This Thursday, May 9, we are partnering with The Go Game to offer a mobile scavenger hunt for singles. All you have to bring is your sense of adventure (and ideally a mobile device, you need one per team); we’ll take care of the rest. We’ll divide you into teams based on your dating preference, and you get to roam the museum completing missions, meeting new people, and perhaps enjoying a cocktail afterwards. Even if you don’t find “the one,” it will be hard not to have fun playing this game. There are several types of missions, including trivia, location-based puzzles, team photo ops, interacting with planted actors, and more.

I hope you’ll stick around after the game to share you thoughts because Elisabeth, Shelley, and I want to pick your brains. Was the scavenger hunt fun? Would you like more of them, perhaps with different topics or themes? Was it a good way to meet new people? Would you like to see more events like this? More singles events in general? The Go Game is kind enough to work with us for this experimental version, and if you like it, we might partner with them to do more scavenger hunts. So gather your single friends and flap your little wings over to the Museum Thursday at 7!

Loïs Mailou Jones (American, 1905-1998). Dans un Café à Paris (Leigh Whipper), 1939. Oil on canvas, 36 x 29 in. (91.4 x 73.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Fund for African American Art and gift of Auldlyn Higgins Williams and E.T. Williams, Jr., 2012.1. © Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Nöel Trust

When Loïs Mailou Jones painted this portrait, Leigh Whipper was approaching the height of his career as a Broadway and Hollywood actor. He had already become the first black member of the Actors Equity Association in 1920 and, by the end of 1939, he would be famous for his role as Crooks in Lewis Milestone’s critically acclaimed film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Whipper’s character—a handicapped farmhand ostracized because of his race—served to illuminate the movie’s Depression-era message that American Dream’s promise of economic and social success was impossible.

Photograph of Leigh Whipper © Estate of Leigh Rollin Whipper, Courtesy of Carole Ione Lewis

Faced with the task of learning more about such a fascinating person, I beat a path to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which holds the Leigh Whipper papers. Thanks these records, I learned that these two dynamic artists time spent together on February 9, 1939. On that day, Loïs Mailou Jones signed the actor’s signature book: “In memory of a very pleasant afternoon.” With that, she left her signature in the august company of other notables like NAACP leader Walter White. According to Jones’s archives, Whipper also left a caring note in Jones’s guest book: “To the #1 Negro artist (Loïs Jones) who will some day be America’s #1 artist.”

Leigh Whipper’s Signature Book, Box 1, Folder 1, Leigh Rollin Whipper Papers, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. © Estate of Leigh Rollin Whipper, Courtesy of Carole Ione Lewis

When Jones painted this portrait she had recently returned to teach at Howard University in Washington, D.C. after a year sabbatical spent studying painting in Paris. Perhaps it was nostalgia for France that led Jones to depict Whipper as if seated at a Paris café. At Howard, the artist would enter an intellectual conversation on campus that shaped the discourse of the Harlem Renaissance more broadly. Harlem Renaissance intellectual Alain Locke and “father” of African American art history James Porter were both professors at Howard.

Jones in her Paris studio, 1938. Papers of LMJ/Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. © Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Nöel Trust

Dans un Café à Paris (Leigh Whipper) reveals the influence of both Locke and Porter. The naturalistic modeling of figure and still-life arrangement of wine bottle and sandwiches follow the academic style that Porter himself employed in his own paintings. Although Locke heralded the flat, egyptianized forms of Aaron Douglas as the epitome of a “racial school of art” inspired by the abstracted forms of African art, Locke also implored black artists to create ennobling portrayals of African Americans—a call that Lois Mailou Jones’s portrayal of a pensive Whipper clearly fulfilled.

In our use it made sense to start with the Sensory Tour, our monthly tour for visitors with visual impairments as well as anyone who wants to experience art using more than just their sense of sight.  We continually had great success using raised line drawings (they’re just what they sound like; the lines are literally raised from the surface of the paper) to help people feel contours of two-dimensional art.  Why not try the same thing with one more dimension in the mix?

It took some creative thinking and interdepartmental teamwork to figure out an appropriate object and Lost Pleiad hit all the right marks. So, armed with a few 3D prints of Randolph Rogers’ sculpture in our teaching bag, we hit the galleries in the capable teaching hands of Megan Holland and Brigitte Moreno to “explore lines of ink on paper, lines of movement, and lines of poetry in our most recent exhibition, Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum.”

So, how did it go, you’re probably wondering?  Did having these touchable models deepen participants’ engagement with the artwork?  Did people walk away feeling like they’d had a satisfying tactile experience with this sculpture?  Is 3D printing going to usurp the place of the statue in museums?  These are all things that were on the minds of the educators as we stepped into this new semi-charted territory.

As with most complicated issues, the results were mixed. Visitors were visibly, physically excited by the prospect of our inclusion of this technology.  They paid careful, detailed attention to the surface of the sculpture and all of its contours. They held up the 3D models and compared them to the original sculpture in front of them.

They looked at the 3D prints from all angles (more than they were able to do with the original, and not unlike the animation commenter Sebastian Heath made from the Thingiverse files David shared in his last post).

During this Sensory Tour, we also passed around samples of marble in various finishes and scarves to think about the contrast between the dense stone and the diaphanous fabric.  People gave them similar amounts of time and attention as they had the 3D prints, but the stone and scarves seemed to spark a wider variety of conversation and brought people’s focus back to the sculpture more quickly.  Not that this is all on the technology, of course, but as educators we’re pretty comfortable using material like the stone samples and scarves to get quality audience conversation going.

The 3D prints are new tools for us to play with, and we need to work with them more to get more comfortable. What are the best kinds of questions to ask people when we put these into their hands?  As blogged about by Alastair Somerville, does it work better to manipulate the image for emphasis, rather than staying strictly true to the original?

In our post-game conversation, the education team behind the Sensory Tours agreed that 3D prints are great tools to help people feel the weight and balance of a sculpture.  They’re “a new way of making lines; a digital brushstroke,” said one educator, and since this month’s Sensory Tour was focused on lines, we couldn’t think of a better place in starting this project.

In years past, we’ve shared various aspects of this event via social media mostly in the form of documentation; artists creating tables, guests arriving, and activity happening throughout the night.  This year, we decided to go a more creative route and our Twitter and Instagram feeds will become #table17.

Starting Friday, Brooklyn-based artist Man Bartlett will take over these two feeds and create a project that speaks to how everyone can bring something to the table.  In his own words:

The People’s Table is a virtual collection of images submitted by people around the world in response to the question, “What do you bring to the table?” It is meant to act as a reminder of the multitude of ways that people attribute value to objects and ideas in culture, while simultaneously offering access without regard to significant financial or societal limitations. Anyone with access to an Internet connection can bring themselves, and their vision to the table. Additionally, this collection will be projected for the guests of the 2013 BK Ball, where they will be invited to participate as well.

Man is working with Barry Hoggard to help bring the table to life and we couldn’t be more excited to see it materialize both online and in the building on April 24.  Follow @brooklynmuseum on Twitter and Instagram to join us at #table17.

Museum sculptures are an interesting case in accessibility; they exist in a place the public can access but usually aren’t allowed to touch. Most sculpture materials aren’t too smelly or noisy so that limits the sensory experience to sight. However, not everyone has the ability to see, and although special exemptions are occasionally made to allow the visually impaired to touch some sculptures, you can only feel so much of a large object.

Sight includes the ability to expand the size or detail of what you’re looking at by moving closer or further away from the object. This isn’t possible in the two-dimensional web, so the paradigm of pairing a “thumbnail” image with a full-size counterpart became an established method for having both a high-level and up-close view of things. With similar constraints in mind, we’ve utilized 3D scanning and printing to create a “thumbnail” for large sculptures which can be used as a tactial maps of the object’s entire shape.

So how do you go from marble masterpiece to plastic replica? Like 3D printing, 3D scanning has also recently broken out of the expensive-equipment-for-expensive-professions world and into the much more afforable world of hobbyists and institutions with modest budgets. AutoCAD’s 123D Catch is a free download which was launched last year as a way to create 3D models from photos using stereophotogrammetry, which basically means taking a bunch of photos from different angles and letting software figure out how far away stuff in one photo is from stuff in the next.

The conditions those photos are taken in both in the camera and everything surrounding the subject are pretty unforgiving; out of the first eight attempts I’ve made scanning sculptures, only the double Pegasus ended up looking close to what it was supposed to. From these initial attempts and some research, I was able to narrow down the list of things to scan next by whether they met this criteria:

• Can’t be shiny
• Can’t be or be inside something transparent
• Can’t be wiggly/moving (no scanning museum visitors)
• Must fit in a photo when shot at 30 different angles in a 360 degree radius
• Must be lit under consistent lighting
• Can’t have shadows cast on it when shooting
• Can’t have too many things moving around in the shot (museum visitors indoors, leaves in a windy day outdoors)

When Rachel recommended Randolph Rogers’s The Lost Pleiad, it so perfectly matched the criteria that I saw myself rendering a perfect model from the first scan. Eleven scanning attempts later, I found out:

• Most cameras try to attempt auto-adjusting exposure when shooting towards a source of light, ruining the scan
• Bright spotlights on bright white marble create a blur between the edge of the object and the background, ruining the scan
• Turning off said spotlights without cranking up a camera’s ISO settings lead to slower shutter releases which lead to blurry images, ruining the scan
• Cameraphones and point-and-shoot cameras don’t have very high ISO settings and I don’t have perfectly steady hands

Scan #11 used a Canon SLR with a manually set white balance, exposure level, and high ISO setting (5000); only auto-focus remained in the camera’s control. Approximately 30 shots in a mostly even perimeter around the statue were taken and re-taken in case if the first take was out of focus along with around 12 overhead shots in a smaller perimeter above and around the statue. After sorting out any blurry photos, the images were uploaded into the Windows version of 123D Catch which shows the angles at which each photo was taken.

Before this is printer-ready, the object had to be cleaned up so that the object has a flat base and doesn’t include stuff in the background picked up by the scan. We used MeshMixer, a free download.

With the texture removed, the remaining mesh looked as though it was melting somewhere that didn’t have gravity with swaths of wall and floor surrounding it (alt+left mouse drag to move around, alt+right mouse drag to zoom in).

I removed floating artifacts is by using the plane cut tool (Edits -> Plane Cut). This was also useful for removing bulges on the surface and slicing a perfectly flat base for the model. The surface of the object was also bumpy and jagged where it should be smooth (arms, torso, etc). The way I solved this was by using the smoothing brush.

The smoothing brush (Smoothbrush/1) is basically digital sandpaper; For each rough area, I adjusted the size and strength of the brush to match the size and roughness of the surface until it looked more like it’s supposed to. In addition to the removal of defects, the object had to be made “watertight” and have any holes and cracks sealed before being printable.

With the  inspector tool (Analysis -> Inspector), a floating color-coded sphere pointed to a gap near the bottom of the robe, which was filled by right-clicking the sphere, choosing to smooth the boundary, then left-clicking the sphere.

With the object ready, I exported it as an STL file (File -> Export), a format which most if not all 3D printers can print with. For the printer we use at the Brooklyn Museum (3D Systems Cube v2), the STL file needed to be processed using their Cube Software, also a free download. Using that, I imported the STL file and clicked Heal to double-check the model’s watertightness. Since the model itself was fairly small, I also used the Orient & Scale tool to make it 260% bigger. In Settings, I removed the raft (the Cube uses a special glue that makes printing a platform raft unnecessary) and also removed supports since most of the statue probably wouldn’t need them. Finally, I centered it with the Center icon and hit Build. For simplicity, I built the final .cube file to a USB drive that I could just plug into the printer.

The printer’s on-screen menu has incredibly clear and simple step-by-step directions on how to print, so I won’t repeat them here. Five hours later, the print was completed and looked close enough to be a handheld tactical map of the real McCoy, with only minor amount of overhanging plastic extrusion in areas near the bottom of the robe and under the raised arm.

BONUS: We’re also releasing the STL files under a Creative Commons license for both the Double Pegasus and The Lost Pleiad which you can download and print on your own 3D printer:

Download Double Pegasus (CC-BY 3.0) on Thingiverse
Download The Lost Pleiad (CC-BY 3.0) on Thingiverse

As part of an internal program within the Technology department, we’ve started a series of developer led R&D projects; developers propose what they want to experiment with and we set aside time in our busy work week to foster that creativity. In our first round of experiments David Huerta wanted to work with 3D printing; he’s incredibly passionate about this and has been following the 3D printing projects in the industry and beyond.

Irwin S. Chanin (American, 1891-1988). Double Pegasus from the Coney Island High Pressure Pumping Station, 2301 Neptune Avenue, Brooklyn, 1936-1937. Limestone, granite, 48 x 24 x 48 in. (121.9 x 61.0 x 121.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Lent by The City of New York, L2003.7.2.

I’ll say I needed some convincing; even in asking the team to experiment, my own thoughts tend to take me toward practical applications and, while 3D printing is whiz bang cool and a lot of people had ideas for applications, we just were not seeing much materialize just yet.  But, you never know where a project can lead you, so David started his project by working with the Double Pegasus—an object from Coney Island which greets visitors in our sculpture garden.

David Huerta with his 3D print of the Double Pegasus.

When he showed up with his 3D print, we were pretty excited and that little physical simulacrum got me thinking about practical applications and how something like this might be used to help our educators with their own goals in helping visitors who are blind or partially sighted.  After speaking with Rachel Ropeik in our Education department, she immediately saw the possibilities and wanted to experiment; David and Rachel are now working on a cross-departmental project to bring 3D printed objects into our series of Sensory Tours.

We consider this a fast, iterative project that aims to get the output right into our visitors hands as we report back on our findings.  We’ve had plenty of bumps in the road—just finding an object that was appropriate for their tour combined with our own ability to capture it was challenging. In the coming week or two, David will blog a lot more on the technical ins and outs of the project and Rachel will be reporting about education goals and visitor reaction. The Double Pegasus is just the start.

Just as a reminder, this photo and the next show the area west of the main roadway just as work was starting. This photograph was taken from atop the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon and looks northwest.

The same area looking southwest from the enclosure wall east of the Precinct entrance. In both photos you can see that we had just completed the first of several mastabas.

This photo and the one that follows were taken at the very end of the season and show the kind of progress that can be made in just a few weeks when expeditions are able to co-operate to achieve common goals. Again, you are looking north from Mut’s 1st Pylon.

The whole area is now much more organized and easy to get around than it was at the beginning of the season. Here is what was accomplished in the last week of work.

The Taharqa ram going onto its new base (left) and in its final position. Now this important sculpture has an appropriate setting and can be seen clearly by visitors.

This long mastaba runs along the south side of the main group of mastabas and has been built to hold blocks from temple walls that cannot be put back in place but demonstrate the scale of work undertaken by the ancient Egyptians with minimal technology. Temperatures at the site neared 100° F for most of the last week, making the work even more difficult. Keeping hydrated is important as Mahmoud and his team know. The final blocks were put in place after we left Luxor.

Three Sakhmet statues found between the ram-sphinxes that stand before the west wing of Mut’s 1st Pylon now rest on new bases.

Building the final mastaba, at the west end of the 1st pylon, was still underway when we left the site. When complete and dry, it will hold several fragmentary Sakhmet statues and the beautiful and well-preserved head one of the ram-sphinxes that line this wing of the pylon. It was found by SCA excavators some years ago; unfortunately the sculpture from which it came is too badly deteriorated to allow the head to be put back in its original position.

We also finished the restoration of the west wing of the gate in the Mut Temple’s 2nd Pylon. This started as a small project to put two inscribed blocks back in their original position, but the rest of the blocks of this part of the gate were in such poor condition that we ended up consolidating and restoring the whole north end of the structure.

Excavation and restoration are only part of the Expedition’s work. We are also preparing to publish the Ptolemaic religious texts on the gateway in the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon. To do so, we need good photographs of the inscriptions and reliefs. Sometimes the Egyptian sun provides perfect lighting, as on the reliefs in the background. Other reliefs, though, need reflected light to bring them out. On one of the last days at the site, Jaap and Mary used a large mirror to try to get just the right light on the inscriptions on the north face of the pylon’s west wing.

The area just outside the site has become a dumping ground for all sorts of trash. One of our last tasks this season was to arrange to have this trash removed early one morning.

This grove of palm trees is just above the southeast corner of the sacred lake, and is where the pottery is sorted and photographed. It is the only shady area in the whole 22-acre site.

And finally, one last bird shot: a flock of stilts wheeling over Mut’s Sacred Lake. It is hard to leave a place that has such beauty.

By mid week, Ayman was turning up some of the clearest and most beautifully laid bricks we have ever encountered. Even when first uncovered, two distinct parallel walls that occupy the full width of the square are clearly visible, with two shorter stubs of brick running off the southern wall. The block of stone between the rows is a door socket, but it seems to be displaced.

Ayman’s square at the end of the work, seen from the southwest. The two shorter walls were later additions built on dirt that had accumulated against the southern wall; they were removed. In the center of the square is a shallow, irregularly shaped pit that was filled with ash and pottery, mostly Ptolemaic. Unfortunately, we found no trace of sphinx bases.

We extended Abdel Aziz’s square to the south to try to find the south face of the theoretical wall/pylon, and to the west to confirm that we do actually have the west face. The west face is real, but on the south the brick continued into the baulk, although it is broken by a later baked brick feature (a well?). The pottery associated with the well (?) is Ptolemaic.

Before we back-filled the squares, they had to be mapped, and that is what I spent much of this week doing. It is very finicky work, particularly when dealing with mud brick. Since a heat wave hit Luxor this week, it was also very hot work.

Once each square was mapped, we laid down plastic matting over the excavated surfaces then began back-filling the squares. Back-filling protects the features from erosion, and the plastic matting will let the next team to excavate here know when they have reached the limits of our work.

On Sunday the two blocks from the north face of Mut’s second pylon were put back into position, a delicate task as the blocks are different heights and neither has a flat lower surface. On the left, Jaap and the masons make sure the alignment is right as the eastern block is lowered into position. By the end of the week both blocks were in place and secure. All that remains now is to cover the new base with a coating tinted to blend in with the ancient stone.

We are building up the inner face of the enclosure wall west of the Propylon to keep brick debris from falling down onto the area below. The construction is of mud brick on top of baked brick, mimicking the ancient construction. On the left, the bricklayer studies the wall before he begins work as he will build it with the same batter as the face of the propylon. By mid-week he was almost finished (right).

To get the bricks from the spot where they were delivered to the building sites, a procession of pairs of men carry baskets containing 3 or 4 bricks. This season’s work consumed over 4,000 baked bricks, which is a lot to move!

The first of the Chapel D ceiling blocks went up on its mastaba early in the week. While not as large as the huge block moved last week (the siba can handle it), it is still a sizable piece of stone that must be handled with care.

The ceiling blocks in their new home, with Chapel D behind them. The blocks on the mastaba in front of them are also from Chapel D.

By the end of work on Thursday we were almost finished building the mastabas. The ones that will hold the Taharqa ram (center) and a group of decorated blocks just inside the precinct entrance (right) received their finishing coats today. We will spend the rest of our time here getting the various sculptures, reliefs and decorated blocks onto their new bases. Preservation is an important component of any archaeological work.

I realized when I typed the last caption that you may not know what the “Taharqa ram” is or its significance. In 1979, at the north end of the Mut Temple’s East Porch we found the head of a ram with a king below its chin (left), along with fragments of the king’s body. The ram’s body was found nearby but had deteriorated to a shapeless mass of granite. Richard dated the head stylistically to the reign of Taharqa. In 2001, at the north end of the West Porch, we found the body (but not the head) of a second ram with the names of Taharqa on its base, thus confirming the dating of the head found in 1979. These two sculptures are among the very few rams of Taharqa found in Egypt. The ram’s head was taken to Cairo for the Museum of Egyptian Civilization.

The new paving has acquired another graffito, probably by the same artist. This time he has chosen to show a queen or goddess, carved with the same skill as the first graffito.

When she takes a break from pottery, Julia photographs the birds that feed in the sacred lake. She took this superb picture of a kingfisher poised to dive on Thursday.

Jaap’s wife, Egyptologist Julia Harvey, arrived on February 15, completing this season’s small team. Julia has agreed to take on the pottery, with which she has considerable experience. She already has the first batches sorted and organized.

We finished work on the paving west of the Taharqa Gate early in the week and Mary got up on a ladder to photograph the results. As expected, some of the newly-exposed stone was badly decayed, but enough survives to show the course of the roadway.

Abdel Aziz’s square north of the Ramesses III temple is no longer boring. After about 1.2 m of clean earth, we began to encounter mud brick. By the end of the week, aside from a few shallow pits with stone, mud brick covered almost the whole square and we had found a line of baked brick along the west side. We are fairly certain that what we have now are the foundations either of the temple’s north enclosure wall or perhaps its pylon. Ramesses’ temple stood within its own mud-brick enclosure (remember, it was outside the precinct until the 4^th century BC), of which only the west and south walls survive. The eastern wall seems to have been completely eaten away by centuries of flooding.

With the Taharqa Gate finished, we opened a new square north of Abdel Aziz to continue our search for sphinx bases. Ayman has encountered the same thick layer of wind-blown earth over broken stone. By the end of the week he was about 90 cm below the modern surface. At least some of the stone in this square seems to be larger and in better condition than in Abdel Aziz’s square.

Several years ago we rebuilt the west wing of the Mut Temple’s mud brick 2^nd Pylon to a height of about 3 m to give visitors some idea of its appearance. Of the pylon’s sandstone gateway very little is left, as you can see. We have determined, however, that the two remaining inscribed blocks actually join, the lower one fitting to the left of the upper, although both are somewhat out of position now. We decided this season to put these two blocks back in place and started work on Tuesday.

Once the two blocks were removed we had to clean up the accumulated dirt, plant remains and deteriorated stone behind them (left). By the end of work Wednesday the debris had been removed, a new support for the blocks was well underway, the new construction conforming to the shape of the remaining ancient blocks. The 2 main pieces of the larger block are ready to be re-joined (right), with stainless steel rods ensuring that the join is secure.

Once the mastaba we built last week was dry, we began moving decorated blocks onto it. Some were relatively easy: large, but able to be moved by a few men using a wooden stretcher and stout straps. Hassan supervises the careful placement of such a block.

The beautifully carved block in the center of this picture was another matter entirely. Not only is it huge, but its lower surface has been both cut away and worn by time, making it difficult to balance. While it could be moved to the edge of the mastaba with a combination of siba (tripod and winch) and levers, it was too heavy for the siba to raise it to the top of the mastaba.

On Thursday morning Mahmoud Farouk, foreman of the work at Karnak (center) and an expert at moving large blocks, used a hydraulic jack, levers and baulks of wood to raise the block gradually to the level of the mastaba.

Once the block was on the mastaba, the siba came back into use to support the block so the wood could be removed and the block gradually tipped into position. This took all morning.

By noon the block was in its final position it’s shallowest end supported by a block of sandstone. Hassan, Mahmoud and the crew are justly proud of the work!

We have also built a second mastaba to hold the several inscribed and decorated ceiling blocks from Chapel D, like this one,  that cannot be put back in place as not enough is left of the chapel (visible in the background). This will not only protect them from water infiltration but will also improve the appearance of the approach to the chapel and the Taharqa Gate.

In the meantime, I have found time to start work in the Montuemhat Crypt, comparing Charles Edwin Wilbour’s corrections to Mariette’s copy of the texts  with what is still on the walls. A small mirror is essential to direct light on shadowed areas of the wall. From what I have seen so far, many of Wilbour’s corrections are accurate.

Adding graffiti to temples is an ancient tradition that seems to be continuing today. The new paving in the gateway of the Mut Temple’s 1^st pylon is only a few months old and already it has acquired its first graffito. The figure has a cobra on its forehead and what looks like a crudely carved beak (Horus?). It wears an elaborate crown with sun disk and a very fancy robe with checkered shoulder straps and diagonal lines on the sleeves. Pity the artist wasn’t more talented.

Jaap took this terrific photograph of two small lizards locked in combat.

And Julia contributed this photograph of a crow diving after a kite. Life is never dull at Mut!

Raw/Cooked: Marela Zacarias, February 1, 2013 through April 28, 2013 (Image: DIG_E_2013_Raw_Cooked_Marela_Zacarias_001_PS4.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2013)

Zacarias conceived these objects from the outset to be quasi-organic and anthropomorphic; she shapes and grows her works, golem-like, in her studio, sketching them first with ordinary window screen, plywood, a power drill and screws.  Zacarias has perfected her technique (painting and sanding multiple layers of joint compound before covering all with original painted designs) through rigorous studio practice. She’s also a serious colorist—for Raw/Cooked she spent hours studying the color palettes of the original murals at the Museum—and a bit of an activist who often works with local communities to incorporate the history of spaces, things and people. In Supple Beat each title refers to actual street names and addresses of the Williamsburg Houses. Certain titles have other associations too, like 202-254 Graham,  which stretches toward the mezzanine balcony and reminds Zacarias of the great American choreographer and dancer Martha Graham.

While Zacarias has created both figurative and abstract murals in the past, her interests and studio practice in recent years have shifted towards abstraction and pattern and intersecting histories. Whether she’s inviting participation from local residents on public art projects or advocating for immigrants’ rights, she has track record of combining her aesthetic interests with social and political activism; in Hartford, Connecticut she was the cofounder of Latino/as Contra La Guerra (Latino/as Against the War) and also worked closely with the Regional Coalition for Immigrant Rights in Connecticut. In the case of the Williamsburg Murals Zacarias appreciates that the city of New York and the WPA made a bold move in supporting abstract art, commissioning works by Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Kelpe, Albert Swindon and Balcombe Greene (little known abstractionists at the time, now revered as an important American artists working in the Constructivist tradition—think forerunners of Color Field and Hard-edge painting.) Against the odds these murals had a life in the Williamsburg Houses, were lost beneath coats of paint in the post-war period, and finally rediscovered and restored in the late-1980s. Supple Beat takes inspiration from the strength and vision of 1930s New Yorkers—artists, urban planners, and regular people who lived through the Great Depression. It also sends out a hopeful note for urban renewal and the future of livable neighborhoods in New York City.