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Arts & Attractions Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is the second largest art museum in New York City and one of the largest in the United States. One of the premier art institutions in the world, its permanent collection includes more than one and a half million objects, from anci... more
The Brooklyn Museum is the second largest art museum in New York City and one of the largest in the United States. One of the premier art institutions in the world, its permanent collection includes more than one and a half million objects, from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art, and represents almost every culture. It is housed in a 560,000 square foot, Beaux-Arts building that welcomes approximately half a million visitors each year. Located in Central Brooklyn, a half-hour from midtown Manhattan with its own subway stop, the Museum is set on Eastern Parkway and one block from Grand Army Plaza in a complex of 19th-century parks and gardens that also contains Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Wildlife Center. The mission of the Brooklyn Museum is to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience; committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs; and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation and presentation, the Museum aims to serve its diverse... more
The Brooklyn Museum is the second largest art museum in New York City and one of the largest in the United States. One of the premier art institutions in the world, its permanent collection includes more than one and a half million objects, from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art, and represents almost every culture. It is housed in a 560,000 square foot, Beaux-Arts building that welcomes approximately half a million visitors each year. Located in Central Brooklyn, a half-hour from midtown Manhattan with its own subway stop, the Museum is set on Eastern Parkway and one block from Grand Army Plaza in a complex of 19th-century parks and gardens that also contains Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Wildlife Center.

The mission of the Brooklyn Museum is to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience; committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs; and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation and presentation, the Museum aims to serve its diverse publics as a dynamic, innovative and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.

The Museum's permanent collections include:

Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art
The Museum's collection of ancient Egyptian art is generally acknowledged to be one of the finest in the world. Many of the works on view are presented in a major reinstallation of more than 500 objects on the third floor of the renovated Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing. It includes a chronological presentation ranging from 1350 B.C. during the reign of Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, through the regime of Cleopatra VII. It includes such diverse objects as elaborate cosmetic containers and pieces of jewelry of the New Kingdom in alabaster, wood, ivory, faience, and gold, important Dynasty XXV reliefs of the major deities Amun, Mut, and Khonsu, as well as the world famous Brooklyn Black Head of the Ptolemaic Period. Another portion of the galleries contains a thematic exhibition of almost 200 objects entitled Temples, Tombs, and the Egyptian Universe.

Arts of Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas
The first museum in America to display African objects as art, Brooklyn's collection, particularly strong in works from central Africa, is one of the largest and most important in this country. Recently the galleries were expanded and reinstalled with 250 works of art, including several pieces that have never before been on public view. Also displayed are a carved ivory gong from the Edo people of Benin and an 18th-century wooden figure of King Mishe MiShyaang maMbul of the Kuba people of Zaire, both of which are the only objects of their kind in the United States. Masks, statues, jewelry, and household objects are also displayed.
The Arts of the Pacific collection includes works from Polynesia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. An important reinstallation of more than 50 objects from Melanesia, which features masks, shields, and statuary, recently opened.
The Arts of the America portion of this collection includes some of the most important Andean textiles in the world, including the famous Paracas Textile that dates to between 200 and 100 B.C. Other notable works include a 15th-century Aztec stone jaguar, and a new presentation of Peruvian art including textiles , ceramics, and gold objects.

The Arts of Asia
The Asian art collection contains some of the most comprehensive and diverse holdings in the New York Metropolitan area. The department began in 1903 under the aegis of the Museum's first curator of ethnology, Stewart Culin. The core of the collection was the result of grand expeditions early in the 20th century to East and South Asia. Since then the collection has grown to include Asian cultures such as Cambodia, China, India, Iran, Japan, Thailand, Tibet, and Turkey. The collection of Korean art is one of the most important in the United States. The collection of art from Iran's Qajar dynasty (1790s to 1924) is the only serious collection of its kind on display in America.

Painting, Sculpture, Prints, Drawings, and Photography
The Brooklyn Museum's collection of Painting and Sculpture includes European and American works from the 14th century to the present day. The collection of American paintings is considered one of the finest in the United States. Highlights from the 18th century include famous portraits of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and Charles Willson Peale. Among the 19th-century artists represented are Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, Eastman Johnson, John Singer Sargent, George Inness, and Winslow Homer. 20th-century artists in the collection include Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Alex Katz, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, and Louise Bourgeois.

Decorative Arts, Costumes and Textiles
The Museum's collection of decorative arts is considered one of the most important in the country. A pioneer in the installation of period rooms, the Museum now has 28 on exhibition, ranging from a 17th-century Brooklyn Dutch farmhouse to a 20th-century art deco library designed by Alavoine of Paris and New York. Among the period rooms are a 19th-century Moorish Room, originally a part of John D. Rockefeller's Manhattan mansion, and a mid-19th century parlor and library, taken from a home in Saratoga Springs, New York, replete with a complete set of Noah's art animals. Other objects, among them silver, ceramics, and furniture are also displayed.

The Museum's holdings of costumes and textiles, which includes one of the country's finest collections of 19th-century American and English costumes, as well as the work of 20th-century American designers and French couture, are included in the Decorative Arts department. Because of conservation concerns this wide and varied portion is only occasionally on public view.

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American Identities: A New Look

This major installation of more than three hundred fifty objects from the Brooklyn Museum's premier collection of American art integrates a vast array of fine and decorative arts (silver, furniture, ceramics, and textiles) ranging in date from the colonial period to the present. For the first time, ... [ + ]major objects from these exceptional collections are joined by selections from the Museum's important holdings of Native American and Spanish colonial art. The galleries are organized according to a set of eight innovative themes, through which visitors can explore historical moments and crucial ideas in American visual culture over the course of nearly three hundred years. Featured within these sections are American masterworks for which the Museum's collections have long been known, by such artists and makers as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Herter Brothers, Union Porcelain Works, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, William Edmondson, David Smith, Richard Diebenkorn, and Robert Colescott. Visitors are invited to tour the galleries using an audio guide that offers a variety of voices and perspectives, or they may follow the comprehensive program of signage that provides detailed discussions of the gallery themes, individual object labels, and "Community Voices" labels written by members of the extended Brooklyn Museum community. Also included in the galleries are four video stations, one showing excerpts from the Museum-produced slide show Facing History: The Image of the Black in American Art and three others featuring continuous loops of early films by Thomas Edison that relate to the gallery themes. The tour begins in a gallery called A Brooklyn Orientation (just off the main elevator lobby on the fifth floor), offering an introduction to the Museum's collections of American art and to Brooklyn as a center of art making and production from the colonial era to the present. Introductory signage and a gallery map are also provided at the secondary entrance to the gallery (just off the Cantor Galleries). Visitors are invited to enjoy four seating areas within the galleries for comfortable extended viewing of the works on hand.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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Small Wonders from the American Collections

This special exhibition celebrates a major new installation in the Luce Center for American Art: Visible Storage ? Study Center that gives the public access to more than 350 additional objects from the Museum’s collections. Since its opening in January 2005, the Luce Visible Storage ? Study Center h... [ + ]as housed approximately 2,100 objects in two types of storage units: vitrined cases and paintings screens. The facility also contains forty-two drawers for storage. Beginning in mid-October and in stages over subsequent months, they will be filled with works from the Museum’s renowned American holdings and opened to the public. Once the drawers are full, the number of objects on view in visible storage will rise to 2,500—an increase of almost 20 percent.

The drawers’ contents will encompass a variety of objects from the Americas—including art of the United States as well as of the indigenous and colonial peoples of North and South America—and dating from the pre-Columbian period to the present day. Although the works range widely in terms of medium, date, function, and geographical origin, they do share a diminutive scale and suitability for flat storage. Among the objects that will be installed in the drawers are: American and Hopi ceramic tiles; Mexican pottery stamps; jewelry and other ornaments from Native and South American cultures; Modernist jewelry; silverplated flatware and serving pieces; Spanish Colonial devotional objects; American portrait and mourning miniatures; commemorative medals; and embroidery. As in other sections of the Luce Visible Storage ? Study Center, objects in the drawers are densely installed to maximize the available space and are grouped by type, medium, or culture. Visitors can learn more about the works by using one of the nearby computer kiosks in the facility, or by accessing the Luce database online. To obtain a list of a drawer’s entire contents, use the Map feature and select numbers 41 through 47.

Held in conjunction with the drawers installation, Small Wonders from the American Collections features an eclectic selection of seventy works of art on the walls and in the display cases above the drawers. This exhibition both highlights objects that will be installed in the drawers and reveals a diversity of cultural traditions and artistic practices that constitute American art. A variety of jewelry and objects of personal adornment—although produced by different peoples—function similarly to signify information about the wearer’s identity. Flatware, pins, and other silver items on display reflect a broad array of forms, styles, and uses for this valuable metal. Ceramic tiles made contemporaneously by Native and non-Native Americans provide an interesting cross-cultural comparison with respect to the decoration and marketing of these wares.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with... [ + ] a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating Herstory Gallery exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
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Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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Decorative Arts Galleries

The Brooklyn Museum's decorative arts collection occupies the fourth floor of the Museum. The focus of the collection is a group of American period rooms ranging in date from the 18th century to the 20th century. Interspersed with the period rooms are galleries that display an outstanding collection... [ + ] of American furniture, silver, pewter, glass, and ceramics. Additional objects from the decorative arts collection are on display in American Identities.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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European Paintings

Although the collection of European paintings has often been presented in a chronological arrangement by school or style, this installation exploits the architecture of the soaring Beaux-Arts Court by devoting each wall to an exploration of the meaningful connections that the works display when arra... [ + ]nged according to theme. The section called “Painting Land and Sea” surveys the formal methods that painters have used to render their physical surroundings across the centuries. “Art and Devotion” considers the ways in which the artists of the early Renaissance expressed the central tenets of the Catholic faith. “Narratives Large and Small” shows how artists distill the elements of a story into a single telling moment. Finally, “Tracing the Figure” charts the enduring artistic interest in the human figure, from portraits that place an individual in a clearly defined place and time to timeless abstractions of the human form.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
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Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity

In April, 2003, the Brooklyn Museum completed the reinstallation of its world-famous Egyptian collection, a process that took ten years. Three new galleries joined the four existing ones that had been completed in 1993 to tell the story of Egyptian art from its earliest known origins (circa 3500 B.C... [ + ].) until the period when the Romans incorporated Egypt into their empire (30 B.C.–A.D. 395). Additional exhibits illustrate important themes about Egyptian culture, including women's roles, permanence and change in Egyptian art, temples and tombs, technology and materials, art and communication, and Egypt and its relationship to the rest of Africa. More than 1,200 objects— comprising sculpture, relief, paintings, pottery, and papyri—are now on view, including such treasures as an exquisite chlorite head of a Middle Kingdom princess, an early stone deity from 2650 B.C., a relief from the tomb of a man named Akhty-hotep, and a highly abstract female terracotta statuette created over five thousand years ago.

The title of the installation refers to a central theme of Egyptian life and to the rebirth of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum. The ancient Egyptians created many of the objects now on view to assist in the process of rebirth from this world to the next. This unifying idea led to an artistic conservatism in Egyptian culture that disguises stylistic changes. The balance between permanence and change is a theme that resonates throughout the installation's seven galleries.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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Assyrian Reliefs

These twelve massive carved alabaster panels, on view together for the first time, dominate the walls of the Brooklyn Museum's Hagop Kevorkian Gallery of Ancient Middle Eastern Art. Originally brightly painted, they once adorned the vast palace of King Ashur-nasir-pal II (883–859 B.C.), one of the g... [ + ]reatest rulers of ancient Assyria. Completed in 879 B.C. at the site of Kalhu (modern Nimrud, slightly north of what is now Baghdad, Iraq), the palace was decorated by skilled relief-carvers with these majestic images of kings, divinities, magical beings, and sacred trees.

How the Reliefs Came to Brooklyn

In 879 B.C., King Ashur-nasir-pal II celebrated the completion of his palace at Kalhu by hosting a banquet for 69,574 guests, but the glorious palace was soon abandoned and forgotten. In 1840, nearly three thousand years later, a young English diplomat named Austen Henry Layard noticed an unusually large mound while rafting down the Tigris River. He returned in 1845 to unearth the remains of the palace, sending his discoveries to the British Museum in London. He sent so many monumental sculptures and relief-decorated slabs that the museum sold some of them, including these twelve reliefs. In 1855, the expatriate American Henry Stevens purchased the reliefs and shipped them to Boston. Unable to raise funds for the reliefs there, he sold them to James Lenox for the New-York Historical Society. In 1937, the Society lent them to the Brooklyn Museum and in 1955, Hagop Kevorkian, the New York collector and dealer, donated the funds to purchase and install the reliefs in the renamed Hagop Kevorkian Gallery of Ancient Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum.

Other objects in the Brooklyn Museum's Ancient Near Eastern collection include works made by the Sumerians, Assyrians, Achaemenid Persians, Sabeans, and others. Art from this region served several purposes. Some objects, like the twelve reliefs installed along the walls of the Kevorkian gallery, were meant to impress and overpower viewers. Figures of gods, in both human and animal form, were worshiped in temples. A few objects, especially small animal sculptures, seem to have been made simply to be enjoyed and appreciated. Though each culture had its own artistic tradition, they frequently borrowed themes and styles from one another. Certain subjects became standard throughout the Near East and were repeated for centuries. For more than four thousand years, artists living in what are now Iran, Iraq, and Turkey fashioned images of supernatural beings combining human and animal characteristics, for example.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
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Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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Arts of Asia and the Islamic World

The Asian and Islamic Art galleries provide a survey of the full range of Asian and Islamic art in the Brooklyn Museum, which houses one of America's foremost collections. It presents more than one hundred masterpieces from these extraordinary holdings, representing China, Korea, Japan, India, South... [ + ]east Asia and the Himalayas, and the Islamic world.

The Chinese gallery at the Museum features more than 100 objects that cover more than five thousand years of Chinese culture and civilization, from neolithic times to the present. Current interest focuses on China's diversity as well as its cultural and artistic connections with neighbors. Many objects also demonstrate the ways in which Chinese culture has, throughout history, looked back at earlier traditions as a sign of enduring respect for the past.

Korean culture is often presented in connection with China and other East Asian cultures. The Brooklyn Museum's presentation of its Korean collection emphasizes Korea's unique traditions, culture, and aesthetics.

Japanese art forms the largest area within the Asian art collection at the Brooklyn Museum. In addition to the traditional arts of Japan, the galleries include a section devoted to contemporary Japanese ceramics by renowned masters and the younger generation of artists who are currently active in Japan. Japanese folk art is represented, as is a selection of artifacts from our renowned collection of Ainu culture.

The South Asian collection includes works from cultures defined by their geographical proximity to the Indian subcontinent, ranging in date from prehistory to the present. The Museum's outstanding India terracotta collection is represented. Basic religious tenets constitute an overarching theme throughout the cultures of South and Southeast Asia. The sculptures and architectural components on display were largely created as religious icons or embellishments for the walls of religious buildings. Outside the religious sphere, courtly traditions, such as Mughal (1526–1756) decorative arts produced in India, are also a strength of the Museum's collection.

The Islamic collection is encyclopedic in representation and contains a renowned, comprehensive group of later Persian art of the Qajar period (1779–1924), which is one of the finest outside Iran. Well-represented among the Islamic holdings are medieval Islamic ceramics, the arts of Safavid Iran, Ottoman Turkish ceramics and textiles, Turkmen costumes and jewelry, and North African textiles, costumes and jewelry. The permanent galleries display approximately 100 works drawn from all periods of Islamic Art, and feature regular rotations of light-sensitive material. Complementary didactic materials and educational programming in the galleries are designed to reach the Museum's many audiences, including the vibrant, diverse Muslim community, which is an important local Brooklyn constituency.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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The Arts of Africa

Over 250 works spanning more than 2,500 years represent art from the African continent in the Museum's first-floor galleries. Additional related art from ancient Egypt and Islamic North Africa can be found in the second- and third-floor galleries. The art on view in the first-floor galleries ranges ... [ + ]from ancient Nubian pottery and sculpture, Berber jewelry, and West African masks to East African beadwork, Ethiopian processional crosses, and a contemporary ceramic vessel by the Kenya-born artist Magdalene Odondo. The main focus of the African collections is on sculpture from West and Central Africa.

The gallery is arranged geographically, as if the viewer were moving across Africa—first from west to east and then, as the gallery turns, from north to south. The gallery seeks to celebrate the creative artistic genius of African artists by presenting exceptional examples of their work. At the same time it tries to help the viewer understand the cultural context in which these pieces were made and used. The groupings reflect stylistic relationships among objects produced in individual cultures as well as relationships among the diverse cultures found in Africa. Labels and panels describe the role that art plays in African life, while photographs and videos illustrate how, in many of these societies, art continues to transmit the traditions and values that have sustained African peoples for thousands of years.

Among the most famous pieces on view in the gallery are a figure of a hornblower, cast in brass for the king of Benin in the 16th century, and an ivory gong also made for the royal court in Benin at about the same time. A seventeenth-century figure of a Kuba king is the only one from that period in North America, and a Luluwa mother-and-child figure is world-renowned. The gallery also shows textiles, ceramics, jewelry, masks, and figures from more than 50 different cultures.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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Rodin: The Cantor Gift to the Brooklyn Museum

Due to installations in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, twelve bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin have been installed in the Rubin Entrance Pavilion. This newly excerpted presentation of the Museum's large holdings by Rodin includes The Age of Bronze, a signature conception from the early yea... [ + ]rs of the sculptor's career, as well as other works from his most significant commissions, including The Burghers of Calais, The Gates of Hell, and the Monument to Balzac. These casts came to the Brooklyn Museum through the generosity of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden

Dedicated in 1966, the Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden at the Brooklyn Museum is a preeminent collection of terracotta, stone, and metal architectural elements salvaged from now-demolished structures throughout the metropolitan area and reinstalled outside the Museum's Norman M. Feinberg Entrance.... [ + ] Most of these remarkable objects date to the period between 1880 and 1910, recording a great era in the cultural, architectural, and industrial history of New York City.

Beyond the significance of individual works, the collection as a whole demonstrates the Museum's agile response to the destruction of architectural treasures even before the historic preservation movement reached its stride in the late 1960s. As public appreciation of architectural ornament and sculpture has grown, the Museum's collection has served not only as an archive of historic objects, but also as a welcoming outdoor installation beloved by visitors.

Recognizing the importance of these two functions, the Brooklyn Museum's 1986 Master Plan features the collection installation as a primary outdoor Museum space to be developed, a complement to the public plaza on Eastern Parkway.

Original works of art in the reconfigured and revitalized garden invite visitors to the Museum as they approach the Norman M. Feinberg Entrance, adjacent to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A later phase will extend installation of the architectural collection into the Eastern Parkway plaza area as well.

These projects, which include rich interpretative programs introducing the history and context of the collection, exemplify the Museum's mission to serve the public as a dynamic and rewarding destination.

The reconfiguration of the Museum's outdoor spaces also includes the renovation and reorientation of the Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum subway stop. Within the train station, an exciting display of historic New York architectural ornaments invites visitors into the newly designed public plaza.

The MTA station project presents an important yet uncelebrated collection, increasing public awareness and appreciation of New York's architectural richness, while also illustrating that great art is not limited to the inside of the Museum.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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Visible Storage - Study Center

The last phase in the creation of the Luce Center for American Art concludes with the opening of the 5,000 square-foot Visible Storage ? Study Center. The dense display of objects in the Visible Storage ? Study Center offers you an inside look at how museums work and provides a glimpse of the breadt... [ + ]h and scope of the Brooklyn Museum's extensive American collections. As huge as the Museum's building is, just a small fraction of the permanent collections can be displayed in its limited exhibition gallery space. Whereas only about 350 works are on view in the adjacent American Identities exhibition, this facility gives open access to some 2,000 of the many thousands of American objects held in storage, which are now available for viewing and research by students, scholars, and the general public.

The Visible Storage ? Study Center is a working Museum facility as much as other storerooms throughout the building that are not open to the public. As in the closed storerooms, the works held in Visible Storage are available for study, and maintained under proper conditions of temperature, humidity, and light levels. Two large, glass-walled bays in the Visible Storage ? Study Center contain nearly six hundred paintings from the permanent collection on rolling racks; the selection on view will be periodically rotated to provide an ever-changing array from the collection's holdings. Large glass vitrines also put on view the majority of the Museum's collection of historic (that is, pre-1945) American sculpture. Other vitrines contain a selection of objects from the American decorative arts collection: pewter, commemorative pressed glass, Tiffany glass and lamps, examples of contemporary industrial design and furniture, silver, eighteenth-century furniture, nineteenth-century seating furniture with original upholstery, and Brooklyn-made ceramics. There are also representative displays of Native American and Spanish colonial objects. Three areas are devoted to small special exhibitions that change periodically and provide focused examinations of different art historical themes or aspects of the permanent collections.

Although this is an operating storage facility rather than a conventional exhibition gallery, the exhibition planning team has designed it to welcome you and orient you to the resources in the facility. Selected "focus objects" are displayed on colored shelves, with texts offering additional information in booklets hanging from the cases. You will find focus objects in the cases, on the screens of paintings, and in small special exhibitions that highlight rotating selections of works on paper, decorative arts, paintings, and sculpture. There is also a searchable database, available in the Visible Storage ? Study Center and online, with detailed information about the objects. We invite you to explore the Brooklyn Museum's great American collections through a tour of the display.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, NY 11238
(718) 638-5000
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Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free

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Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.

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American Identities: A New Look

This major installation of more than three hundred fifty objects from the Brooklyn Museum's premier collection of American art integrates a vast array of fine and decorative arts (silver, furniture, ceramics, and textiles) ranging in date from the colonial period to the present. For the first time, ... [ + ]major objects from these exceptional collections are joined by selections from the Museum's important holdings of Native American and Spanish colonial art. The galleries are organized according to a set of eight innovative themes, through which visitors can explore historical moments and crucial ideas in American visual culture over the course of nearly three hundred years. Featured within these sections are American masterworks for which the Museum's collections have long been known, by such artists and makers as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Herter Brothers, Union Porcelain Works, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, William Edmondson, David Smith, Richard Diebenkorn, and Robert Colescott. Visitors are invited to tour the galleries using an audio guide that offers a variety of voices and perspectives, or they may follow the comprehensive program of signage that provides detailed discussions of the gallery themes, individual object labels, and "Community Voices" labels written by members of the extended Brooklyn Museum community. Also included in the galleries are four video stations, one showing excerpts from the Museum-produced slide show Facing History: The Image of the Black in American Art and three others featuring continuous loops of early films by Thomas Edison that relate to the gallery themes. The tour begins in a gallery called A Brooklyn Orientation (just off the main elevator lobby on the fifth floor), offering an introduction to the Museum's collections of American art and to Brooklyn as a center of art making and production from the colonial era to the present. Introductory signage and a gallery map are also provided at the secondary entrance to the gallery (just off the Cantor Galleries). Visitors are invited to enjoy four seating areas within the galleries for comfortable extended viewing of the works on hand.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
Get Tickets

Small Wonders from the American Collections

This special exhibition celebrates a major new installation in the Luce Center for American Art: Visible Storage ? Study Center that gives the public access to more than 350 additional objects from the Museum’s collections. Since its opening in January 2005, the Luce Visible Storage ? Study Center h... [ + ]as housed approximately 2,100 objects in two types of storage units: vitrined cases and paintings screens. The facility also contains forty-two drawers for storage. Beginning in mid-October and in stages over subsequent months, they will be filled with works from the Museum’s renowned American holdings and opened to the public. Once the drawers are full, the number of objects on view in visible storage will rise to 2,500—an increase of almost 20 percent.

The drawers’ contents will encompass a variety of objects from the Americas—including art of the United States as well as of the indigenous and colonial peoples of North and South America—and dating from the pre-Columbian period to the present day. Although the works range widely in terms of medium, date, function, and geographical origin, they do share a diminutive scale and suitability for flat storage. Among the objects that will be installed in the drawers are: American and Hopi ceramic tiles; Mexican pottery stamps; jewelry and other ornaments from Native and South American cultures; Modernist jewelry; silverplated flatware and serving pieces; Spanish Colonial devotional objects; American portrait and mourning miniatures; commemorative medals; and embroidery. As in other sections of the Luce Visible Storage ? Study Center, objects in the drawers are densely installed to maximize the available space and are grouped by type, medium, or culture. Visitors can learn more about the works by using one of the nearby computer kiosks in the facility, or by accessing the Luce database online. To obtain a list of a drawer’s entire contents, use the Map feature and select numbers 41 through 47.

Held in conjunction with the drawers installation, Small Wonders from the American Collections features an eclectic selection of seventy works of art on the walls and in the display cases above the drawers. This exhibition both highlights objects that will be installed in the drawers and reveals a diversity of cultural traditions and artistic practices that constitute American art. A variety of jewelry and objects of personal adornment—although produced by different peoples—function similarly to signify information about the wearer’s identity. Flatware, pins, and other silver items on display reflect a broad array of forms, styles, and uses for this valuable metal. Ceramic tiles made contemporaneously by Native and non-Native Americans provide an interesting cross-cultural comparison with respect to the decoration and marketing of these wares.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
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The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art, is presented as the centerpiece around which the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art is organized. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with... [ + ] a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold chalices and utensils, and china-painted porcelain plates with raised central motifs that are based on vulvar and butterfly forms and rendered in styles appropriate to the individual women being honored. The names of another 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tile floor below the triangular table. This permanent installation is enhanced by rotating Herstory Gallery exhibitions relating to the 1,038 women honored at the table.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
Get Tickets

Decorative Arts Galleries

The Brooklyn Museum's decorative arts collection occupies the fourth floor of the Museum. The focus of the collection is a group of American period rooms ranging in date from the 18th century to the 20th century. Interspersed with the period rooms are galleries that display an outstanding collection... [ + ] of American furniture, silver, pewter, glass, and ceramics. Additional objects from the decorative arts collection are on display in American Identities.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
Get Tickets

European Paintings

Although the collection of European paintings has often been presented in a chronological arrangement by school or style, this installation exploits the architecture of the soaring Beaux-Arts Court by devoting each wall to an exploration of the meaningful connections that the works display when arra... [ + ]nged according to theme. The section called “Painting Land and Sea” surveys the formal methods that painters have used to render their physical surroundings across the centuries. “Art and Devotion” considers the ways in which the artists of the early Renaissance expressed the central tenets of the Catholic faith. “Narratives Large and Small” shows how artists distill the elements of a story into a single telling moment. Finally, “Tracing the Figure” charts the enduring artistic interest in the human figure, from portraits that place an individual in a clearly defined place and time to timeless abstractions of the human form.

02/08/2023 10:00 AM
Wed, February 08
10:00AM
$
Adults: $16
Students with valid I.D. and Seniors: $10
Ages under 19 and Members: Free

First Saturday of every month except January, July and September: Free
Get Tickets
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