What happens to an artist’s work after it leaves a museum? Artist Marela Zacarías moves a suite of sculptures titled Supple Beat from the Brooklyn Museum to different spaces in the borough. At Zacarías’s Gowanus, Brooklyn studio it’s evident that the space she has to create and store her large-scale works in is extremely limited—a stark contrast to the museum’s wide-open Grand Lobby where Supple Beat is being exhibited (as part of the museum’s on-going Raw/Cooked series.) Zacarías and a crew of art handlers led by Collections Manager Walter Andersons deinstall four of the sculptures. Constructed in carefully conceived parts, their painted geometric patterns cover window screen and joint compound understructures. Zacarías shares her inspiration: the Willamsburg Murals that were created in the late 1930s for a Brooklyn public housing complex and painted directly on walls in common areas. Overtime, they were neglected and covered up, but eventually restored and moved to the museum where they are on long-term loan.
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