Big brash borough: at the freshened-up Brooklyn Museum, a large, crowded exhibition showed the borough's art scene growing in scale, diversity and ambition

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Gregory Volk

galleries to others just emerging: hip-hop disciples from Fort Greene, diverse expatriates who have settled in the borough, or experimental youth, fresh out of art school, founding new outposts in Greenpoint, East Williamsburg and Bushwick. "Open House" achieved a wider representation of the borough's sundry neighborhoods and esthetics than has ever before been attempted in smaller surveys and group shows on the theme, both here and abroad.

The exhibition reflected an art milieu that has grown significantly in the past six years. In Williamsburg, long-running venues like Pierogi, Roebling Hall, Schroeder Romero, Momenta and the itinerant galley called eyewash have been joined by many others, including Priska Juschka Fine Art, Bellwether (which recently moved to Chelsea), Black and White, Jack the Pelican, Parker's Box, Holland Tunnel, Southfirst and *sixtyseven. Bedford-Stuyvesant's Skylight Gallery is a showcase for mostly black artists, as is the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, which is slated to move to Fort Greene this month. In DUMBO, Smack Mellon and the DUMBO Arts Center are part of an eclectic scene including galleries, performance venues and arts organizations, while Red Hook is home to the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition and the Kentler International Drawing Space. Curators Kotik and Mosaka contacted many of these venues, asking for recommendations, and they also visited "hundreds of studios" and saw "thousands of slides," as they put it, from artists who live and/or maintain work spaces in the borough.

At the museum, the sprawling exhibition claimed large parts of two floors and spilled into the permanent collection elsewhere in the building. Of coarse there were problems resulting from the installation of 300-plus works by 198 artists, and, particularly in the main galleries, the exhibition had a willy-nilly, salon-style look. Most artists were represented by one or two modestly scaled works, which made for something of a blur. If the museum wishes to repeat this overview-type exhibition, it should make a commitment to showing the work to better advantage, even if that requires temporarily removing parts of the permanent collection to free up additional space. Although the curators devised various themes to achieve some order--"domesticity," "nature," "identity," etc.--their efforts were largely unsuccessful. Too much was happening at once in too small a space, and the quality was maddeningly uneven, to the point where really good works abutted those that were mediocre at best, and sometimes downright awful. I found it curious, too, that so many works dated to 2000-02, quite a lag time for a show purportedly about now.

On the other hand, the situating of a number of works in the permanent collections was a good idea. While it was sometimes a challenge to locate them, they usually had more space and better sight lines than their counterparts in the main exhibition. And when things clicked, it made for a great exchange between past and present. In Rachel Harrison's Sphinx (2002), placed in the Egyptian galleries, an upright section of white Sheetrock displayed a photograph of noted TV art enthusiast Sister Wendy contemplating a pharaonic bust. On the opposite side of the partition, a rickety wooden tower held a pink Styrofoam blob, presumably IIarrison's oddball version of the ancient sphinx. Also in the Egyptian section, Rob Fisher presented a steel-and glass container, the size of a coffin, filled with gray ash and charred bits of various household items (Untitled, Container of Ash, 2003). Evoking destruction, transformation and catharsis, the work perfectly resonated with a nearby mummy, urns and relief blocks from tombs.