Marela Zacarías's Work Finds A Good Home

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 Williamsburg 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. Zacarías describes how this poignant story reflects her feelings about her own work—formally and emotionally resistant to their surroundings, literally “running out from confinement.” After the deinstallation, Zacarías and a group of friends deliver the sculptures to new but temporary homes. Three of them are stored in a do-it-yourself-style storage space in Gowanus, and the fourth, 163–213 Manhattan (2013), is taken to a friend’s loft in Williamsburg. As Zacarías and her crew install the work in this compact space (yet another contrast to the museum) she reflects on this fitting end: 163–213 Manhattan now has a home in Williamsburg like the murals that inspired it. And like those murals, the Williamsburg location is probably only a temporary resting place for Zacarías’s sculpture.

Also featuring the works 122-192 Bushwick (2013), 202-254 Graham (2013), and 215-274 Humboldt (2013).

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