In Between the Rain Drops

Living in New York lately has felt a lot like living on the planet in Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day"--the rain never stops. At five this morning, I awoke to the steady beat of rain and cursed the never-ending water. Happily, by lunchtime the sky had cleared. Like the children in Bradbury's short story, Patty, Katie, and I scurried out into the sunshine, afraid to miss a moment.

We decided to walk over to the Brooklyn Museum since Katie and I had never been. On our way, we discovered a street fair underway on 7th Ave. It went on for blocks and blocks and there were tons of people out and about. We gorged ourselves on Italian sausages and peppers, Thai spring rolls, and fruit smoothies on our walk. It's just the sort of sustenance once needs for a day of museum viewing. Besides, you can't go to a street fair without experiencing the street fare.

We got a little lost on the way to the Brooklyn Museum, but--happily--we discovered the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Inspired by the glimpses of the roses we had caught behind the wrought iron fences, we decided to scrap the Museum for verdant paths and gorgeous flowers.

Entering the Botanic Garden is like leaving the borough behind. Once you are within the gates, it is a wholly new place. Although the occasional high-rise apartment insinuates itself into the view, the vistas are largely uninterrupted green space. One of the loveliest parts of the Garden is the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden. The calm lake with large koi, the hanging weeping willows, and the simple wooden bridge beguiled us. Beyond the bridge was a charming waterfall. In the pool at the bottom, turtles sunned themselves on a rock. They too were soaking up the sun time.


As we walked along the outer edge of the Garden, we spotted the Brooklyn Museum and decided to pop in for the rest of the afternoon. I must admit, I was slightly mystified by the museum's exterior. Who ruins a beaux art facade by slapping on some tiered-glass spaceship? I suppose it's meant to make the museum more inviting and to draw people in on the ground-level, but I still think it's aesthetically horrifying.


The Museum's facade, it turns out, foreshadowed the juxtapositions within. As nonplussed as I was by the outside of the museum, that's how enchanted I was with the installation of the "American Identities" gallery. In this gallery, decorative arts are juxtaposed with paintings (and sometimes the ceramics or furniture depicted in the painting have a one to one example in a case below the painting). English colonial paintings are displayed next to Spanish colonial paintings, showing the similar ways in which the upper class established their social position. A landscape of Niagra Falls was in dialogue with an abstract painting of water splatters. Both vibrated with the energy of thousands of tons of cascading water.

What I loved about "American Identities" was the sense of excitement. The galleries were painted in vibrant colors. Patty and Katie thought the colors were too saturated and took away from the art, but I thought the colored walls created a sense of dynamism. When I walked into the gallery, it was as if the walls said something is happening here. Then as I focused in on the paintings and decorative arts how they were presented, you could see that there were really exciting dialogues between the displayed objects.

That same dynamism was also on display in the Brooklyn Museum's Luce Center. Unlike the static one at the Met (parallel rows of case after case of furniture, silver, glass, and paintings), the Brooklyn Museum's drew the visitor further and further into it. A display of Tiffany glasses were lit up just inside the entrance. A display with a Murphy's folding chair contained a video screen showing technicians manipulating the chair into its 50 different iterations. Drawers with objects could be pulled in and out, creating a jewelry box sense of excitement. This was the first Luce Center I encountered that was playful.

It was an amazing day in Brooklyn and I'm looking forward to visiting the Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Museum many more times. It would take a year of Sundays to take it all in.