'Corfu: Lights and Shadows' (1909) by Sargent. (Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

The Elizabeth Peyton of the Palazzo Barbaro set, the painter John Singer Sargent had a way with white. From voluminous Bedouin robes to frothing Alpine streams, the sun-bleached marble steps of Santa Maria della Salute to the spotless cashmere shawl on a bloodless Boston socialite, the painter’s whites are perhaps the most socially nuanced in the history of watercolor. A show of nearly a hundred of his expert late watercolors (and a few middling oil paintings), mostly painted between 1901 and 1912, is well worth a visit.

Sargent was an inveterate expatriate: an Italian-born American who lived in London, he learned to paint in Paris. Best known for his massive oil portraits of society women, his watercolors capture what he saw during the travels he made after he had earned his fortunes as a painter and shuttered his studios at the start of the 20th century, when he was in his 50s. “Above all things, get abroad, see the sunlight, and everything that is to be seen,” he advised his friends back in Boston. Set free in an exotic place, he found himself at home. Here he’s rediscovered amateurism—painting his travels for love, rather than painting faces for money—and it shows. (The one exception here to his focus on landscapes over portrait painting is his The Cashmere Shawl from 1911, which has some of the showy ballroom drama of his famous 1884 Portrait of Madame X at the MFA in Boston.)

A technological innovation made Sargent’s peripatetic painting practice possible: watercolor boxes and tubes made for fast work outdoors. (As can be seen in a painting Sargent made of his sister, the top flap of a watercolor tin would open to become a palette; the paper was placed on a portable tripod made from a hiking stick.) Mountain Fire (1906-7) captures wispy smoke rising off mountains. A branch heavy with red pomegranates set against dense green leaves was a souvenir of Majorca.

Women are the stars of this show: giant pale bells of fabric among the Alpine landscape, all parasols, petticoats and sweaters. They are not sexy (Sargent was a “confirmed bachelor”) but sisterly travel companions, and they are incongruously and thoroughly American as they contemplate the Bridge of Sighs, dress up as Biblical characters, or laze on the perpetual vacation their class afforded them on the Greek island of Corfu.

By using both opaque and translucent watercolors, Sargent achieved unusual effects, like pearly highlights made by dragging a loaded brush of wet paint  across his translucent painted washes—techniques we associate more with Spanish oil painting than watercolor. His surfaces are so thick they sometimes crack. Tracks of graphite and areas of wax resist lie under these layers of paint. The paintings are light things, but they push technique. The white of paper is sometimes the bare highlight left from fast painting; sometimes the white is opaque watercolor brushwork.

Sargent could capture tone and mood, but he wasn’t a brilliant colorist. Chemical analysis shows that his colors were, surprisingly, often straight from the tube. His skies: straight cobalt; his water: viridian. The exhibition shows that he read George Field’s primer Chromatography, or, Treatise on Colors and Pigments, but he was no Georges Seurat or Vincent van Gogh.

'Bedouins' (circa 1905–6) by Sargent. (Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

But put him in front of melon boats in Palestine and he gets the swell and movement of wind in waxed canvas sails. In White Ships (1908) the impastoed watercolor rigging is translucent above an awesome opaque anchor, and the white ships have bits of reflected pink and green on their hulls. You’ll get his American watercolor lightness: it’s the predecessor of Elizabeth Peyton’s pretty and ambivalent frosted lines. The neurasthenic Mrs. William James is a prim wash of blues and greens. He got around, too: Roman villas, Moroccan deserts and Florentine gardens. When the Brooklyn Museum bought most of these paintings in 1909, they were being sold as a group to conjure the classic grand tour.

There are a handful of oil paintings in the show, most of them with exotic subjects like turbaned men. They are overworked and unexceptional compared with Sargent’s lightness and speed in the more casual medium. Co-curators Teresa A. Carbone of the Brooklyn Museum and Erica E. Hirshler of the MFA Boston have done well to focus on the watercolors.

In the exhibition’s last room, there are almost no people. Instead Sargent paints white marble quarries, Alpine streams and the white stone walls of Venetian palaces. You can almost hear the water running under gondolas, the whispered conversation in a Bedouin tent, the rustle of skirts, the splash of fountains at the Villa Medici or the Boboli Gardens, the scrape of Bostonian boots on the floor of the Palazzo Barbaro. It’s solid second-rate painting: not the stuff of philosophy and religion, but the stuff of life. (Through July 28, 2013)

'Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes' (1634). (Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

The riches continue to flow for Rembrant lovers in New York. Last year, London's Kenwood House loaned its remarkable self-portrait by the master painter to the Met. Now the Brooklyn Museum has announced that two works by Rembrant that are currently in a private collection in New York will go on view there on March 18. They'll be paired with four other Dutch works from the 17th century that reside in the same collection.

The Rembrandts in question are Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes (1634) and Portrait of Anthonie Coopal (1635). Rembrandt was in the latter half of his twenties when he produced the works. Some tantalizing details about the first work, via the museum's news release:

"Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes was hidden for centuries under another portrait. According to Dr. Ernst van de Wetering, chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP), "the overpaintings were so old one had to entertain the possibility that they had been done in Rembrandt's own workshop." The RRP brought in experts to conduct tests on the portrait's paint surface and assess whether there might be another composition underneath. Six years and several paint layers later, this long-unknown masterpiece was revealed in 2002."

The 100-year anniversary of the Brooklyn Museum's first Dutch art acquisition is nearing. Its first purchase was a Rembrandt etching that the museum picked up in 1919.

(Courtesy BHQF)

This summer, the Brooklyn Museum will host a major retrospective of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the anonymous Brooklyn–based collective known for their ersatz compositions in a variety of mediums.

The show will be titled "The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001-2013" and will feature "less than 17,000 works," according to a source that asked to be identified as "a former White House official who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of reprehension."  It opens June 28 at the museum's new Robert E. Blum gallery, and runs through Sept. 22.

The BHQF is featured in two shows at the moment, a group show curated by Vito Schnabel at Acquavella Galleries and a show titled "The Transubstantial Bruce" at Contemporary Fine Arts - Berlin.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, right, talking with Brooklyn Museum employee Peggy Johnson. (Photo: Carole DeBeer, courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

Last week, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who is the first and, to date, only artist in residence in the history of the New York City Department of Sanitation (a title she has held since 1977), was speaking at the Brooklyn Museum’s daily staff roll call. She told the museum’s crew of maintenance workers—among them window washers, security guards and floor sweepers—that even though their work can seem boring and repetitive, what they do is “the first kind of culture.”

The Observer met with her at the museum later that day. “Here’s the museum with all this stuff,” she recalled telling the workers, “and then there’s what you do. You are culture, and your work is culture. And the endless hours that will never be done, that’s what enables us to be in an institution like this. Mopping up the garbage from yesterday. It’s safe. And the things in here are taken care of. That’s culture. What I’ve been trying to do all these years is take those things that have been behind the scenes, downstairs, things no one will talk about it, and pull them into the zone of things to look at. I’m not just saying, ‘Oh, you poor things, you’re having such a hard time, here’s a chance to let it all hang out.’ I’m saying these are important subjects.”

In the conceptual artworks she has been making for over four decades, Ms. Ukeles, who is 73, has kept her focus on people and how they live. In Brooklyn, she was preparing for a performance in which she would conduct a series of live interviews with a museum security guard, a window washer and a sanitation worker, as well as architects and city planners, asking each person a series of questions: How do you personally survive? What do you need to do to keep going? What happens to your dreams and to your freedom when you do the things you have to do to keep surviving? What keeps New York City alive? What does the city need to do to survive after Sandy?

Besides that last update, the questions are the same ones that were included on questionnaires that Ms. Ukeles handed out to visitors to her exhibitions in the ’70s. She formulated them after coining the term Maintenance Art in 1969. In her brief Manifesto for Maintenance Art, the backbone of her work for the last four decades that was written shortly after giving birth to her first child, she declared, “Everything I say is Art is Art.”

“When I had a baby, people suddenly got uninterested in me,” Ms. Ukeles told The Observer. “It was like I got put into this box of mothers with children, as if they automatically knew everything about me. This made me furious. And I became a maintenance worker. Because if I didn’t do certain tasks, the baby would die. I take care of the baby, the baby can thrive, if she’s lucky and healthy. I loved that baby, but nothing in my educated brain, nothing in my culture, prepared me for this. I got really pissed off. I thought, if I’m an artist, then I get to say anything is art. So I call ‘maintenance’ ‘art.’ If art wasn’t like that before, then it has to change. Why? Because I say so. Period.”

Her artworks at the time included spending five hours washing the sidewalk in front of New York’s A.I.R. Gallery (a champion of the era’s feminist art) and locking and unlocking the doors at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn. In 1976, when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, she staged a performance called “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day” at what was then the Whitney Museum’s downtown location, on the second floor of a large office building on Water Street. She took Polaroids of the building’s 300 maintenance workers, keeping the building open after midnight so the night-shift workers could participate, and printed out labels that said “Maintenance Work” and “Maintenance Art.” She let the workers decide what to call the jobs they were doing.

The piece was reviewed by David Bourdon in the Village Voice, who suggested, tongue firmly in cheek, that the Sanitation Department could replace some of its decimated budget by saying its workers were performance artists and getting an N.E.A. grant. Ms. Ukeles decided to take this advice at face value, and sent a copy of the article to the department’s commissioner. She spent the following months touring the sanitation facilities and getting to know the people. There was talk at the time of closing the department and moving it into the private sector. Over half of its equipment was broken. It patched together garbage trucks from spare parts and employees did desk work on furniture found on the street.

“The cops would throw out their furniture and say, ‘Give it to Sanitation,’” Ms. Ukeles said. “It was crystal clear to me that all the things that pissed me off about how people didn’t see me when I was with my baby carriage, they were in the same boat. Nobody wanted to talk to them. They were blank. It was so ridiculous. You want your garbage to get off your sidewalk, then you have to pay attention to who these people are who are doing this. So I’m still there.”

Her first project as artist in residence was to go to each of the 59 sanitation districts, using a driver provided by the department, and shake hands with every worker, about 8,500 in all. This took about a year and a half. With each handshake, she offered her gratitude, saying, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” The Department of Sanitation has never paid her, but it does give her office space that she uses as her studio. Her office downtown is still technically “restricted” after Hurricane Sandy. It’s running on generators, and mold is a big concern. Most days, the only people in the building are security, a rewiring crew working in what everyone refers to as The Dungeon and, with a young assistant, Ms. Ukeles.

ASK MS. UKELES THE SAME questions she has asked of others in her work for so long, and she quickly grows uncomfortable. They’re not the easiest questions to answer. What does she need to do to keep going?

“Well,” she said, “my work has been focused on this for many, many years. It’s always been fraught, and a big pain in the ass. And boring. How do I deal with that? Like”—a pause—“so, what did you just ask me?”

What do you need to do to keep going?

“I need to”—another pause. “It’s a tender subject. I’m working very hard to build this thing at Fresh Kills,” the Staten Island landfill that’s in the process of becoming a park three times the size of Central Park. She won’t say much about her project there other than that it’s a permanent installation meant for public use. “I got this commission in 1989, and I still haven’t built the goddamn thing,” she continued. “What do I have to do to keep going? I have to not go crazy.”

After our interview, Ms. Ukeles talked with the window washer she would be speaking with on the day of the performance—Margaret Johnson, who lives on Staten Island, has straight black hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, speaks in a deep rasp and goes by the nickname Peggy. She has a friendly but tough, weathered face. She was told they’d have 15 minutes to speak.

“I don’t want any more time than that!” she told Ms. Ukeles. “I am shy. I’m a talker and all that, but when you put me on the spot? No. Blam-o.”

On the day of the performance, Ms. Johnson was washing the windows in the lobby while Ms. Ukeles was talking to other people. After a few hours, she stopped working and sat at a table with Ms. Ukeles in front of a small audience.

“What do you do to survive?”

“I am a three-year survivor of cancer,” Ms. Johnson said. “To me, being able to get up, have a job and not be bedridden, and to have the next day, is how I survive. I was bedridden for a whole year. My husband took off work, and I had stage-four cancer. We had no income. Every day I wondered if tomorrow would come. And it did. The most fearful thing in the world is not knowing if you’re going to be here tomorrow.”

Ms. Johnson was followed by Ed Shevlin, a beefy, goateed worker with the department of sanitation who lives in Far Rockaway. He is 11 years sober and, in his spare time, a Fulbright scholar of Gaelic. When Ms. Ukeles asked him how he survives and how the city will continue after Sandy, he launched into a horror story—witnessing the hurricane’s destruction of his neighborhood. He watched his car get carried into the Atlantic Ocean. He watched two massive sections of the Rockaway Beach boardwalk—“replete with benches, guardrails and light posts”—crush houses and cars as they moved through the neighborhood atop the storm surge. He saw a light post run straight through one of his friends’ houses “like a spear.” After the storm, he used a front-end loader to dig into the three-foot-high piles of sand that had taken over the area. Transporting all the debris with heavy machinery was “like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.”

“When evening came,” he said, “I’d go down to the pool in front of my building, get a bucket of seawater and put it in my toilet tank. There was no running water. I’d bring a case of water home from work, heat half of it up in a big stockpot, stand in the bathtub and pour it over my head. I didn’t shower for three weeks. That was the kind of maintenance I was performing.”

“Let’s end with one thing,” Ms. Ukeles said. “You have this circular pin on your collar. Can you just say what that’s about?”

“This is Fáinne Airgid,” Mr. Shevlin said. “It’s a symbol that tells people I am an intermediate Irish speaker. This means I am open to speaking in Irish with anyone. It’s a continuation of the language. People tried to eradicate the Irish language. But it’s back. It will never be killed.”

mmiller@observer.com

The painting. (Courtesy Brooklyn Museum)

Last November, the Brooklyn Museum sold off from its collection a 1887 painting by Vasili Vasilievich Vereshchagin called Crucifixion by the Romans at Christie's London for £1.72 million ($2.67 million). Today it announced that it used some of those funds to acquire a portrait, Doña María de los Dolores Gutiérrez del Mazo y Pérez, that Puerto Rican painter José Campeche painted around 1796.

More from the museum:

"At age fifteen she sailed from Cadiz to San Juan with her mother and stepfather, a newly appointed sergeant major in the Puerto Rican division of the Spanish navy. At age twenty-one, she sat for Campeche, the island's first major painter, who portrayed her at home wearing a white muslin chemise dress--then the height of European fashion--and matching diamond earrings and necklace. In her left hand Doña María holds a copy of the popular Spanish play, Manuel Bellosartes's La fuerza del amor conyugal, and with her right she gestures toward two folded letters that identify her and her husband, who at the time was stationed in the Puerto Rican port city of Ponce."

Campeche's mother was a Spaniard from the Canary Islands, and his father was an African slave who bought his freedom by working as an artisan.

The work will go on view in the exhibition "Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492-1898," which opens at the museum on Sept. 20, 2013.

At the Brooklyn Museum, Mickalene Thomas has not only upped the ante on Courbet by giving the title Origin of the Universe to her take on his painting—a black-power, pop-palette Venus vajazzled with rhinestones—but she has also given that title to her exhibition.

Ms. Thomas’s massive, French-Impressionist-inspired, rhinestone-embellished paintings of black female nudes are gaudy fun, yes, but they are also enormously ambitious. Her other great subject is her mother, a woman who obviously relishes vamping for the camera (“I always liked Pam Grier,” she confesses in a video portrait). Ms. Thomas has found her voice as an artist in addressing and overcoming origins both artistic (French painting) and familial (her mother). Her paintings may be kitschy, but they are also, as she titles several of them, “très belle,” and display a tremendous awareness of how personal the history of painting can be, or at least seem, for an artist. Four wood-panel and print fabric installations resembling sets for a 1970s sitcom, a colorful wall of miniature collages and a video (Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman from 2012, a biography of Thomas’s mother) round out the display.

At the New Museum, where her mid-career retrospective “Cosmos” just went on view, German artist Rosemarie Trockel reminds us that Courbet’s The Origin of the World was once owned by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Her take on Origin—a framed digital print titled Replace Me (2011), in which an image of a fuzzy black tarantula is superimposed on the Courbet nude’s pubes—deals in uncanny associations between people and things.

Ms. Trockel gives us an artist-curated taste of marginal works from the 19th century and earlier, as well as pieces by so-called outsider artists. Her show is full of wünderkammer-like assortments of natural objects (a 27.5-pound lobster, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka’s famous glass sculptures of flowers and sea creatures, cabinets of dried seedpods and a veritable aviary of 18th- and 19th-century bird watercolors) and oddball artworks (Günter Weseler’s animatronic wall barnacle gently expands, contracts and titters; creepy plaster dolls by Martin Bartlett pirouette in vitrines abutting wonderfully abject sculptures of birds by James Castle). The exhibition’s walls are painted a solemn green-grey; the lighting is dim. Ms. Trockel has placed her own artworks—wool-weft monochromes that hang on the wall like paintings, as well as photographs, sculptures and a library of artists’ books—in the context of these curiosities. In the catalog, her projects are classified according to the eccentric phyla “botany, textiles, zoology, ceramics, ‘odd objects,’ books.” Ms. Trockel’s diverse body of work, like the elephant of the proverb, feels different depending on what part of it you grasp first, and to have so much of her in one place creates a fuller impression of her significance than any viewer (especially one in New York, where she is seldom shown) is likely to have previously had.

The museum also recently remembered its mission of giving underappreciated artists their due. Right now, in the lobby, you can see Judith Bernstein’s long-overdue first solo museum show, “Judith Bernstein: HARD.” It, too, has a riff on Courbet’s painting (thanks go to the museum’s communications director Gabriel Einsohn for pointing this out to me): the painting Birth of the Universe #4, a neon pink and orange intergalactic battle in which beings with flaming penises for eyes and vaginal-mouthed gullets full of cosmoses smolder in space. Ms. Bernstein, now 70 years old, is best known for the enormous gestural “Screw” paintings she has been making since the mid-’60s. They equate erections with flat-head screws and send off everything from phallocentric minimalism to macho (“jackoff,” as one work puts it) U.S. foreign policy. The works were censored from exhibitions in the 1970s, when Ms. Bernstein was active in the feminist collective the Guerrilla Girls and a founder of the alternative space A.I.R Gallery. Her monumental, 45-foot-long Signature Piece, installed against the glass of the New Museum’s lobby, reminds us that just getting your name out there as an artist can sometimes be a gesture of activism and defiance.

There is no Origin of the World in the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum dedicated to feminist art and conceptual art curator Lucy Lippard, unless you count the fact that Ms. Lippard’s work has been the origin of many art worlds. The show focuses on Ms. Lippard’s iconic 1972 book Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, but it also makes a case for the expanded role of women in the arts. The display of 177 objects in two small galleries examines the time span of Ms. Lippard’s book year by year, and what emerges is not so much an investigation, as the curators claim, of the way “the object dematerializes” in that period, but rather of how a new art form demanded a new kind of curator.

Conceptual art required conceptual curating. Ms. Lippard’s 1969 exhibition “955,000”took its name from the population of Vancouver; when the show traveled to Buenos Aires, its name changed to “2,972,543.” For another exhibition, 1970’s “Groups,” she asked artists to take five photographs of the same people dressed in the same clothing each day. As artists like Lawrence Weiner executed these instructions, they helped define a new role for the exhibition organizer: to initiate a project, disseminate a set of rules to a select group of participants and appoint artists as its executors. The roles could also be reversed, with artists like Sol LeWitt providing instructions for Ms. Lippard to follow. Her projects didn’t just engage with new art—they used new forms to do so, and were creative in their own right.

Ephemera comprises much of the show, and it’s crammed into every nook of the galleries: there is the exhibition announcement for Ms. Lippard’s legendary 1966 exhibition “Eccentric Abstraction,” which included organic, tactile work by Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and others as the feminist counterpoint to minimalism; an issue of Aspen Magazine devoted to minimalism; and documentation of Richard Serra’s famous molten iron piece Splashing (1968). All of this can get a bit dry; if you are the kind of person who reads the acknowledgements sections in books and watches movie credits in their entirety, this is the show for you.

But Lee Lozano’s Dialogue Piece (1969) provides some particularly good reading. Her premise was, “Call or write people for the specific purpose of inviting them to your loft for a dialogue,” and on gridded graph paper, she recorded her calls and the ensuing conversations: “May 14 1969 Call Poonsie (Larry Poons). He answers phone, we made a date for May 21.” “Call Johns at Castelli. David White at Castelli says he is busy.” “Dan Graham and I have an important dialogue.” There’s little record about what these dialogues were about (many seem to be about astrological signs and to have taken place while the participants were high), but the gossipy minutiae are scintillating: Robert Morris does it, Walter de Maria never returns Lozano’s call, Marcia Tucker stays in the loft talking for three hours.

The show, organized by Catherine Morris, the curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Vincent Bonin, an independent curator based in Montreal, is thankfully scant on biographical information. Ms. Lippard, who is now in her 70s, has curated more than 50 exhibitions but never worked as a museum curator or had a gallery; her column on art was to be found in The Village Voice, not Artforum, and she never earned a Ph.D., though she’s accumulated eight honorary degrees. She co-founded Printed Matter, among other alternative spaces, and infused her curatorial practice with activism—she was involved in anti-war and art workers’ rights movements and was a champion of women artists. Her curatorial presence helped to define an era.

With women’s issues, and women’s votes, one of the focal points of this year’s presidential election, it is heartening to see women’s work—curatorial and artistic—take center stage in our city. With Sharon Lockhart’s show newly opened at the Jewish Museum, and Martha Rosler, another mid-career activist artist, literally taking center stage at the Museum of Modern Art in November when one of her “garage sale” pieces occupies the atrium, the trend continues. Let’s hope that galleries, whose rosters still feature disproportionate numbers of male artists, start to catch up.

editorial@observer.com

The artist. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

Well that was quick! One day after the Brooklyn Museum made the announcement that it would postpone its upcoming LaToya Ruby Frazier show, without a future date for the show listed, the museum announced today that the show will instead run from March 22 to Aug. 11, 2013.

The show was initially set to open on June 29.

Brooklyn Museum (Courtesy The New York Observer)

The Brooklyn Museum announced that it will host an exhibition by aspiring Brooklyn artists. No, it's not the third season of Work of Art. The museum launched a new initiative today to create a crowd-sourced exhibition inspired by the ArtPrize, a yearly art competition judged by the public, and Brooklyn’s tradition of holding open studio events like Bushwick Open Studios and the Dumbo Arts Festival. Community members can nominate artists for the exhibition beginning on June 4. Then, in early September, museum curators will pay the nominated artists a studio visit and select the work for the show, GO: a community-curated open studio project.

The show, which will open on Dec. 1, 2012, and run through Feb. 24, 2013, is organized by Sharon Matt Atkins, managing curator of exhibitions, and Shelley Bernstein, chief of technology.

"GO is a wide-ranging and unique project that will transform how Brooklyn communities engage in the arts by providing everyone with the chance to discover artistic talent and to be involved in the exhibition process on a grassroots level," said Arnold L. Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum.

Here's hoping that Simon de Pury makes a guest appearance to playfully berate the nominated artists as they vie for the chance to participate.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, "Grandma Ruby and Me," 2005. (Courtesy the artist)

LaToya Ruby Frazier's elegant, personal and sometimes emotionally charged black-and-white photographs have been seen in this year's Whitney Biennial, the 2010 edition of MoMA PS1's Greater New York and the New Museum's first triennial, in 2009. Now they are headed to the Brooklyn Museum, which will mount a major exhibition of her work, titled "A Haunted Capital," this June.

The show runs June 29 through Oct. 21 (mark your calendars, dear reader), and includes some 40 works from a variety of the artist's series. The museum has this to say about it in its news release:

"A Haunted Capital" represents both Frazier's family's history and the history of her community as she explores the decline of Braddock, home of one of America's first steel mills, located on the eastern edge of the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh, which now has a population of under 2,500 and has been declared a "distressed municipality" by the state of Pennsylvania.

An associate curator at Rutgers University's Mason Gross galleries, Ms. Frazier attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

Lucy Lippard at the Brooklyn Museum. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan Company)

Here's just about the most exciting news we've heard in a long time. The Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organizing an exhibition devoted to writer and curator Lucy Lippard's involvement in the development of conceptual art in the 1960s and '70s.

The exhibition, which runs at the museum from Sept. 14, 2012, through Jan. 20, 2013, is titled "Materializing 'Six Years': Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, referring to Ms. Lippard's seminal history of conceptual art and the dematerialization of the art object, Six Years. That book's full title, the museum's new release knows, is as follows:

Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries; consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia and Asia (with occasional political overtones)

The show will include some 270 artworks and will, like Ms. Lippard's book, be presented chronologically, with contributions from artists like Art & Language, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Richard Serra and dozens more. Ms. Lippard has written about contemporary art for about a half century and recently picked up one of the Sackler Center's "First" awards. She has also been active as a curator—she curated a number of shows titled after the populations of cities around 1970 ("955,000" in Vancouver, etc.).

The show is organized by Sackler Center curator Catherine Morris and independent curator Vincent Bonin, and will travel to two additional venues.