‘Visions of an American Dreamland’: New book and Brooklyn Museum exhibit highlight Coney Island
My parents first took me to Astroland, the amusement park at Coney Island, when I was 6 years old. The place terrified me. I told my father I never wanted to go back — and he told me I was a sissy. To this day, I believe he was secretly relieved; I had seen his face turn white (we were belted into one of the two-person canvas seats) on the Parachute Jump. My mother, on the other hand, who had been a WAC in World War II, showed us both up; she immediately went back for a second jump with her sister, my aunt Violet, a former WAVE.
These memories are occasioned by the publication of a dazzling, dizzying new book/exhibition catalog “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.” The catalog accompanies the exhibition of the same name, which opens this Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition was conceived and organized by Robin Jaffee Frank, chief curator and Krieble curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, where the exhibit started its run in January. (Jaffee Frank, not incidentally, is a Brooklyn native.) Via email, I asked her about the genesis of the exhibition: “As a child, I had wondrous and strange experiences at Coney Island … My family and I still go there and we believe in its never-ending potential for magic … [This is the] first exhibition to look at the site’s enduring status as a muse for artists, from its rise in popularity as a seaside resort in the Civil War era through the closing of its space-age amusement park, Astroland, after decades of urban decline.”