ART: The Bronx coup

EXPANSION ERA New director Holly Block moves from downtown to the Bronx Museum—and gets in on the neighborhood’s sprucing-up act.

It’s too soon to tell whether Yankee fans will be happy in October, but Bronx boosters will certainly have something to celebrate. On -October 3, Mayor Bloomberg will cut the ribbon on the Bronx Museum of the Arts, unveiling its $19 million expansion. The gleaming new building—abutting the museum’s original glass-enclosed, black-box structure on the Grand Concourse-—doubles the institution’s exhibition space and education facilities. It’s also an icon of change, symbolizing the renaissance taking place within the museum and in the surrounding neighborhood.

Coinciding with the expansion, the museum has just appointed a new director, Holly Block, who’s moving on from her 18-year tenure as director of Art in General, an alternative space in lower Manhattan. “I was clear with them that if they were looking for a traditional director for a traditional museum, I was not the right candidate,” says Block, who acknowledges that this is the first time she’ll be working for an arts institution with a permanent collection.

For Block, the new position is something of a homecoming, since her first job in New York, in 1985, was as curator of the Bronx Museum’s satellite shows. During her three-year stint in the position, she gave first shows to artist-educator Tim Rollins and sculptor John Ahearn at a time when the Bronx was a mecca for hip-hop and graffiti. “But let’s face it: When I was there, there were no awnings on the street,” Block says, pointing out the obvious improvements to the Grand Concourse. “They were all shredded or gone entirely.” By contrast, the Concourse is now in the midst of an upswing, with the city sprucing things up with plantings and new streetlights in anticipation of the new Yankee Sta-dium, which the City Council recently greenlighted.

“Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture,” the exhibition inaugurating the new facil-ity, is a celebration of the music, performance, poetry and experimental art forms that came out of Brazil in the late 1960s. Most New Yorkers recognize the movement for its music, which -replaced bossa nova with the far more percussive and political songs of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. “The Bronx Museum has -always had a global perspective from a point of view that is much more open and porous, not hegemonic but from the margins,” says Carlos Basualdo of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who curated the exhibition. “And so much of tropicalia, many of its high points, happened in New York—so it’s fantastic that it’s coming to the Bronx.”

“Tropicália” opens, along with the museum itself, on October 7, and a related series of programs will kick off on October 13 with the U.S. premiere of Brasilintime, a documentary about ’60s Brazilian music directed by hip-hop photographer Brian Cross (a.k.a. B+). Bronx Museum chief curator Lydia Yee is rushing to install the 250 works and objects in the show, including Hélio Oiticica’s monumental 1967 piece (also titled Tropicalia), while construction is finishing up.

With an aluminum facade that resembles  a folded-paper model of a skyscraper, the new building will stand out among the midcentury apartment houses and bodegas on the street. “As you walk down the avenue, you feel

the building coming toward you, folding

you in,” explains Bernardo Fort-Brescia of -Arquitectonica, the New York–Miami firm that designed the edifice. “It gives the building a civic presence.” Though it’s only four stories high, it seems much taller in contrast to the glass-and-steel black box of the original building, which was constructed in the 1960s as a synagogue; the city bought it in 1970. The new facade’s steep vertical folds are echoed on one interior wall of the new galleries, which together increase the museum’s exhibition capacity by more than 16,000 square feet.

“With this new space, we can now plan and accept shows of a much bigger scale,” says Block, who adds that the immediate challenge is completing the building on time. The project, initiated by former director Jenny Dixon and overseen by her successor, Olivia Georgia, is phase one of a renovation that will eventually include demolishing the original structure and adding a residential tower and parking garage. All of this is -intended to generate revenue to add to the -museum’s $2.6 million operating budget; given its status as a member of the Cultural Institutions Group, the museum is now funded mostly by city sources. “Usually, everybody who opens a new museum goes through this slump where they are exhausted by the time it’s finished,” says Block. “The great thing is that I didn’t build it, so I can come in fresh with all these new ideas.”

The Bronx Museum of the Arts (1040 Grand Concourse at 165th St; 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org) reopens October 7.

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