The fifth and final exhibition in the Raw/Cooked series presents the work of artist Ulrike Müller and will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from June 29 through September 9, 2012. Raw/Cooked is a major series of five ten-week-long exhibitions of under-the-radar Brooklyn artists. Müller, whose studio is in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is interested in starting a conversation on the lesbian feminist movement and examining the visibility of queer bodies within mainstream culture and the Museum. Müller has orchestrated a collaborative drawing project that is based on the inventory list of the feminist T-shirt collection at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope. She has distributed the textual T-shirt descriptions to feminists, queer artists, and other interested New Yorkers, and asked that they translate these texts into new images. In her Raw/Cooked exhibition, Müller will be exhibiting one hundred drawings from this project.
Additionally, she has taken symbolic lesbian, feminist, and queer terms from the inventory and used them as search criteria to mine the Museum’s collection. In displaying the collaborative drawings and nearly twentyfive Museum collection objects in the Luce Center for American Art’s Elevator Lobby and throughout the Museum, Müller is creating a visual dialogue among contemporary queer culture, the Museum, and activist feminist history.
The artists considered for participation in Raw/Cooked were selected by an advisory board of established Brooklyn artists, including Ron Gorchov, Michael Joo, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Amy Sillman, and Mickalene Thomas, who were asked to nominate artists without gallery representation who had not yet had a major museum exhibition. Ulrike Müller was recommended by Amy Sillman. The final selection of artists was made by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
The artists were given the opportunity to present work in any medium and to propose using any space in the Museum for its display, however unconventional. The artists’ projects could respond to the unique architecture or history of the building and/or the Museum’s collections. Raw/Cooked launched on September 16 with an exhibition of the work of Bushwick based artist Kristof Wickman. Other Brooklyn artists who have been a part of the Raw/Cooked series include Bushwick-based Lan Tuazon, Red Hook’s Shura Chernozatonskaya, and Bedford-Stuyvesant–based Heather Hart. Raw/Cooked continues the Brooklyn Museum’s long tradition of presenting work by both up-and-coming and established Brooklyn artists, including the presentation of the extended exhibition series Working in Brooklyn and continuing with the major survey exhibition Open House (2004), which brought together the work of 200 Brooklyn artists.
www.brooklynmuseum.org/rawcooked/
