Playing House

Playing House is the first in a series of “activations” that invite artists to place site-specific artworks in the Brooklyn Museum period rooms. These “activations” forge new connections between the past and the present and are juxtaposed with the period furnishings in eight of the Museum’s twenty-three rooms. The inaugural exhibition includes works by Ann Agee, Anne Chu, Mary Lucier,and Betty Woodman and will be on view through August 26, 2012, at the Brooklyn Museum.

The Museum period rooms have been interpreted by curators to illustrate with archaeological precision how Americans of various times, economic levels, and geographic locations lived in the past. In Playing House, each artist has selected a group of period rooms to which they responded with site specific installations of various media, including ceramics, textiles, paper, and video.

The project originated with Betty Woodman, an internationally recognized ceramicist and sculptor who has been creating artwork for over fifty years. As the original artist selected for the project, Woodman assembled a team of fellow artists who share her interest in the domestic sphere. The four range in age from eighty (Woodman) to fifty (Anne Chu). While consulting with Barry R. Harwood, Curator of Decorative Arts at the Brooklyn Museum, Woodman was inspired to replace the ceramic, pewter, and silver treasures in the cupboard of the elegant dining room of the Cupola House with an array of her own handmade porcelain cups, saucers, and vases. Woodman also stations one of her seldom seen, baroque-inspired bronze benches in the hallway of the Cupola House.

The Cane Acres Plantation room features artwork by Woodman and Anne Chu. In this Southern interior from the late eighteenth century, Woodman sets the fine mahogany dining table with abstract clay pieces suggesting place settings and installs as the centerpiece a large, white ceramic tabletop sculpture in the shape of a letter holder. Chu fills that centerpiece with a delicate floral arrangement fashioned of fabric and other materials. A life-size cloth cardinal decorated with embroidery by Chu will stand sentry at one of the windowed openings to the room. Chu also contributes her mysterious bird and floral forms to two other very different rooms: the Moorish Smoking Room, a vestige of Victorian New York from the former WorshamRockefeller House, and the more austere Neoclassical, wood-paneled bedroom of the eighteenth century parlor of the Russell House

When at the museum, activate the Activation: Using QR codes in the galleries, visitors can go behind the scenes to see each artist activate the period rooms.

An upcoming decorative arts exhibit will be the Aesthetic Ambitions: Edward Lycett and Brooklyn's Faience Manufacturing Company opening on May 3, and on display until June 16, 2013 on the fourth floor.

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Playing House

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