Boroughs::Art::Brooklyn

Guggenheim First Fridays, PS1 Summer Warm-Ups, Summer Sessions at Cooper-Hewitt, and First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum of Art: great little (not-so) secret social scenes.

Last night some friends and I were out for one of Brooklyn Museum's "First Saturdays". Sure the dancing in the Beaux-arts pavilion was a little subdued, but having access to the galleries at 10 o'clock at night was great fun.

Our first stop was the 2nd Floor mezzanine where Devorah Sperber's newest exhibition is housed ("The Eye of The Artist"). Devorah Sperber's newest work is inspired by her study of neurology and her fascination with digital imagery (pixels mainly). Taking thousands of spools of thread, Devorah creates abstract sculptures (or installations) that, when seen through a glass sphere (which rotates the images 180 degrees), suddenly materialize as familiar works: such as The Mona Lisa or The Last Supper. Also interesting to think about is how her spools of thread reflect on her as a woman artist, and how this ties her to feminism and the past. (Click here to hear the artist speak).

{After van Eyck (Man In a Red Turban), 2006}

Then we were off to my friend Connie's "secret spot" as she called it: The museum's Visible Storage Room (video here). Here, one has the opportunity to see a little slice of how museums store their collections: huge sliders full of paintings and shelving from floor to ceiling full of sculpture, furniture, and other artifacts. Completely magical and lots of fun.