Brooklyn, We Go Hard
Plenty of Outer-Borough Pride at the Brooklyn Artists Ball
Sarah Jessica Parker and the Brooklyn Museum have been teaming up lately: The institution is regularly featured on Work of Art, her Bravo reality show, and last night, the Sex and the City star served as honorary co-host of its Brooklyn Artists Ball.
Some of the museum's considerable holdings were viewable after-hours—most, as Liv Tyler discovered, were not. Trying to enter the African Art gallery with musician Evan Dando, she was promptly turned away by a guard. "I don't know if it was because he looked funny with his long hair, but they kicked us out," she reported.
Parker didn't stay long, but Tyler, wearing a powder pink Stella McCartney blazer she'd bought that day, joined the crowd moving upstairs to the museum's spectacular third-floor rotunda, where guests dined under paintings by Renoir and Degas. The front-and-center works, however, were the table settings created by more than a dozen Brooklyn-based artists, including several inspired takes on candelabras and Valerie Hegarty's lifelike displays of papier-mâché crows and decomposing fruit. In an additional tip of the hat to the borough's creative inhabitants, Brooklyn artists Fred Tomaselli, Fred Wilson, and Lorna Simpson were honored.
Dustin Yellin had custom-built his table to support heavy blocks of Plexiglas, but he also found time to migrate a couple tables over to do some schmoozing. "I just found my dream studio," he told Donald Baechler. "You coming to visit?" Yellin's new space, which is across the street from his present Red Hook studio, will include an exhibition gallery, studios for musicians and artists, and a sculpture garden. Could a big-thinking artist secure anything like that kind of real estate in Manhattan? "Impossible," Yellin said.
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