Review: Time traveling through Solid Gold

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The Brooklyn Museum's lustrous bicentennial exhibition "Solid Gold" is as much of an exploration of mankind's obsession with the precious metal as it is an open invitation to time travel. 

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Over 500 shimmering paintings, costumes, jewelry, coins, sculptures and artifacts expound the beauty, spirituality, honor, success and wealth that gold has signified since the dawn of civilization. Through thirteen rooms, we are whisked around the globe following the evolution of man's relationship with it, from painted Egyptian sarcophagi and opulent Japanese folding screens, to sparkling Cartier timepieces and solid gold Adidas sneakers.

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We begin our journey in the dark void of interstellar space. Upon entry, the exhibit placards asks us to consider the Golden Record — the gold-plated phonograph records sling-shotted beyond our solar system aboard Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977. They carry time capsule evidence of humanity's existence in the form of music, multilingual greetings, encoded images.

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With a start, we fly through the ruins of Ancient Egypt and Rome (spotting Elizabeth Taylor dripping in 24-karat gold cloth in "Cleopatra" on two separate occasions) and end in 2024 with the Oscars, Grammys and Golden Globes.

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The key to time travel is the meticulous curation of the sprawling exhibit. We are constantly reminded of where we came from and where we are going by the juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary pieces. A 15th-century illuminated manuscript shares a display case with a 1969 copy of American Vogue. The Madonna and Child rendered on 13th- and 14-th century Italian altarpieces hold the haunted stare of an incarcerated man, partially obscured by gold-flecked tar, in Titus Kaphar's painting "The Jerome Project (My Loss)" on the opposite wall.

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But we'd be remiss to ignore the dark histories — the human and environmental costs of gold. In the second room of the exhibit, a video installation plays an excerpt from Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders's "The Salt of the Earth," following photographer Sebastião Salgado's 1980s documentation of Serra Pelada, an open-pit gold mine in Brazil. A slideshow of black and white photos capture 50,000 men piled in a cavernous hole. They are caked in mud and sweat. Each posses the crazed eyes of one who believes that, maybe this time, he will strike fortune in the sack he hauls up the ladder that bends under the weight of hundreds more like him. They look like slaves; the video's narrator quickly reminds us they're not: "They were only slaves to the idea of getting rich... I could almost hear gold whispering in the souls of these men."

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Aside, "Solid Gold" is a grandiose, if sometimes exhaustive, shrine to the endurance of gold as both a durable physical substance and as a persistent symbol. But as we walk through the golden tombs of empires past, it also quietly asks us to ponder our own fleeting existence. The exhibit concludes as much with a Robert Frost poem printed on the wall:

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Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower; 

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf. 

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

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"Solid Gold" is currently on show at The Brooklyn Museum through July 6, 2025. It was organized by Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture; Catherine Futter, director of curatorial affairs and senior curator of decorative arts; and Lisa Small, senior curator of European art; with Imani Williford, curatorial assistant of photography, fashion and material culture.

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November 16, 2024