The Guggenheim’s It Came from Brooklyn concert series

Tourists clog the ground floor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on a weekday morning, necks craned in awe at Frank Lloyd Wright’s circular wonder. Barely two flights up, a disgruntled fat kid has plopped himself onto a bench in protest of what must amount to a double bummer: a museum…that goes uphill. Alas, the peak will reward him with neither Xbox nor ice cream. Sharing the bench, somewhat more cheerily, are Bronwyn Keenan, the Guggenheim’s associate director of special events, and Sam Brumbaugh, a novelist and sometime concert booker. Together, the pair have been charged with attracting a different—if arguably whinier—demographic to the museum: indie-rock aficionados.

It Came from Brooklyn, a multimedia concert series produced by the two, kicks off a monthly run on Friday 14 with a gangbusters bill featuring rock bands the Walkmen and High Places, novelist Colson Whitehead and comedian Leo Allen. The show will begin stunningly, with the Brooklyn “Steppers” Marching Band parading up the Guggenheim’s ramp and, in Brumbaugh’s words, “blasting out some Brooklyn hip-hop.”

It Came from Brooklyn is hardly the first music series to occur in a Manhattan museum. But whereas institutions often secrete their noisy guests in a basement (the New Museum) or gift shop (the Whitney), the Guggenheim will present shows in its famed rotunda. The concerts add a glorious, if unlikely, concert venue to the city. “When you’re a band of our size in New York, you find yourself playing the same rooms again and again,” says Hamilton Leithauser, the Walkmen’s singer. “It gets kind of weird. Playing the rotunda should be a change of pace.”

Keenan and Brumbaugh were inspired to launch the series after hiring Blonde Redhead to perform at a 2007 gala and observing the band play the room. “We’ve had music here before, but it’s generally been an afterthought,” Keenan says, adding that such events “really are part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s mission. It’s a social space—it’s supposed to be interdisciplinary and activated in these ways.”

While the Guggenheim embodies a very particular uptown sensibility, this series loudly devotes itself to the voices that have bubbled up from Brooklyn over the past decade. The producers define the shows’ connections to the borough liberally—the Walkmen, for instance, were hatched in Harlem and now mainly reside in Philadelphia—and run the risk of falling into the media trap of using Brooklyn as shorthand for youth culture. “The music and art scene in Brooklyn has always been in flux,” Brumbaugh argues. “People come through, go back, rehearse… But I really think the last ten years have been a true scene in both the music and book worlds.”

It Came from Brooklyn, which in future months will include bands both recognizable (Interpol spin-off Julian Plenti) and less familiar (the charmingly named I’m in You), is well-timed. This year coincides with the Guggenheim’s 50th anniversary—and an economic climate that has battered museums, whose fund-raising efforts could surely benefit from the series’s $45 tickets.

Perhaps more crucially, it is difficult to imagine the Guggenheim turning its rotunda over to rock crowds of decades past. “Years ago, the more institutional places would perceive even the tamest, nerdiest of indie-rock audiences as being wild-card ruffians,” says Brumbaugh, who in the ’90s booked the storied Soho venue Thread Waxing Space. “These days, this kind of audience is much more understood.” Brumbaugh looks admiringly about the city’s most renowned spiral. “There’s no history of gun incidents,” he says, “at Belle and Sebastian shows.”

Rock rumblings from other NYC museums

After moving to its generous Bowery headquarters, the New Museum of Contemporary Art inaugurated “Get Weird,” which presents adventurous young acts (BARR, Akron/Family) in a basement space. Shows occur the third Thursday of every month.

Not surprisingly, the Metropolitan Museum of Art leans toward classical performances, including a chamber-music series conceived by Itzhak Perlman. But its upcoming concert season will also feature Patti Smith, performing an October 17 show in conjunction with the museum’s Robert Frank exhibit.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has long presented odd sounds, staging concerts in its subterranean cafeteria/gift shop. It just concluded a cluster of shows presented as part of the museum’s Dan Graham exhibit, featuring rough-edged guitar bands Abe Vigoda, Vivian Girls and Woods.

In the summer, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) turns its Sculpture Garden over to live music every Thursday evening. This month, in association with its striking installation by Song Dong, the museum focuses on music from China.

It Came from Brooklyn takes over the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Fri 14.

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