A Glimpse at What Goes Down at First Saturdays

Target First Saturdays at the Brooklyn Museum offered a variety of programs and extended hours for families and museum visitors last Saturday, February 5th, in honor of Black History Month.

The event featured gallery talks, guided tours and live music, as well as art activities for families. And according to a museum staff member, free tickets for the curator talks and film events were gone within an hour after distribution began.

The Fat Cat Big Band kicked the night off at 5:00 pm with bebop and swing for a crowd of all ages. Most of the audience soaked it all in at the front of the stage while others enjoyed the music in the cordoned-off area for dancing. 

The Small’s Jazz Club All-Stars ended the festivities in similar fashion at 9:00 pm with big band music for the remaining museumgoers.

Other activities throughout the night included an artist talk led by Hank Willis Thomas, creator of the long-term installation Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, which features vintage advertisements targeted at an African-American audience. Thomas stripped away the headlines, text and logos to demonstrate the pervasiveness of black exploitation in advertising.

Also, there was an interactive project that asked participants to examine old photographs of African Americans and imagine what the subjects’ lives may have been like.

Staff members said that tickets for the Hands-On Art program, in which patrons were invited to create portraits inspired by African American photographer Lorna Simpson’s work, always sell out because the activity is popular with families.