Brooklyn Heights – Arts/Maker past and present

Excellent video – “Beneath the surface of Brooklyn’s oldest and most exclusive neighborhood lurk the ghosts of a darker past” @ The New York Times Weekend Explorer video. Lots of artists of the past were once there and now it’s currently home of my favorite artist-maker Joe Coleman (featured at the end of the video). Worth a gander if you have a few moments to watch the video…

THERE’S little of the great 17th-century cabinets of curiosity, from hand-shaped carrots to human-faced pigs, that Joe Coleman, an artist, can’t match in his 20th-century version. He owns a pair of Fiji mermaids and a two-headed prairie dog. He has a framed piece of embroidery sewn by a 19th-century woman in Sag Harbor, N.Y., who had no hands: Mlle. Tunison, ”World’s Greatest Phenomenal.”

If the island of Dr. Moreau had had a visitors’ center, it might have looked like Mr. Coleman’s four-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights, the living room of which houses his Odditorium, a natural descendant of the great specimen collections. The armadillo was the most popular quadraped of the 17th-century curiosity cabinets; Mr. Coleman has a Tiffany-like table lamp, the carapacious shade of which is an armadillo’s shell.