Displaying items by tag: Brooklyn Museum

Sarah Jessica Parker left early for the opening of “The Normal Heart” on Broadway, but other guests stayed for the Brooklyn Museum’s “Brklyn Artists Ball” last night and then departed with table decorations.

Criterion Collection President Peter Becker grabbed a brick covered in a green fabric with an aquatic scene and signed by Shinique Smith.

Smith and 15 other artists with Brooklyn roots were recruited to decorate the dinner tables. Her contribution involved colorful bricks.

“When you’re a host, you display wealth and generosity,” Smith said earlier in the evening, standing next to one of the mushroom sculptures by Situ Studio in the museum’s Great Hall. “My guests can take what they want. It’s social sculpture.”

The table decorations were the talk of the event as guests sat down for a dinner including timbale of avocado and quinoa, and grilled hanger steak with fingerling and purple Peruvian potatoes.

Ball Chairman Stephanie Ingrassia and her husband, Tim Ingrassia, co-chairman of global mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), sat at the center table. Artist Brian Tolle had decorated it with patches of Astroturf.

“We got to meet the artists at a reception at our house three weeks ago. It was wonderful,” said Tim Ingrassia when he entered the dining room. He had stopped to admire the work of Dustin Yellin: rows of boxes made of acrylic, paint and collage, consisting of images cut out from old books.

Now showing at Los Angeles' Geffen Contemporary museum: "the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art," an exhibition that reverently displays "installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community."

Translation: They're having wine and cheese parties surrounded by framed images of urban blight. They're giving the destruction of other people's property a hallowed place in high-art halls.

And they're inviting school groups to tour this retrospective, even - no kidding - selling cans of spray paint (along with books like "Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art," $39.99) in the gift shop.

If all that weren't bad enough, this grand celebration of vandalism is slated to come to a museum near you - the Brooklyn Museum - in March.

Which means museum mavens will be sticking their thumbs in the eyes of every bodega owner and restaurant manager who struggles to keep his or her property graffiti-free, not to mention the eyes of all New Yorkers who cringe recalling the days of graffiti-covered subway cars.

They will be doing this with taxpayers' help. While the city spends some $2.4 million a year to battle vandalism, and the transit authority spends plenty more, taxpayers also subsidize the Brooklyn Museum to the tune of about $9 million a year.

Usually a fine investment. Not this time.

The Brooklyn Museum in New York has completed an extensive renovation of its Great Hall which will be unveiled on 4 March 2011, marking the first phase of the transformative project.

The project, which is the initial phase of a major redesign of the first floor, marks the most transformative change to the floor ever since it was first constructed. The renovated space has been redesigned by Ennead Architects, defined by a dense grid of classical columns and 24-foot-high ceilings.

The initial phase of renovation features the expansive, two-storey-high colonnaded space with its original coffered glass-block ceiling. The room originally served as a space to house museum's holdings of pre-Columbian, Native American, and Oceanic art. Designed to form the core of a series of galleries, the space now features four freestanding walls, which define a central gallery. The renovation has also created a new South Gallery, restoring to public use an area previously used for back-of-house functions.

The new freestanding walls allow for the display of art while concealing climate-control systems within. Their crisp, diagonal edges facilitate and reinforce movement from the Lobby into the Great Hall. The central gallery features a new terrazzo floor. The entire gallery volume has been technically upgraded to become a state-of-the-art museum environment, complete with new sprinkler and lighting systems.

The lighting, designed by the Renfro Design Group, features a flexible track system integrated into the historic coffered ceiling, with LED lighting in the central bay. Natural light filters down to the Great Hall through glass-block ceiling, which forms the floor of the Beaux-Arts Court.