Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m2), the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects.[2] Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the museum's Beaux-Arts building was designed by McKim, Mead & White.
Not to be confused with Brooklyn Children's Museum or Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Former name
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn Museum of Art
August 1823 (as Brooklyn Apprentices' Library)
200 Eastern Parkway,
Brooklyn, New York
500,000 objects
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238
1895
McKim, Mead & White; French, Daniel Chester
0155
August 22, 1977
March 15, 1966
The Brooklyn Museum was founded in 1823 as the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library and merged with the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1843. The museum was conceived as an institution focused on a broad public.[3] The Brooklyn Museum's current building dates to 1897 and has been expanded several times since then. The museum initially struggled to maintain its building and collection, but it was revitalized in the late 20th century following major renovations.
Significant areas of the collection include antiquities, specifically their collection of Egyptian antiquities spanning over 3,000 years. European, African, Oceanic, and Japanese art make for notable antiquities collections as well. American art is heavily represented, starting at the Colonial period. Artists represented in the collection include Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Judy Chicago, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Max Weber. The museum features the Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden, which features salvaged architectural elements from throughout New York City.[4]
Art and exhibitions[edit]
The Brooklyn Museum's collection contains around 500,000 objects.[2] In the twentieth century, Brooklyn Museum exhibitions sought to present an encyclopedic view of art and culture, with a focus on educating a broad public.[3] In 1923, the museum was one of the first U.S. institutions to exhibit African cast-metal and other objects as art, rather than as ethnological artifacts.[267][268] The museum's acquisitions during this time also included such varied objects as the interior of a Swiss house,[269] a stained glass window,[270] and a pipe organ.[271] The museum's first period room opened in 1929; these period rooms represented middle-class and non-elite citizens' homes, in contrast to other museums. which tended to focus on upper-class period rooms.[272] The 17th-century Jans Martense Schenck house became part of the Brooklyn Museum's collection in the 1950s,[273] as did the interior of a room in John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s Midtown Manhattan home.[274]
In 1967 the Federated Institutes of Cultural Enrichment (FICE), a coalition of Brooklyn-based arts organizations, demanded that the Brooklyn Museum exhibit more works by artists from the borough, especially African American artists.[122][275][276] The museum then hired black curator Henri Ghent to direct a new "Community Gallery", supported at first by the New York State Council on the Arts;[122] he worked at the museum till 1972.[277] Ghent's first exhibition, Contemporary Afro-American Arts (1968), included artists Joe Overstreet, Kay Brown, Frank Smith, and Otto Neals.[123][278]
In 1999–2000, the Sensation exhibition of Charles Saatchi's collection provoked controversy for its inclusion of works such as Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary.[279] The exhibition prompted then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani to threaten to withhold city funding from the museum.[280] In the resulting lawsuit,[281] a U.S. district court judge ruled that the New York City government could not withhold city funds from the Brooklyn Museum on First Amendment grounds.[282]
In 2002, the museum received the work The Dinner Party, by feminist artist Judy Chicago, as a gift from The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Its permanent exhibition began in 2007, as a centerpiece for the museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum featured Manifest Destiny, an 8-by-24-foot (2.4 m × 7.3 m) oil-on-wood mural by Alexis Rockman that was commissioned by the museum as a centerpiece for the second-floor Mezzanine Gallery and marked the opening of the museum's renovated Grand Lobby and plaza.[283][284] Other exhibitions have showcased the works of various contemporary artists including Patrick Kelly, Chuck Close, Denis Peterson, Ron Mueck, Takashi Murakami, Mat Benote,[285] Kiki Smith, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Ching Ho Cheng, Sylvia Sleigh William Wegman, Jimmy de Sana, Oscar yi Hou, Baseera Khan, Loraine O'Grady, John Edmonds, Cecilia Vicuña, and a 2004 survey show of work by Brooklyn artists, Open House: Working in Brooklyn.[286]
In 2008, curator Edna Russman announced that she believes 10 out of 30 works of Coptic art held in the museum's collection—second-largest in North America are fake. The artworks were exhibited starting in 2009.[287] Costumes from The Crown and The Queen's Gambit television series were put on display as part of its virtual exhibition "The Queen and the Crown" in November 2020.[288][289] From June through September 2023, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso's death, the museum hosted It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby, curated by Hannah Gadsby.[290][291] To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library's incorporation, the museum launched a series of special exhibits and events in 2024.[292]
Collections[edit]
Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art[edit]
The Brooklyn Museum has been building a collection of Egyptian artifacts since the beginning of the twentieth century, incorporating both collections purchased from others, such as that of American Egyptologist Charles Edwin Wilbour, whose heirs also donated his library to become the museum's Wilbour Library of Egyptology, and objects obtained during museum-sponsored archeological excavations. The Egyptian collection includes objects ranging from statuary, such as the well-known "Bird Lady" terra cotta figure, to papyrus documents (among others the Brooklyn Papyrus).[293]
The Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern collections are housed in a series of galleries in the museum. Egyptian artifacts can be found in the long-term exhibit, Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity, as well as in the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Galleries. Near Eastern artifacts are located in the Hagop Kevorkian Gallery.[293]
Programs[edit]
The first Saturday of each month, the Brooklyn Museum stays open until 11 pm, and general admission is waived after 5 pm, although some ticketed exhibitions may require an entrance fee. Regular first Saturday activities include educational family-oriented activities such as collection-based art workshops, gallery tours, lectures, live performances dance parties.[318] The museum started hosting First Saturdays in October 1998,[319] and the event had attracted 1.5 million total visitors as of 2023.[320]
As part of the Museum Apprentice Program, the museum hires teenage high schoolers to give tours in the museum's galleries during the summer, assist with the museum's weekend family programs throughout the year, participate in talks with museum curators, serve as a teen advisory board to the museum, and help plan teen events.[321] The museum also runs the Museum Education Fellowship Program, a ten-month position where fellows lead school group visits with a focus on various topics from the collection.[322] School Youth and Family Fellows teach Gallery Studio Programs and School Partnerships while Adult and Public Programs Fellows curate and organize Thursday night as well as First Saturday Programming.[322]
The museum has posted many pieces to a digital collection that allows the public to tag and curate sets of objects online, as well as solicit additional scholarship contributions.[323] The museum's ASK App allows visitors to talk with staff and educators about works in the collection.[324][325]