Did you know that the Brooklyn Museum brings in new acquisitions for our renowned collection from many of our canon-expanding exhibitions? In 2016-17, we honored the 10th anniversary of our Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art through groundbreaking exhibitions during A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum. And we proclaimed an unequivocal YES! for forward-thinking acquisitions from our YOY exhibitions.
Two rare, iconic works came to Brooklyn from our critically acclaimed exhibit We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-85. The first is Flower Sniffer (1966), a rare major painting from the 1960s by Emma Amos, the only female member of Spiral, a short-lived but influential group of African American artists that included Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis. It’s joined by the 1973 work by Betye Saar, Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail, a powerful example of Saar’s mixed-media assemblages that combines the iconography of the Black Power Movement, political violence, and aspirational middle-class American culture.
We also brought to Brooklyn works from two canon-expanding retrospectives organized for the YOY. From the renowned and trailblazing Marilyn Minter, celebrated in Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty, we acquired the video Smash (2014), one of her best-known forays in video art. It features one of Minter’s most recognizable motifs, the high-heeled shoe, explored in paintings, photographs, and public art for years prior to Smash. The video was originally commissioned by the Museum for its 2014–15 exhibition Killer Heels: The Art of the High Heeled Shoe, when a small group of contemporary artists were invited to riff on the high heeled shoe’s enduring place in the public imagination. We also organized a breakthrough survey of Beverly Buchanan, Beverly Buchanan—Rituals and Ruins, from which we acquired the paradigmatic cast concrete Untitled (Frustula Series) from c. 1978 [not pictured].
For our renowned Egyptian art collection, we “re-acquired” significant works through conservation and restoration of collection works in storage for the revelatory YOY exhibition A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt, which featured new research inspired in part by feminist scholarship about the differences between male and female access to the afterlife. Rediscovery of collection works through conservation is a primary way for the museum to “acquire” Egyptian works, in part due to the difficulty of purchasing Egyptian works because of changes in worldwide antiquity laws and still-evolving ethical considerations. For the exhibition we re-acquired five works, including a striking linen cartonnage from the late Ptolemaic Period to early Roman Period and dated ca. 1st-century B.C.E.
The collection also grew from the 107 drawings acquired from Iggy Pop Life Class, which resulted from a one-day performative event created by artist Jeremy Deller. The drawings are by 22 artists from across New York City’s diverse communities and used iconic rock star Iggy Pop as model and subject. They also use the traditional life drawing class as a means to examine what has constituted culture’s idea of an iconic male body through the ages and ask multiple questions about identity, ability and creativity. The drawings reveal the complex relationship between artist, model and spectator while also recreating the mystery that lies behind the closed studio door.
We rounded out the Year of Yes, appropriately, with the addition of Judy Chicago’s mesmerizing 1975 Prismacolor on paper, Study for Elizabeth R. from ‘The Dinner Party’, featured in the acclaimed exhibition, Roots of “The Dinner Party": History in the Making the concluding show of the season. The Dinner Party (1974–79) is one of the Museum’s most beloved object, an icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in 20th-century art, as well as the foundational work of the Sackler Center. “Elizabeth R.,” or Queen Elizabeth I, is one of the best-known women honored among the largely unsung histories recorded on The Dinner Party. A bold ruler who brought stability and prosperity to an economically and spiritually ravaged England from 1558–1603, Queen Elizabeth redefined international expectations of female leadership in her era.
Posted by Susan Fisher