Reframing Complicated Narratives for a Contemporary Audience at Brooklyn Museum

The categories feature selections of artwork ranging from painting and sculpture, to design objects and photography. Many of the works are from the last ten years and are in dialogue with a deep-rooted, problematized history of America. The show faces these issues— racism, colonialism, gender bias, displacement, and class structures— head on. 

The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Sparling Williams, the museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art, along with seven others from various departments in the museum including American Art, Arts of the Americas, Decorative Arts, and Design. 

It incorporates all of these departments and their corresponding artworks into one masterful display shining a light on the museum’s complicated history, along with their keen curatorial eye and prowess at reframing complicated narratives for a contemporary audience. 

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are first greeted with a section that is all about water. The title is Frameworks: Trouble the Water, an immediate implication of the water that carried and continues to carry people to the shores of America. Looking at epic landscape paintings by the likes of Thomas Moran and his piece, Sunset at Sea (1906), and The Great Deep (1909) by Frederick J. Waugh, these two large-scale oil paintings capture the sea in ornate frames, waves glistening with light. 

The landscape is familiar, engrossing, sublime, and depending on one’s relationship with the sea, terrifying. Installed nearby are outstretched arms, Untitled (2022), made by Andrea Chung. Chung’s resin sculptures are blue and emerge as if coming out of the wall. Their hands hold beads, shells, and crystals, and it’s almost as if they cast a spell or a wave of healing energy over the paintings, over the waters. 

The juxtaposition of the works is powerful and a perfect foreshadowing into the depth and conceptual undertakings of the show. From standing in front of pieces by the aforementioned artists along with Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keefe, and Canadian Inuit artist Janet Kigusiuq, the voice of Stephanie Sparling Williams echoes overhead reading the 2021 poem, To Hold Water. 

There is an audio component that ebbs and flows throughout the galleries— entrapping our senses. In the second gallery, a selection of books are stacked in glass cases and a makeshift bookshelf, not only as recommendations, but also giving us the information that the curator and staff utilized in crafting the visual journey we are on. 

Spines facing outwards, we see texts by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz and her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, and In the Wake by Christina Sharpe. All of these redefine nationhood by defying borders, colonization, slavery, ancestral rights, and loss. 

While there is a deep focus on Black, Indigenous, and Asian experiences, certain artworks by white women— in particular, Georgia O’Keefe and a small watercolor, Tangier, by Emily Sargent— stand out. Emily Sargent made work while visiting regions in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, alongside her brother John Singer Sargent. 

While John Singer Sargent’s paintings are hung in most major museums, the Brooklyn Museum presents this small gem by his sister. Whereas we know that male artists traveled the world, their lesser-known female counterparts deserve the same wall space. 

Hanging nearby is Untitled (Fang Sculpture, Crow, and Fruit), a painting made by Beauford Delaney in 1945. Delaney is getting his due, albeit too late (he died in 1979), after exhibiting in the Metropolitan Museum’s recent exhibition, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism and Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum. 

What the curator and curatorial staff have accomplished is a visual dialogue that is extremely contemporary. Merging other museums through the thread of artists such as Delaney, they also incorporate Jewish artists like Deborah Kass and her 4 Black Barbaras (Jewish Jackie Series), 1993 and First Personage, a freestanding painted wood sculpture by Louise Nevelson from 1956. 

A quote by Nevelson accompanies the work in its description, “But when I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors.” Nearby is Iago’s Mirror, an intricately layered sculpture of black glass by Fred Wilson from 2009. 

In a 200 year culmination, Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, not only celebrates the legacy of the Brooklyn Museum, but generously provides a fresh lens from which to see the artwork of their ever-expanding collection.