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Exhibition Reviews
Kym S. Rice and Benjamin Filene
Contributing Editors
Introduction
The contributing editors encourage readers to suggest representations of history in American public culture that might be reviewed. In addition to continuing coverage of museum exhibitions, they are interested in covering living history projects, historical pageants and reenactments, memorials, historic preservation projects, and virtual museums. Please contact:
| Kym S. Rice |
Benjamin Filene |
| Museum Studies Program |
Exhibits Department |
| George Washington University |
Minnesota Historical Society |
| 2035 F St., NW |
345 Kellogg Blvd. West |
| Washington, DC 20052 |
Saint Paul, MN 55102-1906 |
| <kym@gwu.edu> |
<benjamin.filene@mnhs.org> |
We would like to thank the American Association for State and Local History for providing information on the work of its members.
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"Brooklyn Works: Four Hundred Years of Making a Living in Brooklyn." Brooklyn Historical Society, 128 Pierrepont St., Brooklyn, NY 11201.
Long-term exhibition, opened Oct. 2003. F–Su 12–5. Adults $6, seniors and students $4, 12 and under free. 2,800 sq. ft. Wendy Aibel-Weiss, vice president for exhibits and programs; Ann Meyerson, chief curator; Design Division, Inc., exhibition design; Monadnock Media, Inc., audiovisual design and production; Adina Back, Joan Bartolomeo, Joshua Brown, Nancy Foner, Joshua Freeman, Isabel Hill, John Manbeck, David Ment, Victoria Missick, Ellen Snyder-Grenier, Emanuel Tobier, Mike Wallace, and Craig Wilder, research advisory committee.
"Picture This: Brooklyn Works" classroom curriculum kit; linked material culture collecting program; oral history collecting.
Internet: photographs and brief text <http://brooklynhistory.org/brooklyn_works.html> (June 14, 2005).
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| With the closing of the Domino Sugar Company's last refinery in Brooklyn in January 2004, Americans, and especially New Yorkers, were once again reminded that work as we knew it is an imperiled species. The kind of work that stayed in place for generations, marked by characteristic buildings, tools, clothing, and a long-evolved culture of the workplace, often seems like a vision from the past in today's workscape of anonymous terminals electronically processing offshore activities of the unknown and unnamed. |
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The exhibition "Brooklyn Works" manages to find the humor, personality, and courage that permeate our daily dose of toil, while evoking some of the bitter episodes in the history of employer/employee relations in a borough that has been important as an agricultural area, seaport, and factory mecca. Although the Brooklyn waterfront has crumbled, the exhibition asks us to remember the crates of Bazooka gum, Eberhard colored pencils, and Rheingold beer once shipped from its docks. Economic forces become visible through such work issues as slavery, sweated immigrant labor, the decline of mom-and-pop businesses, industrial strikes, and company closings. |
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Throughout the exhibition, voices from primary sources are deployed to ground the interpretation in real people's experience. Few people realize that Brooklyn was a center of slavery in the early republic, with more than one of every three persons enslaved. A moving excerpt from the diary of John Jea, a native of Africa who worked on the King's County fields of a Dutch farmer until he achieved his freedom and became an itinerant preacher, connects slaving in Nigeria with farming in Flatbush around 1800. The dramatic reading from Jea's diary is situated in an object theater, where lights and audio steer the viewer around a series of key artifacts from a Dutch farmer's daily routines. Elsewhere visitors can hear the voices of living Brooklynites interviewed for the exhibition. That technique often succeeds in animating the materials with the salty commentaries of Brooklynites, such as the subway trackman who testifies that his pants stood up with grease after a shift. |
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