{"id":1107,"date":"2024-01-30T15:13:25","date_gmt":"2024-01-30T15:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/?p=1107"},"modified":"2024-01-30T15:18:52","modified_gmt":"2024-01-30T15:18:52","slug":"hands-on-art-at-the-brooklyn-museums-new-education-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/headlinegram.com\/hands-on-art-at-the-brooklyn-museums-new-education-center\/","title":{"rendered":"Hands-On Art at the Brooklyn Museum\u2019s New Education Center"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It could easily be an alien civilization: Its citizens have no gender, no organized religion, no formal government. They inhabit a lush ecosystem of candy-colored vegetation, where plants can grow infinitely tall. Residents travel on driverless, ring-shaped buses that hover in the atmosphere. A single year lasts more than two centuries.<\/p>\n

Yet as extraterrestrial as this environment sounds, you can soon encounter it in Brooklyn. Called \u201cArtland,\u201d it is an ever-expanding fantasy world and traveling museum exhibition designed by children, molded from modeling clay and overseen by the internationally renowned artist\u00a0Do Ho Suh, whose two young daughters conceived it. On Saturday, from noon to 3 p.m., \u201cArtland\u201d will welcome the public to a free celebration of the newly renovated\u00a0Toby Devan Lewis Education Center\u00a0at the Brooklyn Museum, where visitors can sculpt imaginary flora and fauna to add to the show\u2019s phantasmagoric jungles.<\/p>\n

In some ways, the installation symbolizes the new center, which aims to help visitors find their own pathways into art.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all about world building, right?\u201d Shamilia McBean Tocruray, the museum\u2019s director of education, said in an interview. \u201cAll about creating possibilities, and really akin to the invitation that we\u2019re making to our community to say: \u2018Come in here. What can we make together?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Titled \u201cArtland: An Installation by Do Ho Suh and Children,\u201d the show inaugurates the Norman M. Feinberg Gallery, just inside the entrance of the redesigned education center. The 9,500-square-foot wing also includes three art-making studios equipped with audiovisual technology, as well as education offices that foster collaboration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cEssentially, it was a gut renovation,\u201d said Stephen Yablon, whose firm,\u00a0Stephen Yablon Architecture, designed the $9 million project, which he called an \u201cart connector.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe concept was to kind of build a space that would be a tool to connect people to learning about art, experiencing art and to the museum,\u201d Yablon said in an interview. He added, \u201cThe way to do that was to make it very welcoming when you came in. So you immediately come into a public space, not a corridor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the first-floor education wing had a gallery previously, it was devoted exclusively to the work of participants in the museum\u2019s programs. \u201cArtland,\u201d on view through May 5, represents a new, additional initiative: to present an annual interactive exhibition led by a world-class artist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Few shows are more interactive than this one, which began in 2016 on the dining table in Suh\u2019s London household, where his older daughter started building a universe she named Artland, inhabited by cat-shaped creatures called Slimes. When her little sister grew big enough, she, too, got involved, and as they expanded their invented cosmos, which Suh eventually moved to his studio, the little girls wrote an entire mythology for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI called myself art assistant to my daughters,\u201d Suh said in a video call. If they had difficulty adding clay creations to Artland, he used recycled materials to build a simple framework that allowed it to extend from a table\u2019s surface to a wall or a floor.<\/p>\n

Suh, whose work is in the Brooklyn Museum\u2019s collection and those of other institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, said he felt sad when the girls, now 13 and 10, began to outgrow their creation. But he saw a way to preserve it when the\u00a0Buk-Seoul Museum of Art\u00a0in his native South Korea invited him to do a show for its children\u2019s gallery, where\u00a0\u201cArtland\u201d became a participatory exhibition.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was a huge hit,\u201d Suh said. \u201cOver 100,000 children came to the show and contributed something.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In Brooklyn, \u201cArtland\u201d will start on a small scale, with just three of the world\u2019s pre-existing islands placed atop small tables. But the gallery offers many more surfaces of different heights for children to expand the project, as well as a video about it and a pamphlet that explains its taxonomy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When young New Yorkers discover \u201cArtland,\u201d Suh said he hoped for a result even \u201cmore audacious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope that they feel the ownership of this,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd they feel like they are the artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Museum executives said they hoped visitors would respond that way to the entire renovation. Unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s new\u00a081st Street Studio, which caters just to children, the Brooklyn Museum\u2019s education center will serve more than 50,000 visitors, young and old, who participate in its offerings annually. These range from\u00a0Stroller Tours, for those 2 and under, to the\u00a0A.R.T. (Art, Research and Teaching) Guide\u00a0volunteer program, which includes many retirees.<\/p>\n

And while the Met attracts numerous tourists, the Brooklyn Museum\u2019s visitor population is \u201cvery much still anchored in local Brooklyn communities,\u201d Adjoa Jones de Almeida, the museum\u2019s deputy director for learning and social impact, said in an interview. But the education wing, which had not been renovated since opening in 1980, was dark, cramped and closed off.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was always this conversation of, like, \u2018Is it a coincidence that Brooklyn Museum is the space that serves the most BIPOC audiences and has the shabbiest spaces around of any encyclopedic institution\u2019?\u201d Jones de Almeida said, using an acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color. \u201cThat was always a really hard thing to hear.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n