Penelope Umbrico: Leonards for Leonard & 5,537,594 Suns From Flickr (Partial)
Overview
Presented concurrently across public sites within BAM’s Peter Jay Sharp Building, this dual-site exhibition featured two site-responsive installations by artist Penelope Umbrico. Installed in the Leonard Natman Room and across the public box office windows, the exhibition brought singular physical artifacts and internet-based photographic archives into dynamic conversation, probing how collective memory, desire, and presence function in a digital age.
Project Context & Curatorial Role
As Curator, I invited Umbrico to respond directly to the history, architectural scale, and transactional rhythms of BAM’s lobby spaces, creating a dual installation that examined the contrast between analog materiality and mass digital aggregation.
Leonards for Leonard (Leonard Natman Room): Prompted by a singular oil portrait of Leonard Natman—a former BAM house manager who developed youth education programs and died of AIDS in 1986—Umbrico explored the stark contrast between physical objects and web-based archives. Because Natman died before the consumer internet, a Google image search for his name yielded zero results. To provide the portrait with digital companionship, Umbrico collected thumbnail headshots from search results for "Leonard" and printed 100 as theatrical headshots. Installed across from the portrait, figures like Leonard Cohen, Leonard Nimoy, and anonymous individuals created an active dialogue between singular material memory and atomized web presences.
5,537,594 Suns From Flickr (Partial) (Box Office Installation): Activated simultaneously at the high-traffic ticket windows, Umbrico placed thousands of machine C-prints of cropped suns into a sun-less, transactional space. Sourced from millions of sunset photographs uploaded to Flickr, the installation cropped away individual landscapes to focus solely on the sun itself. By massing consumer photo prints together behind the box office glass, the work demonstrated how individual attempts to capture an ephemeral personal moment aggregate into a standardized, collective ritual.
Role: Curator
Date: January 6—March 14, 2010
Location: Leonard Natman Room, BAM Peter Jay Sharp Building, Brooklyn, NY
Artist: Penelope Umbrico
