Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898
200 Eastern Parkway
September 20–January 12, 2014
Within a hundred years of the Spanish empire first expanding its borders into the Americas, an abundance of incredible wealth had been amassed in the New World. This September, Brooklyn Museum is opening its doors and inviting visitors into an elite Spanish Colonial home. They will be showcasing extravagant domestic collections, which give insight into the private lives and power struggles of Spain’s New World Elite. Behind Closed Doors, will include paintings, sculptures, luxury goods from everyday life, manuscripts, textiles, and decorative objects. The exhibition explores themes that include representations of the indigenous and Creole elite, rituals in the home, the sala de estrado (women’s sitting room), the bedchamber, and social identity through material culture. The Brooklyn Museum began acquiring domestic Spanish colonial art in 1941 and now the collection ranks among the finest in the nation. This is the first major exhibition in the United States to explore the private lives and interiors of Spain’s New World elite. Richard Aste, Curator of European Art, organized Behind Closed Doors, which is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-published by the Museum and the Monacelli Press.
Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories
The Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories is part of a series at the Brooklyn Museum that asks artists to stage the museum’s Period Rooms with site-specific art. In Hegarty’s work, featured in the Cupola House parlor and the dining room, she explores themes of colonization, Manifest Destiny, and repressed histories. Her display in the Cupola House includes a Native American patterned rug and portraits of George Washington and an anonymous Native American Chief. The rug looks to be tattered with unkempt plants and roots growing over it and the portraits appear to be engaged with one another. In the dining room, 19th-century still-life paintings come to life with fruit overflowing from their frames and being attacked by black three-dimensional crows, referencing Alfred Hitchcock and segregation, among other cultural themes.
Heather Hart: The Eastern Oracle
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY
Through June 24
For the fourth exhibition in its Raw/Cooked series displaying the work of budding Brooklyn artists, the Brooklyn Museum presents an installation by Heather Hart. Occupying the museum’s fifth-floor rotunda, the installation will consist of a single rooftop that lies flat on the ground, without walls and outside its original context. As Hart describes it: “A rooftop can refer to home, stability, or shelter, but in this context, it is also an action of reclaiming power.” The roof makes specific reference to the oldest architecture in the museum’s period room collection—the Jan Martense Schenck House, built in 1676, the second-oldest Dutch-American building in Brooklyn. Visitors are encouraged to physically interact with the structure, fulfilling Hart’s intention to create a place of self-reflection and self-empowerment.