Valerie Hegarty, Table Cloth with Fruit and Crows, mixed mediums, dimensions variable. InDining Room, Cane Acres Plantation, Summerville, South Carolina. Courtesy BrooklynMuseum.
Valerie Hegarty has intervened in two of the Brooklyn Museum’s period rooms, the second in a series of invited actions by various artists. Particularly powerful is her trashing of the dining room in the antebellum Cane Acres Plantation (South Carolina). Nineteenth-century painted still-life elements—fancy dishes, flowers, fruit—are transformed into three-dimensional objects assaulted by crows. The birds have ripped mercilessly into the watermelons: it’s delirious vengeance, Django-style.