was arguably the most iconic nightclub to emerge in the twentieth century. Set in a former opera house in Midtown Manhattan, with the stage innovatively re-envisioned as a dance floor, Studio 54 became a space of sexual, gender, and creative liberation, where every patron could feel like a star. From the moment Studio 54 opened, its cutting-edge décor and state-of-the-art sound and lighting systems set it apart from other clubs at the time, attracting artists, fashion designers, musicians, and celebrities whose visits were vividly chronicled by notable photographers. In addition to presenting the photography and media that brought Studio 54 to global fame, the exhibition conveys the excitement of Manhattan’s storied disco club with more than 600 objects ranging from fashion design, drawings, paintings, film, and music to décor and extensive archives.
Studio 54: Night Magic is curated and designed by Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture, Brooklyn Museum. Lead sponsorship for this exhibition is provided by Spotify.
John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance
May 1, 2020–February 7, 2021
Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia Gallery of Contemporary Art, 4th Floor
John Edmonds is the first winner of the UOVO Prize, a new annual award for an emerging artist living or working in Brooklyn. This is Edmonds’s first solo museum exhibition and features approximately 25 new and recent photographic works that include portraiture and still lifes of Central and West African sculptures. Best known for his sensitive depictions of young Black men, Edmonds uses photography and video to create formal pictures that challenge art historical precedents and center Black queer desire. He often uses a large-format camera to heighten the staging of his subjects and explore their sculptural potential, making reference to religious paintings and modernist photography. Highlighting markers of Black self-fashioning and community— hoodies, du-rags, and more recently, African sculptures— Edmonds’s works point to individual style and a shared visual language across time.
John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance is curated by Ashley James, former Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, and Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator, Photography, Brooklyn Museum. Leadership support for the UOVO Prize is provided by UOVO.
Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt
Opening May 22, 2020
Egyptian Galleries, 3rd Floor
This exhibition, which draws from our renowned Egyptian collection, seeks to establish a context for considering contemporary concerns and struggles over public monuments and damage to antiquities. Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt explores patterns of organized campaigns of destruction to sculptures and reliefs motivated by shifting ideologies, politics, and crime in ancient Egypt, over a 2,500-year period. Presenting approximately 60 whole and damaged masterpieces of Egyptian art, the exhibition explores the damage that occurred during and after the rule of Pharaohs, with particular focus on the contested reigns of Hatshepsut (circa 1478–1458 B.C.E.) and Akhenaten (circa 1353–1336 B.C.E.). Targeted damage to sculptures typically occurred around a figure’s nose, which ancient Egyptians believed would remove the sculpture’s supernatural ability to breathe and therefore prevent the deceased figure from interacting with the human world. The exhibition explores the notion of public approval of iconoclasm and poses the question, who has the power to bring down or destroy images? Opinions about iconoclasm hinge on questions of whose narrative dominates public space. Many of the same questions about public art that concern the contemporary world, such as the role that U.S. Confederate monuments should play in today’s publically shared spaces, are illuminated through the lens of ancient iconoclasm.
Striking Power: Iconoclasm in Ancient Egypt is organized in collaboration with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and is curated by Edward Bleiberg, Senior Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art, Brooklyn Museum.
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And
November 20, 2020–April 11, 2021
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is the first comprehensive retrospective of one of the most significant figures in contemporary performance, conceptual, and feminist art. For four decades, from the anger and hilarity of the early guerrilla performance Mademoiselle Bourgeoise Noire, to the joy and complexity of Art Is… on Harlem’s streets, to the haunting alternations in her single-channel video Landscape (Western Hemisphere), O’Grady has delved fearlessly into a range of timely questions: Black subjectivity (especially Black female subjectivity), diaspora, hybridity, art’s guiding concepts and institutions (from modernism to the museum), and the intersection of self and history. By putting contradictory ideas into play—black and white, self and other, here and there, West and non-West, past and present—and allowing them to interact with each other without expecting a concrete resolution, O’Grady’s work aims to replace the dualistic, “either/or” of Western thought with a productive, open-ended “both/and.” The urgency of the ideas she explores is perhaps the reason that her work is being newly embraced by a younger generation of artists who find much to learn from a practice that upends the fixed positions of power that structure our culture—while bringing into focus the poignancy of the lives that have been lived within these frameworks.
The exhibition includes twelve of the artist’s fourteen major projects, accompanied by a selection of material from her rich archive. It is accompanied by a catalogue documenting the full span of O’Grady’s artistic career, the first publication to do so, with essays by Malik Gaines, Harry Burke, Zoe Whitley, Catherine Morris, and Aruna D’Souza, along with a conversation between O’Grady and Catherine Lord.
Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And is organized by Catherine Morris, Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, and writer Aruna D’Souza. Leadership support for this exhibition is provided by The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation. Major support is provided by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust. Generous support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons.
We hope to see you at the Museum soon!
Rose Hartman (American, born 1937). Bianca Jagger Celebrating her Birthday, Studio 54, 1977. Black and white photograph. Courtesy of the artist. © Rose Hartman
Kehinde Wiley (American, born 1977). Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Partial gift of Suzi and Andrew Booke Cohen in memory of Ilene R. Booke and in honor of Arnold L. Lehman, Mary Smith Dorward Fund, and William K. Jacobs, Jr. Fund, 2015.53. © Kehinde Wiley. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
Lourdes Grobet (born Mexico City, Mexico, 1940). Untitled, from the series Painted Landscapes, circa 1982. Silver dye bleach photograph. Brooklyn Museum; Gift of Marcuse Pfeifer, 1990.119.12. © Maria de Lourdes Grobet. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972). WHEN FIRE IS APPLIED TO A STONE IT CRACKS, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, glass beads and artificial sinew inset into custom wood frame. Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago. © Jeffrey Gibson. (Photo: John Lusis)
Eskimo artist. Engraved Whale Tooth, late 19th century. Sperm whale tooth, black ash or graphite, oil. Brooklyn Museum; Gift of Robert B. Woodward, 20.895. Creative Commons-BY. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
Kuba artist. Mask (Mwaash aMbooy), late 19th or early 20th century. Rawhide, paint, plant fibers, textile, cowrie shells, glass, wood, monkey pelt, feathers. Brooklyn Museum; Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.1582. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
Guy Marineau (French, born 1947). Pat Cleveland on the dance floor during Halston's disco bash at Studio 54, 1977. (Photo: Guy Marineau / WWD / Shutterstock)
John Edmonds (American, born 1989). Two Spirits, 2019. Archival pigment photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Company, New York. © John Edmonds
Face and Shoulder from an Anthropoid Sarcophagus, 332–30 B.C.E. Black basalt. Brooklyn Museum; Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.1516E. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
Lorraine O'Grady (American, born 1934). Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in the White Kitchen tastes her coconut, 1982/2015. Digital chromogenic print from Kodachrome 35mm slides in 48 parts. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York. © Lorraine O’Grady/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
