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

Also effective are Marc Lepson's large (100-by-114-inch), willfully bland screenprints of the exterior of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, which has been in the news for its alleged maltreatment of Islamic prisoners (Breathe: A Meditation on Claustrophobia, Confinement & Comfort, 2002). Lepson's prints are crossed by a thick band of text containing matter-of-fact, yet heartbreaking, chronicles of detainees swept up after 9/11 in this troubling era of the Patriot Act. President Bush puts in an appearance as a scary, grimacing half-portrait, seen from just nose to chill, in Melanie Baker's charcoal and newspaper collage George (2002). And Rico Gatson's video sculpture Media Center (Powers, Forces, and Meditations), 2004, is a rapid-fire blitz of war-related images.

Kambui Olujimi's spare black on white digital print Something Like a Phenomenon (2002) collages together superstar athletics and the horror of lynching by featuring a tiny black silhouette of a basketball player soaring for a slam-dunk beneath a large, black, looming noose, doubling as a basketball hoop. Vik Muniz's photograph of a drawing of Muhammad Ali done in chocolate syrup and Glenn Ligon's silkscreen and flashe painting of Malcolm X colored as if wearing makeup, and referencing 1970s black pride coloring hooks, are irreverent takes on historical icons. Works attuned to the codes or pressures of youth include Luis Gispert's Fujiflex print of a woman's foot and hands, nails garishly decorated, protruding from a car window; Katy Grannan's C-print of a defiantly near naked young woman standing in a stream as her dog looks on; and Karlos Carcamo's thin column of sports jerseys that ascends from a small section of a wrestling mat.

"Open House" showed that Brooklyn is still home to the kind of quirky, amusing work I initially tell for: Danica Phelps's systems-based drawings and textual notations, for example, from her 2003 installation Integrating Sex into Daily Life, including ecstatic little sketches and textual lists concerning the quotidian events in the artist's new relationship, her first with a woman; or Beth Campbell's drawings of beauty products that she took from the Ritz-Carlton in West Palm Beach, which anxiously communicate with each other in scrawled notations (Dislocated Products from the Ritz Carlton, 2002). Nina Katchadourian identifies an absurdity in our relationship with nature in her photographs of an outhouse fitted by her father with catchy movable red and green cutouts to signal occupancy; above the outhouse is a birdhouse to which the artist humorously attached a tiny version of the same apparatus (Birdhouse/Outhouse: Semiotics of the Forest, 2003). Mike Ballou, a founder of Four Walls and still the guiding force behind the Four Walls Film Club, where artists routinely meet to show and discuss their films and videos, installed a Pinocchio-shaped weather vane above the back entrance to the museum (Weather Vane, 2003-04). With its pointy red hat, long triangular nose and an open mouthed, slightly astonished expression, the vane combines childhood playfulness and folk-art Americana to lighten the sobriety of a venerable institution.