David Bowie Is
We’re thrilled that our frames are now on the shelves of the store of Brooklyn Museum, a spot we often find ourselves in search for new ideas and inspiration. Currently, the museum is showing the historic "David Bowie Is" exhibition. Experience the stunning tour before it ends on July 15.
Five years after it began in London, the fascinating world of David Bowie is making its last stop in New York, the city he called his home. Curated using over 400 objects from all over his iconic career, “David Bowie Is” at the Brooklyn Museum is an important tribute to the rock star, whose sustained reinventions, innovative collaborations, and bold characterizations revolutionized the way we see music.
"I think more than anybody he's been a great visualizer of music," describes Brooklyn Museum curator Matthew Yokobosky. "You know, there's Kandinsky who painted music, [and] Georgia O'Keeffe. But we were in a new era where we have rock and roll music, and David Bowie was able to also tell you how rock and roll music should look.”
The historic exhibition stages unseen relics, from his collection of designer shoes to his Seventies coke spoon, labeled bluntly, "Cocaine spoon, 1976." The space is filled with stage costumes, drawings, handwritten lyrical drafts, sketches, gig posters, video footage, right up to his notebooks for Blackstar.
As in previous stops, the exhibition is meant to be experienced with a soundtrack, heard over Sennheiser headphones and timed to visitors’ locations in the galleries. The audio segues from “Space Oddity” to a BBC interview with a shaggy 17-year-old Davy Jones.
Bowie lived just long enough to release Blackstar on his 69th birthday, two days before he died from cancer, making "David Bowie Is" an intensely emotional tribute to an artist who kept creating and changing to the end.
"I wanted to be thought of as someone who was very much a trendy person, rather than a trend," are the words of Bowie himself in a BBC interview. He saw himself as a creature of his book, record and art collections.
Words: Aiko Austin
Resources:
