#ericnmack

What can a painting be? Who can it reflect? Eric N. Mack pries open the bounds of painting, ushering in both new materials and muses: waxed cloth and plaid swatches; suitcase fragments, moving blankets; musical luminaries Prince and Kelis; everyday black girls, Seat Pleasant, D.C., and more. Consisting of textile assemblages held in physical and metaphorical tension with the museum walls, Lemme walk across the room is both example of and prompt for charting new spaces for aesthetic experience. See this expansive show before it closes this Sunday, August 4.

Eric N. Mack’s Lemme walk across the room considers how painting can activate space in multiple dimensions, beyond the flat white wall. Using semi-transparent, subtly dyed fabric, Mack “paints” the architecture of the museum, swathing and washing the room in joyous color.

A portrait of a youthful Prince foregrounds Eric N. Mack’s Parade, juxtaposed with pages taken from various printed materials, including fashion magazines, newspapers, and the artist’s own stained papers. In taping the iconic artist Prince’s image alongside a catalogue spread for the foundational German Conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, Mack insists upon seeing the resonance of radical creativity across different cultural spheres and across time. (Indeed, Beuys died the same year Prince’s eight studio album, Parade, was released). By using Tartan plaid fabric instead of a conventional canvas, and incorporating materials like the red suitcase fragment and shower curtain rod, Mack carries forth Beuys and others’ charge to collapse the distinction between art and everyday life, channeling it through the spirit of Black musical and stylistic genius.

Each week the Brooklyn Museum Summer Interns participate in full-day educational programs that explore the roles of museums through on-site visits and field trips to other institutions around the city. Look out for our weekly posts where we’ll share what we’re doing and learning in the program.

Week 8: The BKM interns gathered in the Glass Pavilion on our third to last Tuesday of the summer. The morning was cooler than any in recent memory, a change many interns celebrated in sweatpants and long-sleeves (also worn in observation of our day away from the office). We split from there to continue working our group presentations. We will share our completed projects, in which we will propose interventions for the Cane Acres Plantation house on the museum’s fourth floor, in two weeks.

We reconvened in the boardroom, whose walls, I’m sure, have never enclosed so many t-shirts. There we discussed the value of mentorship and the steps we, as young actors tip-toeing into the working world, can take to build constructive relationships with mentors we admire.

We then migrated to the Arts of Asia to meet Joan Cummins, the Lisa and Bernard Selz Senior Curator of Asian Art. Joan, a former BKM intern herself (!!), walked us through the spaces that will come to hold the Museum’s Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art collections, as well as the already open Arts of Korea. She spoke to the nuanced challenges of her role, which include curating antiquities for a modern audience and grappling with unresolved provenance. Also funding. Joan shared how her academic training in art history and her personal experience prepared her for her position, the likes of which today might require formal knowledge of museum studies and curatorial theory. 

Per tradition, we ran overtime with questions. After concluding with Joan, we broke for lunch. I felt somewhat personally duped that I could not escape the viscous air-conditioning of the galleries in the courtyard. Food helped me, so did conversation with my fellow interns who never cease to amaze me with their intelligence and wit. 

After lunch we gathered outside One: Titus Kaphar and Rembrandt to Picasso: Five Centuries of European Works on Paper to hear from Lance Singletary, Director of Exhibition Design, who has been at the Museum for 15 years. An interest in how interior design and architecture control individuals’ psychological experiences in covert ways has rented out space in my mind this summer, so I was particularly excited about this conversation. Lance guided us through the space, explaining the process of exhibition design and the various actors involved. He shed light on the selection of wall colors and the sequences in which pieces hang. 

We followed up our chat with Lance by meeting three of the Museum’s art handlers– Filippo Gentile, Senior Art Handler/Supervisor Museum Maintainer, Aisha De Avila-Shin and Richard Fett, both Art Handlers and Assistant Museum Maintainers. Filippo identified working intimately with art as the ever-rewarding joy of his job. In Eric N. Mack’s Lemme walk across the room, he discussed helping living artists achieve their vision, and upstairs in Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion, he and Aisha divulged some industry secrets related to securing hats onto mannequin heads. 

We then traveled to the auditorium (coldest location of the day) for a conversation with Keonna Hendrick, School Programs Manager and Michael Reback, Senior Museum Instructor/Teacher Services coordinator. We discussed the fundamental role of the Museums' Education and Public Programs departments in its function as a responsive body (invoking to our summer’s framing question: “What is the responsive museum?”). We shared our visions for the democratization of museum access, which to us seems to hinge on improved representation within those in power. 

This conversation spilled into our closing reflection, which, characteristically, ran late. Before clocking out for the day, we traded poem, song, artist, and book recommendations. Homework for next week.

There's only a few weeks left to walk across the room of Eric N. Mack's site-responsive installation of new and existing textile-based, closing August 4. Tag your photos with #mybkm for a chance to be featured next!

It’s an exciting treat to help an emerging artist realize his vision, especially when it includes a site-specific installation for his first major museum solo-show. Earlier this January a team from numerous Brooklyn Museum departments assisted Eric N. Mack with his exhibition Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room.

Mack uses different fabrics and materials to stretch the boundaries of painting. In the site-responsive work here, he literally stretches a dyed open-weave cotton fabric across the entire space. Here Mack is pinning the fabric to the tightly strung climbing cable that supports it.

The first work that you see as you approach the space was hand-dyed by the artist in the gallery. In the image below, you can see how Mack applied the dye and used cardboard sheets as a straight-edges to make long horizontal bands of color.

Besides the site-specific work, pre-existing works like this waxed canvas with collage elements, were also included in the exhibition. While two-dimensional works are sometimes more straightforward to install, they requires a team of people and sometimes, a scissor lift...

The last piece to be installed was a freestanding work that the artist conceived of during his residency at The Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. Here he makes final adjustments to the drape of the bed skirt.

For more information on Mack and his artistic practice, here’s an interview from last year. Lemme walk across the room will be on view in the Great Hall, on the First Floor, through July 7, 2019.