Alexis Rockman: Manifest Destiny

Alexis Rockman's Manifest Destiny translates into haunting yet inspiring simplicity the environmental crisis of global warming. In conjunction with the opening of the Brooklyn Museum's new entrance pavilion in April 2004, the distinguished American artist Rockman (born 1962) was commissioned to paint a visionary 8-by-24-foot mural about the distant future boroughs. Rockman's project suggests what geological, botanical and zoological changes might transpire in the ecosystem of the area thousands or even millions of years ahead. Believing that the past provides clues to the future, Rockman drew from the museum's historical paintings collection for source material, including such works as Albert Bierstadt's A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (1866), a monumental Hudson River School landscape. The artist is also not without humor--humans may have drowned Brooklyn, but the world survives, and here and there, life's indomitable spirit prevails. On top of a floating oil drum, its antennae rapt with attention, is that ineradicable symbol of eternity--the cockroach. This book looks at preliminary drawings and research by the artist for Manifest Destiny and contains a full-color foldout image of the mural.