The Brooklyn Museum just announced the opening of Spike Lee: Creative Sources, Brooklyn’s first major exhibition on Lee, an artist whose persona is synonymous with the borough. This immersive installation focusing on Lee's cinema and the art of filmmaking will run from Oct. 6-Feb. 4.
“Spike Lee: Creative Sources offers a fresh perspective on a cultural icon, focusing on the individuals and influences that have shaped Spike Lee’s body of work, which is so well known today,” said Kimberli Gant, the curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “By making Lee’s collection accessible to the public, this showcase celebrates his legacy while honoring his deep connection to Brooklyn, a place that has been an integral part of his storytelling.”
Visitors will discover the sources of inspiration that have fueled Lee’s work. The exhibition will be organized around seven themes: Black history and culture, Brooklyn, sports, music, cinema history, family, and politics. The Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition offers visitors a new lens through which to understand how Lee’s lifelong interests have intersected and impacted his productions.
More than 300 objects will be on display to represent the wide range of mediums that have inspired Lee, such as historical photographs, paintings, album covers, movie posters, letters, first-edition books, costumes and film memorabilia.
Also shown throughout the exhibition are works by prominent Black American artists, including Kehinde Wiley, Deborah Roberts, Elizabeth Catlett, Michael Ray Charles, Gordon Parks, and James Van Der Zee. The exhibit will also feature depictions of Black American and African figures that have made an impact on Lee, such as Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis, Toni Morrison, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Malcolm X, Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Michael Jordan and Prince.
The primary section of the exhibition will highlight Black history and culture. Art on display will include Michael Ray Charles’s satirical artwork Forever Free (Bamboozled) (1997) which depicts a dartboard with the face of a Black man winking and smiling widely, despite the deep wound cleaved into the figure’s head. Representing the racist stereotyping of Black people, the painting helped inspire Lee’s provocative film Bamboozled (2000), a critique of minstrelsy and blackface.
As part of the Brooklyn portion of the exhibition, photographs by David Lee (Spike Lee’s younger brother) will be on display, alongside movie posters; and set dressings and props from Lee’s Brooklyn- based films, such as Do the Right Thing (1989) and She’s Gotta Have It (1986).
Showcasing the wide range of work that inspires Lee, on view in the sports section is a commissioned painting by Kehinde Wiley that honors the legacy of Brooklyn Dodgers player Jackie Robinson.
In the music portion, guests will find a saxophone signed by Branford Marsalis, who collaborated on the soundtrack for Mo’ Better Blues (1990).
The cinema history section presents photographs and vintage posters of films by his predecessors and contemporaries, such as Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and Italian director Federico Fellini.
In the section on politics, World War II and Vietnam War propaganda posters featuring stereotypical imagery of Black American soldiers are displayed alongside posters of Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna (2008) and Da 5 Bloods (2020). Both films spotlight the treatment of Black American soldiers and emphasize the hypocrisy of making them fight alongside white counterparts and for the United States.
The notion of family will form the final section of the exhibition. Here, visitors will see photographic portraits of Lee and his siblings, parents, and grandparents, as well as artistic depictions of family by Elizabeth Catlett and William H. Johnson.
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