As the city continues its reopening from the pandemic, a set of public art installations in two locations in Brooklyn keep the experiences of the past year in the present. Chloë Bass’s The Parts, organized by the Brooklyn Public Library’s curator for visual art programming Cora Fisher outside the Central Branch in Grand Army Plaza and the Center for Brooklyn History in Brooklyn Heights, addresses both the isolation brought on by the pandemic and the trauma and exasperation of Black and brown Americans brought on by police killings.
Alongside the green landscaping that flanks the Central Branch building across from Eastern Parkway, a progression of colorful window films printed with centered texts followed by aluminum signs that resemble pedestrian street signs, also printed with alternating text and images, lead down to the Plaza. After these first three works, each named generically 6 Parts, 9 Parts, and 8 Parts (all works 2020/2021), the installation continues around the sidewalk along Flatbush Avenue. A final work appears on the library’s electronic sign in front of the entrance’s sweeping staircase; it is closest in materials and medium to the digital origins of the installations in Instagram posts Bass published during the pandemic. The post for what is installed at the library as 9 Parts notes in its caption that the black slides with white type in the carousel are a “rehearsal” for a billboard, tying these works to Bass’s 2019–20 Wayfinding installation of mirrored billboards in St. Nicholas Park in Harlem (commissioned by the Studio Museum in Harlem).
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