The Brooklyn Presence at SXSW

By Nic Yeager

MAY 2022 | Film

Between March 11 and 20, four Brooklyn-based short films screened at SXSW, each shot in Brooklyn and made by and featuring Brooklynites. SXSW is known for celebrating innovation in tech and education, and these projects offer their own kind of innovation: namely, an irreplaceable artistic ingenuity that flows out of this borough.

76. (The Brooklyn Museum)

By Raphael Rubinstein

NOV 2021 | The Miraculous

At the sparsely attended opening of his first museum show in the United States, a German artist carries a 16-mm movie camera on his shoulder throughout the event. As people come up to congratulate him, he says almost nothing while pointing the camera at their faces. It’s unclear whether or not he is actually filming, but the camera effectively insulates him from his fans, however few they are.

79. (Brooklyn Navy Yard, Columbia County)

NOV 2021 | The Miraculous

An artist in his mid-30s living in New York and working in a 300-square-foot studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, finds himself consumed by frustration and anger. Although he is having exhibitions, after the shows close his paintings inevitably return to his studio, unsold. He’s not sure he wants to go on being an artist. A psychiatrist he consults helps him to understand that his anger revolves around his feelings about race, class and entitlement. Eventually the psychiatrist recommends that he begin working with a physical trainer, who has him start boxing and working out with a punching bag. Around the same time the artist, who is half-Choctaw and half-Cherokee, has been meeting with traditional Native American artists who tell him how the practices of dancing, drumming and beading have saved their lives. These experiences lead him to make a breakthrough in his work. Instead of focusing on painting, he begins to adorn Everlast vinyl punching bags like those he has been using at the boxing gym in extravagant styles inspired by Native American beadwork, pop culture, and everyday life. Along with beads, he adds tassels, sequins, brass and steel studs, yarn, chains, and sundry items. Some of the bags feature beaded texts quoting everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to Public Enemy.

Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers

By Zoe Ariyama

DEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen

A glowing newlywed couple, a graduate in her cap and gown, two portraits of one young boy smiling wide—a small dog sits on his lap in the first, he wears a cowboy costume in the other: records of major life events, taken also for pleasure. Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers brings together nearly 250 unique photographs, pulled from archives and personal collections alike, to trace the histories of images taken by and for Black sitters from the nineteenth century to present.