Posted by Tammy
on February 20, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: bureau of unknown destinations, sal randolph •
Early 20th C Specimen Jars Containing Contents of Birds' Stomachs, contributed by Sam Droege
At the opening of Object Migration on January 12, the second show in the migration year of Proteus Gowanus, I witnessed something unusual to such an event: quiet contemplation.
Lining the bookshelves and encircling the room are objects contributed by participants who were invited to lend an object to the show and include with it the object’s migratory story. These handwritten details of the object, its history and the significance it carries can be found on yellow 3×5” notecards alongside the objects.
Objects in the show include a petrified potato, a portable church, glass from the first atomic detonation in 1945 (hopefully not still radioactive), hipbones from an elk, bird stomach contents, a toilet tank part, and many others. There is a quip from a scorned lover accompanying a hotel shampoo tube, an ecological proposition with a pile of bread tags, and a number of objects of personal significance to the contributors. There was a mixture of inquiry, incredulity, and nostalgic pondering in the room as guests at the opening would pick up a set of index cards and travel on their own quiet journey.
Continue reading “Material Meaning”
Posted by Krista
on January 30, 2012. Category: Migration. Tagged: material meaning, Object Migration, smartphones •
- Randy Dudley (American, born 1950). Gowanus Canal from 2nd Street, 1986. Oil on canvas, 34 x 63 5/8 in. (86.4 x 161.6 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Purchase gift of Charles Allen, 87.31. © artist or artist’s estate
I recently visited Proteus Gowanus to see their Migration show, which includes photocopies of a portion of The The Wallace Gould Levison Collection in The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives. Levison was a member of The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in the early 20th century. The photocopies are from an entertaining account he wrote of the release of sparrows into Brooklyn by members of the Institute which includes anecdotes about the members.
The space at Proteus Gowanus is charming, with rooms tumbling into one another, each housing a different exhibit housed in a different style. One room is divided into two sections, one displaying the history and future of Gowanus, and the other holding The Reanimation Library. The first portion of the room is a cluttered, homey sort of space, with maps and photographs hanging on the walls, found objects trailing across the shelves, and books on the table. The second half of the room contains the library. The Reanimation Library is a collection of nonfiction works which are no longer in circulation. As I perused the shelves, I wondered if my parents had used these books, or others like them, as reference materials in their youth. But what truly struck me about the collection was how it made me feel about the preceding display and the neighborhood of Gowanus more generally. Here was a room devoted to bringing books back to life, just as spaces like Proteus Gowanus are doing for the neighborhood. This feeling increased when I sat down to look at the design project book design project book on the table. Page after page showed ideas for ways to create a beautiful living space surrounding the now polluted canal. I suddenly felt that I was watching the reanimation of Gowanus.
Continue reading “The Reanimation of Gowanus”
Posted by Krista
on December 11, 2011. Category: Migration. Tagged: Gowanus Canal, Katy Christensen, Miss Gowanus, The Battle of Brooklyn, The Wallace Gould Levison Collection •
Proteus Gowanus hosted the first screening of our yearlong Migration Film Series on Tuesday, November 1. Migratory Media, An Evening of Appropriation and Experimental Animation, focused on the migration of visual data throughout multiple mediums and across timelines. The program of shorts included films from two filmmaking eras that produced breakthrough work using computers: the present and the 1970s. Lillian Schwartz, a pioneer in the development of computer-generated art, was in attendance to screen her rarely seen Apotheosis (1972), Alae (1975) and Olympiad (1972). In the Q&A afterwards, Schwartz said the software she uses now is more limiting than what she used in the 70s. Schwartz and the other filmmakers in attendance, Steve Cossman and LJ Frezza, discussed the current state of computer software in the arts and how they seek to break through coding systems to generate something new. Schwartz said she missed the randomness that working with a punch-card computing system allowed her to achieve. It was fascinating to hear about the process of these artists, and how the decades between them doesn’t change what they desire from their process.
Continue reading “Migratory Media”
Posted by Krista
on November 22, 2011. Category: Migration. Tagged: appropriation, film series, Lillian Schwartz, LJ Frezza, Steve Cossman •
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
It is often said that history is written by the victors (“Speciesists,” cry the inchworms, “we thread the trees but no one reads!”). It is hard to know, however, who the victor might be in the case of the sparrow migration. While accounts in the document (Excerpt of the Source of the English Sparrow, Manuscript and Notes for a History of the Brooklyn Institute, see previous post) include discrepancies in the details on the introduction of the sparrows into Brooklyn, they all converge in the Greenwood Cemetery, where the contentious tale of the sparrow begins.
Sparrow. Involuntary immigrant. An experiment. A solution. A pest. An outlaw. Though there were some previous attempts made, as the document details, to integrate the sparrow into the local ecosystem, the release of the sparrows into the Greenwood Cemetery was the first liberation en masse, and the first nesting place of the birds. It is perhaps, of no great surprise then, that the sparrows were doomed to the limens of North American ornithology, as figures occupying graveyards and their surrounds, in Western art and literature, often symbolize those shunned or otherwise unable to live among so-called normal society.
Continue reading “Part II: Liberators and the Liberated”
Posted by Krista
on October 18, 2011. Category: Migration. Tagged: Greenwood Cemetery, Lindsay Cuff, Sparrow •
Thanks to Proteus Gowanus extending a hand (or rather, wing) to the Brooklyn Museum Libraries & Archives for the purpose of its “Migration” exhibition series, we couldn’t help but delve a little further into our own history with the topic of migration. As it turns out, this took a rather literal turn and we didn’t need to look far to discover one particularly affectionate tome in the Natural Sciences departmental report of the Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, expounding on the adventures of one particular group: the Bird Lovers Club of Brooklyn. The club itself took flight in 1907, after a chance encounter with a friendly Cardinal in Central Park inspired its founders to organize bird-watching walks through Prospect Park. By the time the article in the Quarterly was published in 1916, the club had visited the park 988 times on these missions, recording a total of 159 species of birds. It is immediately apparent that these excursions were anything but work to those involved:
“Has all this work paid? Some might say that it has not paid, in a money sense, as we have consumed 103 days’ time, if we allow two and one-half hours for each of the 988 trips made, but against this is the pleasure of becoming acquainted with so many of Nature’s happiest creatures and the storing up of much health through the outdoor exercise. We think it has paid many times over.”- Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, Vol. 3-4 (01/1916-10/1917), pg. 100.
Photo documenting some of the birds seen on a Winter Bird Lovers’ walk. Brooklyn Museum Quarterly, Vol. 3-4 (01/1916-10/1917), pg. 104.
In fact, so plentiful were the observations of the Bird Lovers and their knowledge of Brooklyn bird life, that they organized an exhibition
Continue reading “Brooklyn Bird Lovers”
Posted by Krista
on October 14, 2011. Category: Migration. Tagged: Bird Lovers Club of Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum Libraries & Archives, Emily Atwater •
(from News and Events)
Proteus Gowanus is pleased to announce a Migration collaboration with The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives. The Museum has loaned us a facsimile excerpt of an archive manuscript by Wallace Gold Levison, written in the early 20th C. for a book (never completed) on the early history of the Brooklyn Institute, the Museum’s predecessor. The notes recount a fascinating account of the Institute’s role in importing the English sparrow to Brooklyn in the 1850’s, a tale whose outcome is visible to us every time we go outdoors. —TP
Below is my exploration of the document in three parts: the facimile on display at Proteus, the sites where the sparrows were first released in Brooklyn, and the books on view in the Brooklyn Museum Library Reading Room, collected and put aside as an off-site collaborative project.
For more on the collaboration between The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives and Proteus Gowanus, click here
—KD
Part I: The Arrival
The sign on the cocoon read: Ennomos Subsignaria Only. Once inside, the congregation of inchworms wriggled close to hear what the Speaker had to say.
“It has started, they are coming by sea.” A shiver went up and down (and up and down again) through the crowd.
“How many?” One of the smaller worms called out.
“Two, twenty, two-hundred maybe,” said the Speaker, “no one knows for sure.”
The story of the introduction of the English Sparrow into the Brooklyn ecosystem in the Excerpt of the Source of the English Sparrow, Manuscript and Notes for a History of the Brooklyn Institute, reads like a mystery novel. It is a murder mystery, as the “little exiles” were brought to Brooklyn to destroy the inchworm, an “obnoxious and offensive worm or caterpillar ‘ennomos subsignaria’ . . . on account of their hanging by webs from the branches and falling in great numbers upon the pavements some streets having rows of beautiful shade trees [that were] made almost impassible for pedestrians.”
Continue reading “Little Exiles”
Posted by Krista
on October 4, 2011. Category: Migration. Tagged: Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn Museum Libraries & Archives, inchworms, Sparrow, Wallace Gold Levison •
Posted by Tammy
on September 21, 2011. Category: Migration. Tagged: opening •
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