Rob Wynne's 'FLOAT' Exhibition at Brooklyn Museum Engages Historical Collections

Rob Wynne's exhibition 'FLOAT' at the Brooklyn Museum's Luce Center for American Art ran from June 6, 2018 to March 3, 2019. The show featured glass installations and mirrored text pieces placed throughout the museum's fifth-floor American galleries, creating dialogues with permanent collection works. Wynne's interventions included 'Extra Life' (2018), a swirling glass galaxy in the elevator lobby that interacted with 19th-century marble sculptures by Chauncey Bradley Ives, Randolph Rodgers, and Frederick William MacMonnies. A gold brooch snake from 2011 was inserted into a Meso-American antiquities case, positioned near a 1400-1700-year-old Ecuadorian jaguar vessel. Text-based works like 'I Saw Myself See Myself' (2018) engaged with Kem Weber's 1934 Art Deco vanity, while 'Fly' (2008) overlooked paintings by William Glackens and John Sloane. The exhibition concluded with 'The Moon Viewers' (2018), a large-scale glass installation facing Alex Katz's 'Arthur 1' (2017) that used the gallery doorway as a compositional element. Wynne's work employed shimmering silver, golden snakes, and prismatic glass to create both critical and empathetic responses to historical American art. The artist's installations referenced works ranging from Martin Johnson Heade's tropical scenes to John Singleton Copley's portraits, creating networks of meaning across centuries.