Foliate Border with Head, from Turner Towers, 135 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn

1928

This block comes from Turner Towers, a circa 1928 co-op building located opposite the Brooklyn Museum. Its makers worked anonymously for a company that made decorative architectural elements, and to which the block would have been credited. This is unlike the Yorùbá and Māori artists who made the other works here; their identities are no longer known because their names were not recorded by those who sold or collected these works, though they would have been renowned at the time. Artists poured cement into molds to make decorative elements such as this. Fashionable Beaux-Arts style-designs such as this male head and floral garland recall classical Greek and Roman models. Many of the building’s exterior ornaments were not replaced following maintenance work in the 1980s. Fragments were given to the Museum, some of which were later installed at the Brooklyn Museum-Eastern Parkway subway station.