Mickalene Thomas (American, born 1971). A Little Taste Outside of Love, 2007. Acrylic, enamel and rhinestones on wood panel, Overall: 108 x 144 in. (274.3 x 365.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Giulia Borghese and Designated Purchase Fund, 2008.7a-c. © Mickalene Thomas

The reason why Mickalene is an art historian/studio teacher’s dream come true is because of all the references. The title of the exhibition itself, Origin of the Universe, is a direct reference (or perhaps I should say response) to an 1866 painting by Gustav Courbet called L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World). Thomas often puts her work into conversations with art-historical cannons, with examples such as her piece Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, responding to Gustave Courbet’s Le Sommeil (Sleep), and her painting A Little Taste Outside of Love, part of the Museum’s permanent collection, often finding visitors puzzling about where they’ve seen something like it before (if this has happened to you, the answer is usually Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, painted in 1814).

Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, painted in 1814, now at the Louvre.

Of course, mixed in with the art-historical references are social and racial conversations which are too complicated to get into in a blog post (just Google the word “Odalisque” to get started), but which will make for stellar class discussions and studio projects. At the end of the day, Thomas’ visual conversations are simply a great example of just what our Gallery/Studio program strives to do: Start with the work hanging on the museum wall, and build a bridge from it to you. Find your own connections to it, and make it yours.

Looking Back: Art History to Studio Practice starts on October 7 and runs Sundays from 1-3pm.  If you are interested in joining us you can register for this new class.

Page from Keith Haring's journal NB-0 c.1971 (age 13). The Keith Haring Foundation is uploading a page a day to Tumblr.

In the exhibition there is one room towards the back of the gallery set apart as a place to draw, sketch, or doodle. The goal of this room was to allow visitors to think and respond visually to the work on the gallery walls, to experience, in a way, the artist’s process. Haring’s journals are filled not only with words but also with marks familiar to many of us, artists or not: doodles. Doodles often get a bad rap as being signs of distraction, when in fact they are often one of the best sources of creativity. In art school I was once given an assignment to doodle until something good emerged, even if that meant drawing for hours and hours. For most people in my class, the work that came out was some of the most interesting of the term. The symbols that emerge, and reemerge, when you are not trying to make a perfect drawing often tell us a lot about what’s in our heads. Think of doodling as a form of communication, as a conversation between your dreams, your thoughts, and your pencil.

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This past Saturday I went to peek in on the people drawing. The space had a calm yet busy energy; it was quiet despite being filled with people. The drawings on these boards are temporary; they will disappear at the press of a button, so I think it’s more for the experience of drawing than the outcome that visitors spend time in this room. To me, it felt both meditative and really challenging to draw with no specific outcome in mind. I saw moments where drawings stood on their own, the spaces around them blank, and places where drawings came together, touching at points, or spread across many boards at once. I wonder if this is how Haring felt when working; I wonder if his drawings are like records of conversations he had with himself.

Behind the green doors, educators install the Student Exhibition of the Gallery/Studio.

If they doors are open, you might see some works of art on the far wall. If you step through the doors you will notice many more artworks filling the gallery. There are sculptures and paintings, artist books, prints, digital photographs, videos, models, and sometimes (for example this January) even interactive works that ask for visitor participation. This is the Student Exhibition of Gallery/Studio, the Brooklyn Museum’s in-house studio art program.

“You should let more visitors know about the student exhibitions and art classes. Untill I took a course here I had no idea what was going on behind those green doors.” - Suggestion from comment book in the Con Edison Education Gallery

The youngest artists of the group are 6 years old, but the program also offers courses for adult students, as well as for every age in between. Some of our artists paint, some print, some try their hand at wire sculpture, stone carving or life drawing. All learn how to use the Brooklyn Museum’s collections as inspiration for their own artwork, discussing artist’s choices and processes in the galleries and bringing that knowledge to the studio to merge with their own life experience and creative expression. A Teaching Artist guides each group of students through a theme or medium over ten weeks, working with them through blocks and breakthroughs, and finally celebrating their journey at the opening of the Student Exhibition.

Installation in progress in the Con Edison Education Gallery on the 1st floor.

Have you ever installed a gallery show? The last show I installed in a non-museum gallery showcased 15 artworks. The average GSP Student Exhibition has between 150-200 pieces. Our challenge is to make sure each artwork shines, while also telling the story of process by showing how different artists within a class interpreted the same Museum piece, or what each artist took from a class-wide project. This involves discussion, more discussion, arranging artwork, changing our minds, more discussion and, well, I think you get the picture. It’s a process.

Measure twice, hang once. Educators install the Gallery/Studio show.

For two weeks before each Student Exhibition the green doors are closed, though visitors are still welcome to peek in and see what we’re up to. Our team can often be found holding a piece up on the wall and trading places so each person can contribute their opinion. We measure things often. Think artists don’t have to do math? Think again. Then comes writing. Each Teaching Artist comes up with an explanation of what students did for the project on display. What artwork did they visit in the galleries? What did they talk about when they were there? What did they do in the studio? How did their studio work incorporate the discussion from upstairs? The info is written up on a label that accompanies each group of artworks. It’s hard to say everything about the process in only two paragraphs, and even our best try sometimes leaves some fun details out.

Come see for yourself. You can find the show behind the green doors starting January 14th!

Join us every third Thursday of the month for drawing in the Museum’s galleries. Each workshop is led by a skilled teaching artist and focuses on a different object from the Museum’s collection, combining conversation with drawing to inspire engagement with art in new ways.

I spent a recent Saturday at an inter-disciplinary conference on drawing. I began the day thinking (as an artist) that I knew what “drawing” meant, and left both more confused and more excited than I had expected. One presenter was a plastic surgeon who thought about what he does with his scalpel as a sort of drawing. He collaborates with a fine artist who follows his hand movements and translates them into marks on paper which become beautiful in a way that only great abstract mark-making is. Another artist made a robot that can draw faces. I’m serious; the robot draws. The drawings are quite good, in fact, leaving out just enough information to convey the hand-drawn (or in this case robot hand-drawn) nature of the work. During the conference a textile artist was knitting responses to research papers about drawing, while a room full of teachers, academics, and artists discussed lines, gestures, marks and media.

I attended this event because we are starting a new evening program at the Museum based around drawing as an artistic and social experience. We’re trying to bring drawing into many different museum experiences in order to explain or record your thoughts and as a way to work though them. We know that drawing helps you see an object differently, but it can help you think differently as well.

Unfortunately, as adults we can sometimes forget to draw. Even for those of us who stick with drawing can forget the joy of it as we spend night after night in our studios, by ourselves. So one night a month we’re hoping to fill one of the Museum’s galleries with people drawing. There will be an instructor who will run though techniques and provide information about artworks, but there will also be you, hopefully lots of you, or people like you, or people unlike you, but people who are all willing to give this experience of looking, talking and drawing a shot. It’s this interaction, this feeling that drawing should be something fun, that will make this program great.

So come join us. And draw something.

Photos of Staff Show by Trish Mayo.

One of the great parts of working in an art museum is how many fine artists come out of the woodwork for events such as this. There were pieces by artists who work in conservation, collections management, digital collections, curatorial, public information, visitor services, education, audio/visual, and more. Some pieces came from the artist’s “other life” as a painter or sculptor but some, such as Digital Ikebana by Anita Cruz-Eberhard (Digital Collections and Services) fused these two lives and, as a result, made me see their museum job in a whole new light. Ms. Cruz-Eberhard uses the same skills to produce her own work and to help the museum archive ours. She also shows internationally and has a BFA. She’s a great example of yet another career that I can now tell young art students to consider.

Another option for young artists might be to think about a job in education. Jeremiah Jones, a Teaching Artist in the Brooklyn Museum’s Gallery/Studio Program, contributed Sewing Table, a multimedia sculpture piece that fuses video, textiles, and sculpture. Jeremiah also taught a fall 2010 course in moving art and animation in which a class of 8-10 year olds created original stop-motion animations with drawings and found objects. It was on exhibition last semester in the education gallery, but (yea technology!) can still be found on the Museum’s Gallery/Studio facebook page.

Museum employees need not be fine artists, or even art history buffs, but for those who are the museum is an ideal place to work. You are constantly fed new ideas in the form of special and permanent exhibitions. For example I’ve returned to the Nkishi Power Figure in the Arts of Africa Exhibition many times, thinking about wrapped sculptures. In my “other life” as an artist I work mostly with fabric, but I’ve also worked with metal and clay sculpture and, if Nkishi stays there for me to pass on my way to get my morning coffee, I will probably end up fusing the media again.

Someday I will get around to my new project of googling all our staff artists and looking at their web pages, but for now I’m just happy to see their work up on the walls.