Practical Art at the Brooklyn Museum's New Education Center

It could easily be an alien civilization: its citizens have no gender, no organized religion, no formal government. They inhabit a lush ecosystem of candy-colored vegetation, where plants can grow infinitely tall. Residents travel on self-driving, ring-shaped buses that float in the atmosphere. One year lasts more than two centuries.

But as alien as this environment sounds, you can quickly encounter it in Brooklyn. Called “Artland”, it is an ever-expanding fantasy world and traveling museum exhibition designed by children, cast from modeling clay and supervised by internationally renowned artist Do Ho Suh, whose two young daughters conceived it. On Saturday, from noon to 3 p.m., “Artland” welcomes the public to a free celebration of the newly renovated building Toby Devan Lewis Education Center at the Brooklyn Museum, where visitors can sculpt imaginary flora and fauna to add to the show's phantasmagoric jungles.

In some ways, the installation symbolizes the new center, which aims to help visitors find their own way to the arts.

“It's all about world building, right?” Shamilia McBean Tocruray, the museum's co-director of education, said in an interview. “All about creating opportunity, and very similar to the invitation we extend to our community to say, 'Come in here.' What can we make together?'”

Titled “Artland: An Installation by Do Ho Suh and Children,” the exhibition inaugurates the Norman M. Feinberg Gallery, just inside the entrance to the redesigned education center. The 9,500 square foot wing also includes three art studios equipped with audiovisual technology, as well as educational agencies that promote collaboration.

“Essentially it was a gut renovation,” says Stephen Yablon, whose company Stephen Yablon Architecturedesigned the $9 million project, which he called an “art connector.”

“The concept was to build a kind of space that would be a tool to connect people to learning about art, experiencing art and to the museum,” Yablon said in an interview. He added: “The way to do that was to make it very welcoming when you walked in the door. So you immediately enter a public space, not a corridor.”

Although the first floor education wing previously had a gallery, it was devoted exclusively to the work of participants in the museum programs. “Artland,” on view through May 5, represents a new, complementary initiative: presenting an annual interactive exhibition led by a world-class artist.

Few shows are more interactive than this one, which started in 2016 on the dining room table in Suh's London household, where his eldest daughter began building a universe she called Artland, inhabited by cat-shaped creatures called Slimes. When her little sister grew up, she got involved too, and as they expanded their fictional cosmos, which Suh eventually moved into his studio, the little girls wrote an entire mythology for it.

“I called myself my daughters' art assistant,” Suh said in a video call. When they struggled to add clay creations to Artland, he used recycled materials to build a simple framework that allowed it to extend from the surface of a table to a wall or a floor.

Suh, whose work is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum and those of other institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, said he felt sad when the girls, now 13 and 10 years old, began to outgrow their creation. But he saw a way to keep it when the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art in his native South Korea invited him to do a show for the children's gallery, where “Artland” became a participatory exhibition.

“That was a huge hit,” Suh said. “More than 100,000 children came to the show and contributed.”

In Brooklyn, “Artland” will start on a small scale, with just three of the world's pre-existing islands on small tables. But the gallery offers many more surfaces of different heights for children to expand the project, as well as a video about it and a pamphlet explaining its taxonomy.

When young New Yorkers discovered “Artland,” Suh said he hoped for an even “braver” outcome.

“I hope they feel ownership of this,” he added. “And they feel like they are the artists.”

Museum officials said they hoped that's how visitors would respond to the entire renovation. Unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new 81st Street Studio, which caters exclusively to children, the Brooklyn Museum's education center will serve more than 50,000 visitors, young and old, annually. These vary from Stroller toursfor those 2 years and under, to the ART guide (art, research and education). volunteer program, which involves many retirees.

And while the Met attracts countless tourists, the Brooklyn Museum's visitor population is “still very much entrenched in local communities in Brooklyn,” Adjoa Jones de Almeida, the museum's deputy director for education and social impact, said in an interview. But the education wing, which had not been renovated since it opened in 1980, was dark, cramped and closed off.

“There was always a conversation of, 'Is it a coincidence that the Brooklyn Museum is the space that serves the most BIPOC audience and has the shabbiest spaces of any encyclopedic institution?'?” Jones de Almeida said, using an acronym for Black, Indigenous and People of Color. “That was always very difficult to hear.”

As museum officials began preparing for the institution's 200th anniversary next fall, they wanted a renovation that reflected its legacy as a training ground for artists like Lynda Benglis, Robert Smithson and Richard Mayhew. In addition to designing an open space with flexible seating, the architects raised the ceilings and gave the education center glass doors. By installing high windows in two of the art studios, natural light enters for the first time.

“There was a lot of talk about visibility, a lot about accessibility,” said Kenneth Kurtz, the museum's staff architect. The first studio has side-by-side sinks on two levels; the lower one is suitable for a child or a visitor who uses a wheelchair.

The redesign also includes a room for the museum's guides are teen programs. Equipped with a colorful sofa and tableware for snacking, as well as tables and work stations, this space is “more of a meeting place,” Yablon said.

In conjunction with the center's opening, the museum, which has no set admission — the suggested ticket price is $20 for adults and free for anyone under 20 — is expanding its schedule to include drop-in public programs every weekend. Visitors to Saturday's celebration can enjoy a photo booth, graffiti wall and zine project, as well as “Artland.”

“Maybe you've never taken a painting class in your life, you've never thought about sculpture in your life,” said Jones de Almeida, “but you have a place in this neighborhood that is accessible, both physically and financially, where you can grow those skills and nurture those skills. That is really crucial to the vision for this renovation, the idea that we are all creative.'