To mark its 200th anniversary, the Brooklyn Museum curators explored various ideas for creatively integrating works spanning the museum’s history of collecting. One such theme emerged: gold—and it became the starting point for the highly praised exhibition “Solid Gold.”
With over 500 gilded objects on display, the exhibition delves into the grandeur of gold as a material and color throughout history. It also examines the metal’s multitude of associations, past and present, which couldn’t be more topical, as its value as a commodity continues to skyrocket in the face of economic uncertainties.
“It offered an opportunity to develop an exhibition that would showcase work from all the museum’s collections, since the medium of gold, as well as simulations of the color, permeates our collecting history,” shares Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture. “Solid Gold offers a moment of celebration and joy.”
Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum
Visitors are treated to works across a range of disciplines—fashion, jewelry, luxury objects, painting, sculpture, and film—some of which are regularly exhibited at the museum, but over 100 have rarely, if ever, been on display. The exhibition is organized into eight themed sections, with historical pieces intentionally set with and against contemporary ones. “I wanted to illustrate how the many styles and forms of goldworking through history are resurrected and echo earlier designs and patterns,” Yokobosky explains. “For example, juxtaposing pre-Colombian gold pectorals that depict beings with golden smiles with grillz created in recent decades illustrates a continuing idea of dental adornment. Perhaps we believed grillz were visually ‘new,’ but, like many design trends, there are often earlier precedents.”
Highlights from Solid Gold include a large sarcophagus lid from Dynasty 22 (945–740 B.C.E.) that hasn’t been available for public viewing in over a century; the museum’s Lunar Moth, one of only two pianos designed by Edward Steichen in existence; and Marc Quinn’s “Siren,” a life-sized 18-karat gold sculpture of supermodel Kate Moss in a yoga pose that’s on view in the United States for the first time. “When I made the ‘first pass’ of the Solid Gold checklist, I knew that Marc Quinn’s ‘Siren’ was a must for the show. [It] exemplifies so many of gold’s operatives in the world,” Yokobosky says.
“The interesting thing about gold is what it represents to people. It’s a belief system—the idea that something can be perfect in an imperfect world; that it can transcend degradation and entropy to remain perfect, golden, and untarnished forever. Gold symbolizes immortality, a collective wish to live forever,” artist Marc Quinn tells us. “That’s why I made ‘Siren’ out of gold—to create a sculpture that reflects this collective belief system about value. The sculpture has always been, to me, a sculpture of the image of Kate Moss that we have collectively hallucinated as a perfect ideal, who has a life independent from the real Kate, who, like anyone else, is simply human. We collectively construct these images of perfection, whether through Photoshop, AI, often in fashion and across the media, only to forget they aren’t real. And then we punish ourselves for failing to live up to them.”
When asked about some of his favorite pieces in the exhibition, Yokobosky brings our attention to The Blonds’ Cleopatra Catsuit and Winged Cape from its 2016 Egyptian Disco collection. The designers were inspired by a 24-karat gold cape worn by Elizabeth Taylor in the film Cleopatra (1963) that itself was inspired by the mythic golden phoenix. “While [designer Irene Sharaff’s] original design was based on a mythic bird and handed-down accounts of Cleopatra’s life, I love how the legends and myths were reimagined by The Blonds to become actual, golden clothes once again,” the curator notes.
Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum
The fashion industry’s use of gold is prominently displayed throughout and is one of the exhibition’s high notes, with works from The Blonds, Balenciaga, Hubert de Givenchy, Azzedine Alaïa, Anna Sui, and Yves Saint Laurent, to name a few. The Christian Dior by Gianfranco Ferré Hélios ensemble showcases haute couture’s brilliant ways of working with gold. “Gold bugle beading, sequins, glitter, gilded leaves, gold-painted sequins, gold papier cinétique overlay—it’s a magnificent combination of materials, color, and techniques,” Yokobosky points out.
Other notable items on view that resonate with the curator include a collection of gold tweezers dated between 100 BCE and 800 CE that are part of Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection; Agnes Martin’s “Friendship,” a painting depicting a grid of gold squares that employs a centuries-old goldworking technique; and Walter Van Beirendonck’s “Love Shoes and Love Boots” constructed in a gold shade of leather.
While it’s easy to focus on the spectacular works on display in Solid Gold, Yokobosky explains that its curation is centered on the overall experience. “Having spent a good portion of my career as an exhibition designer, when I am composing an exhibition checklist, I am already planning the sequence of works, the juxtapositions, and the visual sequence of the viewer experience. With this in mind, ‘Solid Gold’ is an experience more than a sequence of singular works.”
Solid Gold is on view at Brooklyn Museum through July 6, 2025. For more information and to plan your visit, click here.
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