Heart of Brooklyn's Free Summer Sunday: A Bridge To Somewhere

Among the many free activities on the first-ever Heart of Brooklyn Free Summer Sunday this weekend—free carousel rides in Prospect Park, free admission to the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Prospect Park Zoo, and an event at Grand Army Plaza called Brooklyn Icons Mini Golf.  

Players can putter for free through a course that features miniature reproductions of Junior's (of cheesecake fame), Grand Army Plaza itself and, oddly, the Statue of Liberty. But, let’s face it, there is only one Brooklyn icon in the Brooklyn Icons Mini Golf course that, shown anywhere in the world, would say to people: Brooklyn. That is the Brooklyn Bridge.

It is both fitting and unsurprising that steps away from the golf course, inside the Central Library of the Brooklyn Public Library, there is an exhibition entitled Brooklyn's Bridges: Engineering as Art & Inspiration. Like the offerings in the other five cultural institutions, the exhibition will be free and open to the public on Sunday – as the Central Library is every Sunday.

However, certain aspects of the exhibition may indeed surprise even regular visitors to the library.

Only a handful of the other branches of the Brooklyn Public Library have the facilities to present any full-fledged art exhibitions. The Central Library, however, offers six new exhibitions approximately every eight weeks and has been doing so for more than a decade.

“It’s great to show art here because there are so many people, so many eyeballs,” said Barbara Wing, manager of exhibitions for the Brooklyn Public Library.

It is unclear how many of those eyeballs actually focus on the art, though it is likely to be more than any gallery exhibition in the borough. The latest survey reported some 900,000 annual visits to the Central Library.

“Brooklyn’s Bridges,” as it turns out, is a kind of a greatest hits collection from past exhibitions.

“Going through our archives, we thought ‘why not show our artists off?’” said Wing.

The photographs, paintings and drawings in the exhibition are by 17 contemporary artists of various stripes, almost all living in Brooklyn. All of them exhibited their work previously at the library.

In “Brooklyn Authors,” illustrator Randy Jones sits 18 famous writers at café tables on the upper deck of the Brooklyn Bridge – Walt Whitman next to Edwidge Danticat, Truman Capote next to W.H. Auden, and Henry Miller in a t-shirt by himself.

If most of the pieces focus on the Brooklyn Bridge, all four of Brooklyn’s major bridges get their due with works ranging from Antonio Masi’s painting “Red Fence, Williamsburg Bridge,” to Lynn Saville’s eerily dark print, “Under Manhattan Bridge,” to Charley Andrisano’s gleaming night-time photograph “Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Also included is a 1914 photograph of a funeral procession on the Manhattan Bridge. The photo is a selection from the Brooklyn Collection, an extensive archives housed in the Central Library.

"A host of more modest structures round out Brooklyn's remarkable inventory of man-made crossings," the exhibition’s wall label tells us – too modest apparently for artistic rendering.

Wing included some works that she admits aren’t really studies of Brooklyn’s bridges, but qualify for inclusion because, yes, there’s a Brooklyn bridge somewhere in them. Al Pereira’s “Black Sheep” is a photograph of two hip-hop artists who are underneath a bridge.

“Bridges make for powerful, if much overused, metaphors,” the wall label tells us. They are certainly a useful metaphor for Free Summer Sunday, which has been created to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Heart of Brooklyn, a partnership of six cultural institutions intended to create connections with one another and with the public. In some ways, it is a celebration of Brooklyn arts ascending.

That Brooklyn’s bridges fascinate so many visual artists is nothing new; that so many of these artists live and work in Brooklyn may be. Last fall, Wing organized an exhibition of children’s book illustrations and was surprised to discover that all 34 of the illustrators live in Brooklyn.

Free Summer Sunday will take place Sunday, August 7, rain or shine.

Brooklyn's Bridges: Engineering as Art & Inspiration is in the lobby of the Brooklyn Public Library Central Library through September 18th. The other exhibitions are scattered throughout the Central Library.