Brooklyn Theater and Arts Events

Part of the 2012 Winter/Spring Season

Jan 10—Mar 4, 2012 (click on Schedule tab above for details)

By William Shakespeare
Directed by Sam Mendes

“Mr. Spacey gives fierce and flashy physical life to every twist of a power-mad man’s corkscrew mind.” —The New York Times

Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey owns the stage as Shakespeare’s outrageous villain Richard III. At the climax of the Wars of the Roses, Richard watches his brother ascend the throne of England and confides in us—with all the profound bitterness of an outcast born with a hunchback and malformed leg—his intention to seize the crown. Navigating an imposing assemblage of some of Shakespeare’s greatest female characters, Richard—played brilliantly by the mercurial and mordantly funny Spacey—lusts for power, assuring his own bloody rise and fall.

Academy Award winner Sam Mendes directs the transatlantic cast in the final production of The Bridge Project, a three-year partnership uniting BAM, The Old Vic, and Neal Street. More info.

Melish CollectionCollection Highlight at the Brooklyn Historical Society

John D. Morrell, Assistant Librarian at the Long Island Historical Society, now the Brooklyn Historical Society, donated over 2,000 black and white and color negatives and prints to the Photography Collection. The images document Brooklyn's streets, railroads, buildings and people in almost every neighborhood, but predominantly in Brooklyn Heights, Bath Beach, Flatbush, Carroll Gardens and Downtown Brooklyn from 1958-1963. They are indexed in detail by address, street name, and/or neighborhood, and sometimes include proper names of businesses or institutions.

Click here for an outstanding collection of Brooklyn images.

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

Luigi Lucioni (American, 1900–1988). Paul Cadmus, 1928. Oil on canvas, 16 x 12 1/8 in. (40.6 x 30.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 2007.28

through–January 29, 2012

Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing, 5th Floor

How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords.

Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. Youth and Beauty will present 140 works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.

Image: Nickolas Muray (American, 1892-1965). Gloria Swanson, circa 1925. Gelatin Silver print, 12 3/4 x 9 3/8 in. (32.4 x 23.8 cm). George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York, Gift of Mrs. Nickolas Muray. © Estate of Nickolas Muray