The Brooklyn Museum is showing an
exhibition of the work of Yinka Shonibare, a gifted young Nigerian-British artist with one idea. He complicates images of 18th and 19th century European life by creating scenes with (headless) mannequins in period costumes - but the fabrics are all the colorful Dutch wax prints which colonialists, learning from Indonesian batik, printed in Europe (probably on cotton from India) and exported to Africa, whose emblem they have now become. (Above: "The Age of Enlightenment - Adam Smith," 2008.) The effect is initially jarring, often beautiful, and shimmers with a sort of profundity - the whole colonial economy of the modern world seems on unwitting display: the emperor's new clothes are colonial! But after a while it can seem a bit repetitive, even formulaic.
Happily,
Shonibare created a special installation for this show which demonstrates the wit and power of his approach in all its freshness; his work really needs to be taking on something familiar and local, and then it's electric! He placed figures of children (still headless) in some of the period rooms in the Brooklyn Museum's
standing collection. Looking for them - like a game of hide and seek - energized and troubled displays which would otherwise have seemed of merely antiquarian interest. Here are three: a girl under the table in the dining room from Cane Acres Plantation in Summerville, South Carolina, c. 1806; a child skipping rope in the "Moorish Room" designed for a New York townhouse in 1878; and a boy playing with a marionnette soldier in a "Civil War Dressing Room," a composite display whose fireplace hails from Andrew Johnson's White House in Washington, DC. The innocent joy of the children, their games, and their racial opacity really bring the post-colonial critique of western modernity home, heartbreakingly.
The Brooklyn Museum is showing an exhibition of the work of Yinka Shonibare, a gifted young Nigerian-British artist with one idea. He complicates images of 18th and 19th century European life by creating scenes with (headless) mannequins in period costumes - but the fabrics are all the colorful Dutch wax prints which colonialists, learning from Indonesian batik, printed in Europe (probably on cotton from India) and exported to Africa, whose emblem they have now become. (Above: "The Age of Enlightenment - Adam Smith," 2008.) The effect is initially jarring, often beautiful, and shimmers with a sort of profundity - the whole colonial economy of the modern world seems on unwitting display: the emperor's new clothes are colonial! But after a while it can seem a bit repetitive, even formulaic.
Happily, Shonibare created a special installation for this show which demonstrates the wit and power of his approach in all its freshness; his work really needs to be taking on something familiar and local, and then it's electric! He placed figures of children (still headless) in some of the period rooms in the Brooklyn Museum's 
standing collection. Looking for them - like a game of hide and seek - energized and troubled displays which would otherwise have seemed of merely antiquarian interest. Here are three: a girl under the table in the dining room from Cane Acres Plantation in Summerville, South Carolina, c. 1806; a child skipping rope in the "Moorish Room" designed for a New York townhouse in 1878; and a boy playing with a marionnette soldier in a "Civil War Dressing Room," a composite display whose fireplace hails from Andrew Johnson's White House in Washington, DC. The innocent joy of the children, their games, and their racial opacity really bring the post-colonial critique of western modernity home, heartbreakingly.
