Museums - Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum, housed in a 560,000-square-foot beaux arts building, is the second-largest museum in New York City and one of the largest in the United States. Its world-renowned permanent collections include more than one million objects, ranging from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art. The mission of the museum is to serve as a bridge between the rich artistic heritages of cultures around the world.
The origins of the Brooklyn Museum go back to 1823, when its ancestor institution was founded as the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library Association. In 1890 the museum evolved into the wide-ranging Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Construction on the current facility, based on plans by the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, began in 1895 and continued for more than thirty years. The building’s architectural sculpture was executed by Daniel Chester French, better known for his colossal statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In the mid-eighties, plans for major renovations were approved, and have been ongoing since.
The museum’s Department of Ethnology was established in 1903, with Stewart Culin serving as its curator until 1929. Under his guidance, the museum developed an extraordinary collection. This included a Native American art collection strong in Zuni and Hopi items, and a large Central African collection purchased in Belgium in 1922. Though the department name changed a number of times over the years, non-Western material continued to be administrated as a whole until 2001, when it split into the departments of the Arts of Africa and the Pacific Islands, the Arts of the Americas, Decorative Arts, and Asian Art.
The Brooklyn Museum was the first museum in the United States to devote a permanent gallery to the display of African objects as works of art. Recently reinstalled, the African display collection now features 250 works, including a remarkable sixteenth century carved ivory double gong from the court of Benin and an eighteenth century ndop portrait sculpture of King Mishe miShyaang maMbul of the Kuba people of central Congo, both of which are the only objects of their kind in the United States.
The museum’s Arts of the Americas installation includes some of the most important Andean textiles in the world. Other notable features include a fifteenth-century Aztec stone jaguar and a new presentation of Peruvian art, including significant textiles, ceramics, and gold objects. There is also an outstanding collection of Native American textiles, ceramics, totem poles, statuary, headdresses, and masks.