At the launch of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in 2004, the Museum created its own database to complement The Dinner Party, which is still accessible on our website. At the time, independent researchers spent months researching and writing entries for each of the 1,038 women.  Of all the issues I encountered in the early stages of this Wikipedia project, the one that most decisively determined the course of the rest of my work was that areas of this database do not provide citations.  While the database entries on the Place Setting women are longer and carefully sourced, the Heritage floor entries were created more as placeholders for information that we’d later expand upon, and are therefore typically shorter and do not list any sources.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party (Heritage Floor; detail), 1974–79. Porcelain with rainbow and gold luster, 48 x 48 x 48 ft. (14.6 x 14.6 x 14.6 m). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © Judy Chicago. Photograph by Jook Leung Photography

The lack of citations for each of the Heritage Floor entries eliminated the option of directly translating information from our database to Wikipedia. This also had significance for those pre-existing Wikipedia articles that listed The Dinner Party database as a source. By citing the database, which is a tertiary source that does not list any of its sources, the Wikipedia articles were perpetuating a cycle of poorly referenced material. The task became replacing the Brooklyn Museum citation with the original source material.

A more minor problem was the difficulty in finding women on Wikipedia because of multiple or misspelled names. Legendary and mythical figures often have several names, or a name can be spelled differently depending on the transliteration system being used. There were several occasions in which I created new articles only to find that articles already existed under a different spelling of that woman’s name. For example, Judy Chicago’s Flavia Julia Helena was simply “Helena (Empress)” on Wikipedia, and Fibors was found under the name “Tibors de Sarenom.” In these instances, entries were consolidated and multiple aliases were redirected to the same article.

Another issue specific to this project rested in Wikipedia’s notability policy, which states that articles and list topics must be notable, or “worthy of notice”. Determining notability does not necessarily depend on things such as fame, importance, or popularity—although those may enhance the acceptability of a subject. Chicago chose the Heritage Floor women based on many years of extensive research and a rigorous set of criteria for inclusion: “whether the woman made a worthwhile contribution to society; if she had attempted to improve conditions for other women; and whether her life or work illuminated a significant aspect of women’s history or provided a role model for a more egalitarian future.”

This issue was brought up when the article I created for Gisela of Kerzenbroeck, a medieval manuscript illuminator, was nominated for deletion on the basis that the article “lacked context” and was “very incomplete.” I immediately defended the article’s existence on the AfD (Article for Deletion) page, citing the fact that her most notable work, the Codex Gisele, is a significant medieval manuscript and her life and work have been the subject of several published studies. Several other Wikimedians came to the defense of the article and the discussion that ensued is evidence of how exciting the process of writing and editing on Wikipedia can be. Needless to say, the result of the discussion was a “speedy keep.”

I would argue that there is very limited information on many of these historical women because in their lifetimes, their accomplishments were probably deemed unworthy of recording for the sake of posterity. Their accomplishments were also often attributed incorrectly to men. Fanny Mendelssohn, a gifted pianist and prolific composer of the Romantic era, created a musical style that was falsely attributed to her brother, also a famous composer. Oliva Sabuco, a 16th Century Spanish philosopher and author of medical treatises, published a visionary philosophical text in 1587 that, decades later, was attributed to Oliva’s father based on the notion that Sabuco had plagiarized his ideas; recent feminist scholarship has produced compelling counter-evidence of Oliva’s authorship. Genevieve D’Arconville’s 18th Century anatomical drawings, which were the subject of scientific interest for many years, were attributed to a man during her lifetime. The list goes on and on, and many Wikipedia articles still credit these men rather than affording women the credit that is rightfully theirs. Now, we have the opportunity to give these women their due by recording what we know about their lives in Wikipedia, the most public, accessible source available today. It’s an exciting prospect and I look forward to seeing this project through over the next several months.

Judy Chicago (American, b. 1939). The Dinner Party, 1974–79. Mixed media: ceramic, porcelain, textile. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, 2002.10. © Judy Chicago. (Photo: © Aislinn Weidele for Polshek Partnership Architects)

Given this context, it felt right that one of my projects would involve Judy Chicago’s large-scale installation, The Dinner Party, which has been on permanent exhibition at the museum since 2007. The Dinner Party is an icon of feminist art, which features the names of 1,038 women in history—39 women are represented by table place settings and another 999 names are inscribed in the Heritage Floor on which the table rests.

Chicago created The Dinner Party “to end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record.” As Wikipedia is often the first and last place people go to conduct research, it is increasingly coming to represent the most accessible, if not the most comprehensive or well sourced, historical record available today. This project is a direct manifestation of our effort to advance Judy Chicago’s intentions for The Dinner Party and re-write forgotten women back into history.

George Grosz (American, born Germany, 1893-1959). For German Right and German Morals (Für Deutsches Recht und Deutsche Sitte), 1919. Lithograph, Sheet: 25 1/16 x 18 5/8 in. (63.7 x 47.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. F. H. Hirschland, 55.165.143

Cynicism and disillusionment with the government and militarism permeates the work of George Grosz, an incisive caricaturist, satirist, and one of the most influential graphic artists to be associated with Expressionism, New Objectivity, and Dada. An ardent communist and supporter of the working class, Grosz expressed his disdain for the right wing capitalist and military ruling classes in a caustic portfolio of lithographs he made after WWI ironically titled God With Us after the nationalistic motto inscribed on every German soldier’s belt buckle. The print For German Right and German Morals (German Soldiers to the Front) (55.165.143) presents five brutish, malevolent, and corrupt specimens of the German military; the squat and thuggish officer in the center, whose holster makes obvious reference to his genitals, crushes a flower under his boot.

And in The Communists Fall and Foreign Exchange Rises (Blood is the Best Sauce)(X1041), another repulsive officer enjoys a genteel meal with a bloated war profiteer, one carving his meat and the other delicately dabbing at a stain on his shirt, while behind them a mob of vicious soldiers wield their bayonets to kill unarmed workers. Grosz based some of these lithographs on drawings he made while a patient in a mental hospital during the war, claiming he wanted to retain “everything that was laughable and grotesque in my environment.” When Grosz exhibited the portfolio at the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, he was accused, tried, and found guilty of defaming the military. Like Max Beckmann, Grosz would immigrate to the United States, arriving in New York in 1933.

George Grosz (American, born Germany, 1893-1959). The Communists Fall and Foreign Exchange Rises, 1919. Photo-transfer lithograph, Sheet: 18 9/16 x 24 7/8 in. (47.1 x 63.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection, X1041

Otto Dix noted that “War was something horrible, but nonetheless something powerful…Under no circumstances could I miss it!” But the epic destruction and trauma of modern mechanical warfare and its aftermath was soon made starkly apparent to him.

Otto Dix (German, 1891-1969). Card Players (Kartenspieler), 1920. Drypoint on heavy wove paper, Image (Plate): 12 13/16 x 11 1/8 in. (32.5 x 28.3 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. F.H. Hirschland, 55.165.66. © artist or artist’s estate

After the war, Germany’s streets were filled with one and a half million wounded and crippled soldiers. Dix, who fought as a machine gunner on the Western Front, depicts three such figures in his print Card Players (55.165.66). Here, the war’s capacity for bodily devastation and disintegration is sharply delineated: a mechanical jaw and hand, a patch covering a missing nose, an unseeing glass eye, an ear tube emerging directly from a misshapen skull. Between the three men there is only a single shirt-sleeved and cuff-linked leg; like the other soldier’s mouth it has been repurposed to hold cards. The other prosthetic “legs” and the contraption supporting the torso of the figure on the left are nearly indistinguishable from the chair and table legs. These figures play cards (and smoke cigars!) like they may have done before the war, but in this image of truncated, mechanized men, Dix shows how the war machine remade the world in its own image.

Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867–1945). The Mothers (Die Mütter), 1922–23. Woodcut on heavy Japan paper, 18 13/16 x 25 9/16 in. (47.8 x 64.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Carll H. de Silver Fund, 44.201.6. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bon

She explored the physical and spiritual dimensions of the human condition primarily through printmaking, a populist medium that resonated with German artists eager to renew the tradition of Northern Renaissance masters such as Albrecht Dürer. The powerful black and white woodcuts and lithographs on view, drawn from two of her major print portfolios, War (Kreig) (1922–23) and Death (Tod) (1934–35), are intensely personal yet universal expressions of devastation, loss, and grief made in response to the horrors of World War I and the early years of National Socialism.

Kollwitz’s works are part of the Brooklyn Museum’s significant collection of prints by artists associated with the German Expressionist and New Objectivity movements, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Georg Grosz, and many others.

Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950). Weeping Woman (Weinende Frau), 1914. Drypoint on heavy wove paper, Image: 9 1/4 x 7 5/16 in. (23.5 x 18.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, By exchange, 38.257. © artist or artist’s estate

The first prints entered the collection in 1937 and were the subject of an exhibition here in 1948, making Brooklyn among the very first major American museums to acquire and present this material (when it was considered contemporary art), a bold move during a period when anti-German sentiment still ran high in the States. The excitement generated by our current presentation of the rarely seen Kollwitz prints seems like a good excuse for a two-part post highlighting some of our other German war-related prints from this era.

Weeping Woman by Max Beckmann (German, 1884-1950) (38.257), who suffered a mental breakdown after serving in the medical corps, depicts a woman bringing a handkerchief to her eyes, which appear black and hollow under a mourning veil. Made in the first year of the war, it is thought to be a portrait of the artist’s mother-in-law who, like Kollwitz, lost her son in battle. Beckmann would immigrate to the United States in 1947 and taught for several years at The Brooklyn Museum Art School (which closed in 1985).

Christian Rohlfs (German, 1849-1939). The Prisoner (Der Gefangene), 1918. Color woodcut in blue and overpainted by the artist, on gray wove paper, Image: 25 x 19 1/2 in. (63.5 x 49.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Carll H. de Silver Fund, 65.161

In Christian Rohlfs’ (German, 1849-1939) woodcut The Prisoner (65.161), the rough wood grain texture and heavy lines that articulate the subject’s gaunt face, tense hands, and emaciated body, convey the physical immediacy and force of the artist’s hand. The figure seems to be less a specific POW intern than a despairing manifestation of spiritual and emotional imprisonment in a desolate postwar landscape.

Ernst Barlach (German, 1870-1938). Kneeling Woman with Dying Child (Kniende Frau mit sterbenden Kind), 1919. Woodcut on laid paper, Image: 9 x 12 5/8 in. (22.9 x 32.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. F.H. Hirschland, 55.165.76
Image: overall, 55.165.76_bw_IMLS.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph

Ernst Barlach (German, 1870-1938) was a close friend of Kollwitz and shared with her a preoccupation with universal themes of human existence and tragedy. In his nightmarish woodcut Kneeling Woman with Dying Child (55.165.76), a withered woman attempts to breastfeed a starving infant, their angular figures merging with the surrounding spiky and barren landscape. Although it calls to mind a medieval emblem of Famine, Barlach’s image is rooted in the reality of the food shortages that occurred in rural Germany after the war.

A collaborative project between the artist and her audience, Wish Tree is Ono’s open invitation to viewers to write their own wishes on small tags that the writer then hangs on the live tree – making a kind of living monument to all our dreams, big and small.  Ono has recounted that as a child in Japan she would write wishes on small pieces of paper which she then attached to the branches of flowering trees in the courtyard of a temple.

Yoko Ono's Wish Tree installed on our third floor.

Over the course of our exhibition, as the tree fills with wishes, the museum will occasionally collect the tags and at the end of the show, all the cards are returned to Ono, to be buried, unread, around her Imagine Peace Tower, a 2007 installation in Reykjavík, Iceland, dedicated to the memory of her late husband John Lennon.  More than a million people have shared their wishes with Yoko Ono, and we invite you to add your dreams.  As the artist has said, “All my works are a form of wishing.  Keep wishing while you participate.”

Image Courtesy of Sarah Gentile

Remembering the Triangle Fire by Know Your Museum

March 25, 2011 marks the centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Brooklyn Museum staff will join the world in ringing a bell at 4:45PM to commemorate this horrific event.

More often than not, visitors were browsing the iPads in groups.

I’ll mention there is a lot of possible error with those numbers. For starters, we were seeing that the iPads were overwhelmingly social devices with often more than one person using them at a time, so while we can get a rough idea of sessions, it’s not indicative of how many visitors actually used them or how many of the same visitors may have used more than one device throughout their visit.  In addition, there were some anomalies in the stats that had us questioning how we were capturing some of the metrics.  That said, it seems better to release what we know and ask you to take these metrics with a grain of salt as we dive deeper into this post.

Map of the gallery showing iPad placement.

In the exhibition layout, we had three iPads installed throughout the gallery near the works of art to be used while standing in the space.  There were also two iPads installed in a seating area at the end of the exhibition.  We were curious about possible differences in seating vs. standing metrics, so we were tracking stats accordingly.  Units that were placed in the galleries to be utilized standing were overall more popular than the units placed in a seating area at the end of the exhibition.  On average, wall units were used for ten minutes with visitors viewing 11.18 wiki articles, while units near seating were used for eight minutes with visitors taking a look at 9.55 wiki articles—again, that’s for the average session with the possibility of multiple visitors per session.  We had expected more use at the seated units, so these figures surprised us a bit.  I don’t want to jump to too many conclusions remembering that the very end of an exhibition is less trafficked than beginning/middle and it’s possible these numbers wash out in the end, but it may point to visitors wanting the resource near the works of art.

The coverflow app that Beau developed worked very well.  Stats indicated that visitors were traversing the entire length of the 26 artists.  The artist names were presented alphabetically in the coverflow, but visitors didn’t just click on names earlier in the alphabet, they swiped and clicked on names all over the menu.  Interestingly, visitors looked at almost the same artists no matter if they were seated or standing.  When you look at the top ten in each category, the lists are almost the identical with the order changing slightly:

top 10 at end of exhibition with access to seating—

Dorothy_Grebenak, Dorothy_Iannone, Chryssa, Jann_Haworth, Vija_Celmins, Marjorie_Strider, Pauline_Boty, Idelle_Weber, Letty_Eisenhauer, Kay_Kurt

top 10 in gallery standing—

Dorothy_Grebenak*, Marjorie_Strider, Jann_Haworth, Dorothy_Iannone, Idelle_Weber*, Pauline_Boty, Chryssa*, Vija_Celmins, Rosalyn_Drexler*, Marisol_Escobar*

In the standing top 10, I’ve included asterisks that indicate artists with work in the show physically near an iPad, possibly changing the stats.  Devices were also near objects by Lee Lozano and Kay Kurt, but those two artists did not make it into the standing top 10 list.  I’ll note at this point that choice of thumbnail easily skewed stats and, it seems, sex and money still sell in the end—take a look at some of the images used in the coverflow and then revisit the top 10 lists:

On average visitors were looking at 10.66 wiki articles, but given we allowed access to the entire English Wikipedia what were visitors looking at? Across the board, the top 26 articles were exclusively our featured artists; people stayed within our exhibition framework for most of the time. Beyond that, articles on pop art, psychedelic art and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band were universally popular no matter if visitors were seated or standing. (Jann Haworth, one of the artists featured in the exhibition, designed the album cover along with Peter Blake and the link to Sgt. Pepper is in the first sentence of her wiki article, so this makes sense especially given she was in the top 10 on both lists.) What’s more fascinating is to keep looking….visitors who were standing seemed intrigued by articles about other museums. More often that not, a standing visitor would click on articles about Met, Whitney, MoMA, Gugg, New Museum and the list goes on and on to institutions far and wide. (Seriously, other museums should have paid us for in-gallery advertising—it was just that noticeable.) At the seated units, visitors were more likely to browse deeper in subject matter: sexual revolution, pop artist, painting, happenings, WWII, sculptor, surrealism, artist names, etc. Even though our 26 artists were universally popular, we saw lots and lots of statistics pointing to visitors going down the wiki rabbit hole given the opportunity to do so.

Psst...It's okay to pick up the iPad.

After opening, it became clear that visitors were apprehensive about picking up the device.  Even though we copied the Apple store’s display which allows people to pick them up, we found most visitors were using it on the stand instead of cradling the device. After adding some signage guards reported more visitors picking them up, but it’s interesting to remember that in a museum setting old habits die hard and even with iPads people were cautious to touch too much.  At this point, I’ll also note that we were using the same alarm system Apple uses in their stores and we never had a visitor attempt to walk away with an iPad.  We did have the alarm go off once and we all got a good laugh when we discovered it happened during the press preview as one of the reporters got a little over curious about the setup.

Overall, this project worked well on many levels.  A high percentage of visitors utilized the devices for long periods of time going pretty deep into the wiki catalog, but also staying focused on exhibition content. Given most people come to museums with other people, the iPads turned out to be a social device which engaged people in a way that seemed natural to their visit.   The information in the wiki articles on these 26 artists is now out in the world via Wikipedia and will contribute to information sharing beyond our exhibition.  This leaves us likely to do it again at the next opportunity.

Chryssa's Cents Sign Traveling From Broadway to Africa via Guadeloupe on view in Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968, October 15, 2010 through January 9, 2011 (Image: DIG_E2010_Seductive_Subversion_04_PS4.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2010)

In January of 2005 we contacted David Ablon at Tecnolux a neon specialist who has worked with many artists who work in neon, including Chryssa herself.  It was at that point we determined that the neon was in great working order.  The outer box on the other hand was a problem.  Before considering undertaking an extensive conservation treatment on a work of art by a living artist, it is necessary to consult the artist on possible treatment plans so that the conserved work will remain true to the artist’s intentions.  Chryssa was born in 1933 and luckily for us was alive in 2005.  Through a very circuitous route, (a Greek man in my Spanish class), we managed to find her contact information in NYC.  We gained permission to have the outer box re-made so that the artwork could be exhibitable.

Photo shows the missing sides of the original box. Chryssa (American, born Greece, 1933). Cents Sign Travelling from Broadway to Africa via Guadeloupe, 1968. Neon tubing and plexiglass, 43 x 35 x 28 1/2 in. (109.2 x 88.9 x 72.4 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Sidney Singer, 85.290. © artist or artist's estate

When Catherine Morris Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art put the Chryssa on the Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 checklist, the project was a go!  Grewe Plastics, Inc. was contracted to remake the neon box.  They have worked with conservators from MOMA, and other artists in fabricating and re-fabricating precise plastic elements.  The very difficult part in undertaking this conservation treatment was coordinating and communicating the work and the needs of the two specialists—the neon fabricator and the plastics fabricators—to ensure that the neon would fit inside the new box.

I first worked with David to disassemble the neon from the damaged box.  A nerve racking process as Chryssa’s three dimensional neon tubes are extremely fragile.  David can be heard in this video describing the colors of the neon before we begin the disassembly process.  The difficult part for the plastics fabricators is that they had the original box, but had to replicate all of the holes, and transfer the internal shelves with extreme precision so that the neon tubes could be reinstalled inside the new box.  Although there was a few moments of nail biting, both specialists were excellent and the end result is a completely transformed, exhibitable work of art.

I travelled down to Kutztown for a couple of days and took part as a learner and student. We practiced Encounters, which are flexible entry points into teaching the work, rather than prescriptive lesson plans. This included watching Right out of History: the Making of Judy Chicago’s the Dinner Party and attending a presentation by art historian and co-author of Gender Matters in Art Education, Dr. Martin Rosenberg or Rutgers University, Camden.

On the third day, I travelled back to Brooklyn with the group. While at the Museum, participants had the chance to view and discuss The Dinner Party with artist and creator Judy Chicago; hear a curator talk of Kiki Smith’s exhibition Sojourn; and part-take in a hands-on lesson I taught modeling learning activities in the Fertile Goddess Teacher Packet.

This lesson showed how The Dinner Party can connect to women and artworks across history and time by joining the Fertile Goddess plate setting to ancient goddess figurines.

While some participants had known about The Dinner Party for many years, others were learning about it for the first time. For any teacher interested in teaching about feminism, feminist art, or The Dinner Party, I highly recommend using the 14 Encounters found in The Dinner Party K-12 Curriculum Project.  I felt bonded to the participants I met through our passion for teaching and feminist art. I enjoyed hearing everyone’s stories of how they came to teaching art and the experiences that led them to want to learn more about Judy Chicago and The Dinner Party.