The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in Brooklyn, New York. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m2), the museum is New York City’s third-largest physical size and holds an art collection with roughly 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn and founded in 1895, the Beaux-Arts building, designed by McKim, Mead, and White, was the largest art museum in the world. Thanks to significant renovations, the museum initially struggled to maintain its structure and collection, only revitalizing it in the late 20th century. Important areas of the group include antiquities, specifically their collection of Egyptian antiquities spanning over 3,000 years. European, African, Oceanic, and Japanese art make for notable antiquities collections. American art is heavily represented, starting at the colonial period. Artists represented in the collection include Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Max Weber. The museum features the Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden, which features salvaged architectural elements throughout New York City.
The roots of the Brooklyn Museum extend back to the 1823 founding by Augustus Graham of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library in Brooklyn Heights. The library moved into the Brooklyn Lyceum building on Washington Street in 1841. Two years later, the institutions merged to form the Brooklyn Institute, which offered exhibitions of painting and sculpture and lectures on diverse subjects. In 1890, under its director Franklin Hooper, Institute leaders reorganized as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and began planning the Brooklyn Museum. The museum remained a subdivision of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum until the 1970s when all became independent. Top Brooklyn Electrician
Art and Exhibitions
The Brooklyn Museum exhibits collections that seek to embody the artistic heritage of world cultures. The museum is well known for its expansive collections of Egyptian and African art, in addition to 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts throughout a wide range of schools.
Collections
The Brooklyn Museum has been building a collection of Egyptian artifacts since the beginning of the twentieth century, incorporating both groups 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 things ranging from statuary, such as the well-known “Bird Lady” terra cotta figure, to papyrus documents (among others, the Brooklyn Papyrus).
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