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February 23, 2007
Cut and Footprints
Library Creates Controversy By Trying To Avoid It
Brooklyn Downtown Star
By Norman Oder
What's in a name? How did the controversy evolve over "Footprints" artwork on exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library? Could the Library Bill of Rights have provided the curators with some guidance?
Oder tries to answer, in depth, these questions and more.
The library didn’t help its cause by first issuing a brief, somewhat muddled statement about its intentions. It stated, "As a non-partisan institution, Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) features exhibitions that record our borough's history. As with any exhibition we host, we worked closely with the curators of the Footprints exhibit to select the pieces of high artistic merit that best document Brooklyn…. Our interest in this exhibition is in documentation, not advocacy.”
The difficulty, of course, is separating documentation from advocacy. Besides that Goldstein photo highlighting DDDB, there’s another small photo in the exhibit of activist Patti Hagan wearing a sticker challenging eminent domain.
Kaplan later amplified the library’s goals, noting that the exhibition space is dedicated in part to work that documents Brooklyn–and acknowledging that the library should have renamed the show: “The individual works included in the library's ‘Footprints’ show were selected from among the art works included in the show of the same name at Grand Space as well as from among additional works by some of the same artists that showed at Grand Space. They were selected because they documented a neighborhood and its residents at a time when the Atlantic Yards community is on the cusp of change.”
Posted by lumi at February 23, 2007 8:54 AM