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Brooklyn Museum’s long-term installation Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn brings objects from the museum’s extensive collection and unites them thematically. Rather than visit different galleries representing specific time periods and/or cultures, this singular space set on the main floor provides an intimate archive of works from across the globe that range from antiquity to the contemporary.
Judging by their 1909 manifesto, the Italian Futurists were a violent lot. They called for nothing less than the destruction of museums, libraries and feminism. They intended to “glorify war, the only hygiene of the world,” and to “sing to the love of danger.” If their manifestos fell a little flat, their creative endeavors were all-encompassing, reconstructing painting, sculpture, architecture, fashion and even performance to such an extent that we would never look at the world in quite the same way again.
If it’s true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder happened to be Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich henchmen, then the likes of Kandinsky, Kirchner, Kokoschka, and Klee (and that’s just the early 20th Century artistic giants whose names start with “K”) were in big trouble. By the time the Nazi campaign to purge the world of modernist art ended, some 20,000 pieces were confiscated, hidden, sold, or destroyed.
Unlike some who have thrown up their hands in understandable despair, the shootings and the plight of black men in Chicago and elsewhere have sparked Gay's imagination and creativity. She used her skill as a painter to provoke members of the black community to take a new look at what is happening to their sons, not to look away. Gay's paintings also bid the black community to look at black men as human beings and fathers.
Ever the maverick, Foulkes was not content to stay with this format, however popular. While he would reference his rock paintings in future pieces, he took a dramatic turn with his “Bloody Heads” series—although “obscured heads” might be a better descriptor. Portraits with faces obstructed by bright red, blood-like strokes or symbolic objects (a doctor’s head, for example, has an X-ray superimposed upon his face, while a geometry teacher has a triangle) are jarring in their juxtaposition of the macabre with the mundane.
Judy Jetson grew up and became a swinger: That’s the impression one might get the first time viewing a Shag painting. The artist Josh Agle—his nom de brosse comes from the SH in “Josh” and the “AG” in Agle—is known for his martini-clutching mod characters in swanky spaces rendered in saturated colors with a distinctive mid-century style. Lithe ladies in bobs and beehives and their cool-cat men lounge on boxy sofas and egg chairs, or sip tropical drinks in bars next to zombies and skeletons while bongo drummers and guitarists play on.
At the young age of 12, the child prodigy has commissioned six-figure works of art and has garnered national and international acclaim for her colorful tributes to Marilyn Monroe. Her artistic style has been compared to iconic abstract painters including Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and the Picasso. Her exhibitions have defined her as one of the most accomplished and recognized prodigies of our time. Her original masterpieces have sold for tens of thousands of dollars, and have been acquired by several major art collectors.