Why Brooklyn Museum matters.
Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedic art museum where Prospect Heights's cultural corridor meets Beaux-Arts architecture, global collections and ambitious contemporary exhibition making.
Set along Eastern Parkway near Washington Avenue and just steps from Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library, the museum occupies a commanding site at the eastern end of a broad parkway conceived as a major civic approach. McKim, Mead & White organized the immense building around a central pavilion and symmetrical wings, giving the institution a classically ordered facade whose scale announces the breadth of the collections inside. Thirty allegorical figures developed under Daniel Chester French's direction joined the exterior in 1909, extending the architectural program through sculpture devoted to branches of knowledge and civilization. Polshek Partnership Architects reshaped the principal approach in 2004 with the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Pavilion and Lobby, placing a sheer glass structure and new public plaza against the historic masonry frontage. The result is an institution whose Beaux-Arts massing, architectural sculpture, glass entrance and parkway setting give successive generations of museum design a powerful physical presence within Brooklyn's cultural core.
What defines Brooklyn Museum.
Brooklyn Museum is best known for developing one of the nation's broadest art collections from an institution whose ancestry reaches to the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library, founded on August 7, 1823 to educate local young people and apprentices. General Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the library's first permanent building in Brooklyn Heights in 1825, and Walt Whitman served as librarian a decade later. The organization merged with the Brooklyn Lyceum in 1843 to become the Brooklyn Institute, then reorganized as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1890, an umbrella institution whose descendants included the museum Academy of Music, Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Brooklyn Children's Museum. Fine Arts collecting began during the 1880s with European paintings, American furniture, Egyptian antiquities and Chinese ceramics, followed in 1900 by collecting across Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Islamic world and the Pacific. Brooklyn mayor Charles A. Schieren laid the cornerstone for the new Central Museum in 1895, and the Brooklyn Institute opened its first completed section in 1897. Franklin Hooper envisioned an institution encompassing human history through arts, sciences and libraries, helping explain the encyclopedic scope that shaped its early development. Photography entered that institutional ambition unusually early: a dedicated department began annual exhibitions in 1889, making the Institute the first North American art museum to present photography as an art form. The present museum grew through nearly two centuries of institutional change, moving from apprentice education through multidisciplinary collecting into an encyclopedic art institution spanning cultures across thousands of years.
Egyptology provides one of the deepest threads within that collection history, particularly through Charles Edwin Wilbour, among the earliest American Egyptologists. Wilbour's children donated his Egyptian objects and Egyptological library in 1916, followed by gold jewelry from Theodora Wilbour in 1917 and another group of antiquities in 1921. Victor Wilbour's 1932 bequest created the Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, financing acquisitions, curatorial work and the Wilbour Library of Egyptology while supporting the formation of a dedicated antiquities department. Belgian Egyptologist Jean Capart became Honorary Curator of Egyptology and later published Wilbour's letters in Travels in Egypt in 1936. The New-York Historical Society placed its Egyptian and Assyrian holdings at the museum during the 1930s, and those objects entered the Brooklyn collection permanently in 1948. Theodora Wilbour's bequest included ten sealed Aramaic papyri from the Jewish community at Aswan, prompting years of scholarly work on their fragmented texts. This long sequence of family gifts, endowed scholarship, curatorial specialization and major institutional acquisitions turned the Egyptian department into one of the museum's strongest concentrations and connected the collecting history directly with the development of American Egyptology.
How Brooklyn Museum fits.
Brooklyn Museum works as the anchor for an afternoon connecting feminist art, Japanese landscape design and the nineteenth-century creation of Brooklyn's great urban park.
Begin inside the museum at Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, an 8,300-square-foot curatorial center established in 2007 after Elizabeth A. Sackler gave Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party to the museum in 2002 and funded a permanent home for the work. Susan T. Rodriguez of Polshek Partnership Architects designed the fourth-floor center, whose inaugural exhibition, Global Feminisms, was co-curated by founding curator Maura Reilly and art historian Linda Nochlin. Chicago created The Dinner Party between 1974 and 1979 with hundreds of collaborators; its 48-foot triangular table carries 39 place settings, with another 999 women named on the Heritage Floor, creating a permanent centerpiece for a curatorial program devoted specifically to feminist art. Continue to Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where landscape designer Takeo Shiota completed the Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden in 1915 after philanthropist Alfred T. White supplied $13,000 for its creation. Shiota shaped a 1.5-acre pond with artificial hills, winding paths, a waterfall, bridges, stone lanterns, a Shinto shrine and vermilion torii, producing the first Japanese garden built within an American public botanic garden. Frank Okamura began caring for the site after World War II and restored damaged elements during a tenure that also helped advance the Garden's bonsai program. A $3 million restoration completed in 1999 removed accumulated silt, renewed the shoreline and returned key elements of Shiota's design. Conclude at Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1866 and opened to the public in 1867. Their 585-acre undertaking created Brooklyn's largest green space around an expansive pastoral composition that now contains the borough's remaining upland forest and a 60-acre lake. Olmsted and Vaux developed the park during the same period when Brooklyn was expanding rapidly as an independent city, giving the growing metropolis a major landscape project whose scale complemented the cultural institutions later assembled along its eastern edge. The progression moves from Chicago, Sackler, Reilly and Nochlin's permanent center for feminist art through Shiota and Okamura's century of Japanese garden design and culminates in Olmsted and Vaux's vast urban landscape, connecting three distinct chapters in Brooklyn's cultural development.
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