NYC Day Trip Art With Sofia and Lucia: Brooklyn Museum: Basquiat/ Faile/ Sneakers

Lobby of the Brooklyn Museum. Girls dwarfed by their avatars.

We started the day out with lunch at Prospect Park. These snake handles slithering into potted flowers greeted us at the gate.

So many good trees to eat lunch under...

These twin girls joined us for some summertime leaf collecting.

This was our view. You can see the playground we are heading to after lunch on the left, made from all repurposed wood from hurricane Sandy destruction and turned into playground toys.

Now at the playground, at a water pump fountain. The girls could have stayed here all day.

On the way to the museum we stopped by the Brooklyn children's library.

First stop at the Brooklyn Museum is the Faile exhibit. I had never heard of Faile but it was incredible. Old broken down ruins give it an ancient feel, as if the present were long past.

But then you enter the arcade, and there are dozens of re-purposed pinball and video games. All of them playable, with a specific cultural critique.

This one was pure design manipulation.

Here you wield spray paint and tag a wall. Then the po-po comes and you have to get away.

This re-purposed driving game was one of my favorites. You drive a pixie stick and suck up all the pixie dust being dropped by a fairy. The game was called Camino De Dolor. The girls enjoy the game without understanding the irony supplied by the title.

After spending an hour playing video games we checked out the sneaker show. This was my favorite pair. One size fits ONE. A black man runs and a nation follows him.

Then onto the Basquiat:

This was a show of his notebooks, mostly, which were intimate and yet with a sense of the public gaze already in them.

I love this text on translating. A good example of his poetic prowess. It took me a while to decipher the last couple lines. "Tight\ I'm a spring bouncing." The hand-writing has loosened up and looks like a spring bouncing!