The Yinka Shonibare mid-career survey opens at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on June 26th. Because June 26th has not yet occurred, I was recently surprised to see a little bit already on view. Described on the BMA website: "a site-specific installation created for this presentation titled Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play will be on view in several of the Museum’s period rooms."Um. Let's start with the state of these rooms without any headless mannequinns. Sad. Up until the later nineteenth-century, the period rooms there are pretty bleak. Despite their house-like groupings, these rooms do not feel like "real" interiors. For some reason they just feel like unfinished shells. Which is actually kind of creepy. Add the current installation, which often took me by surprise, and, well, I'm still digesting. Has anyone seen these rooms recently? Thoughts?
Another side note (i.e. ramblings about period rooms): BMA has a few rooms that visitors basically have to peer into through glassed-off doorways - this means no walking into the room, no facing the scene head-on. I felt that this made the spaces better. The visitor becomes the voyeur, much more than in the usual installation, in which the fourth wall is either behind you or absent. Feeling like you're naughtily sneaking a peek into someone's living room instantly humanizes (for me) the otherwise uninhabited interior. I could bore you for a long time about the wonderfully crazy world of period rooms. Good, bad, awesomely bad: I think they are always worth seeing.
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