If you’ve followed my blog for a while then you know that I love the Brooklyn Museum Target First Saturdays and this event was no different, in fact, it was a big two for one in my case. The Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic exhibition was going strong and it was the first day of the Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks show. The Target First Saturdays events are an extremely popular happening every month, well attended, and a place to be seen by bloggers, fashionistas and the like  (all the cool kids). It gives people who avoid museums regularly an easier way to digest all the art with a backdrop of music, food, movies, and crafts.

Kehinde Wiley is an artist who works in multiple mediums. He paints, sculpts and constructs stained glass windows. His subjects are people of color all around the world, usually young people and putting them against Technicolor backgrounds. He uses early American paintings as the basis for reinventing them into modern works with modern scenes. This exhibition is my favorite so far this year! It was so crowded and had to take angled pictures because so many kept walking in front of the camera, so I hope that doesn’t keep you from enjoying the paintings.The exhibition will be at the Brooklyn Museum until May 24th.

Look at the size of this canvas!! Notice the woman standing next to it, its massive! It is one of the bigger pieces but definitely not the biggest in this collection.

The paintings are layered with oil paints, enamel and gold leaf. The way it is painted the painting is almost three-dimensional.

Army fatigues and going to war on a majestic stead, awesome new interpretation of a two-hundred-year-old painting leading the troops on to their deaths.

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The artist, Kehinde Wiley explains his exhibit at the museum in his own words.

I was blown away by this show, I have to admit that I was let down by the Basquiat exhibit. I’m not sure I can appreciate how abstract it was. I must be limited in my creativity to understand his message. The exhibition is mostly previously unknown works taken from his notebooks that were found after his death. He was an untrained artist who mainly focused on racism and inequalities between the privileged and the poor and how the poor were taken advantaged of in modern life. He was influenced by the beginnings of hip-hop and graffiti. He was a common fixture on the music scene in New York because some of his works were composed while listening to favorite songs. The exhibition is at the museum until August 23rd.

I had to be pulled out of the museum as usual, even though my feet were killing me and my eyes blurry. Do you enjoy the museums in your town and what kind of art calls out to you? I’d love to hear about it.

Until our next rendezvous…

XOXO

Trudy