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We invite you to visit us in the heart of one of the most diverse, creative, and exciting urban centers in the world, the borough of Brooklyn. At the Brooklyn Museum you can explore an extensive and comprehensive permanent collection that includes ancient Egyptian masterpieces, African art, European painting, decorative arts, period rooms, and contemporary art. You'll also experience intelligent, cutting-edge exhibitions and programs that reflect a fresh view of traditional and historical works as well as engagement with today's most important artists and artistic practices and ideas.
Front Plaza
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The front plaza area is comprised of
more than 80,000 square feet, much of it reclaimed from a large, unused, fenced area, which is now entirely open to the public. The plaza area includes a “front stoop,” which will provide multiple options for programming as well as various areas for informal gatherings. It also includes two water features created by WET Design, the firm that designed the famous fountains at the Los Angeles Music Center and the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. One of the fountain features provides a versatile array of vertical “dancing” water jets that may be programmed in a variety of ways. Another water feature, comprised of a shallow reflecting water skim over black granite beneath a spiral, outdoor ornamental stair, is on the west side of the pavilion. The entire plaza area includes cherry trees and other plantings.
Rubin Pavilion and Lobby
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The Museum opened its dramatically redesigned front entrance and new public plaza on April 17, 2004. The new entrance pavilion rectifies the architectural imbalance, as well as resolving the practical issues of access, that had remained since the original monumental staircase was removed in 1934.
Within the pavilion, the brick support piers that once housed the five front doors have been “excavated,” restored, and left permanently exposed, showing the foundations of the institution both structurally and symbolically.
In addition to the main pavilion level, there are two further, exterior levels: an elevated promenade, above the new entrance pavilion, provides inviting views into the interior as well as a sweeping overview of the plaza and the surrounding neighborhood.
Connecting Cultures
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This innovative, cross-cultural installation was developed to create new ways of looking at art by making connections between cultures as well as objects. Located in our first-floor Great Hall, it provides for the first time a dynamic and welcoming introduction to our extensive collections, featuring pieces that represent peoples throughout time and around the world.
Connecting Cultures is organized around three main themes: "Connecting Places," "Connecting People," and "Connecting Things." In viewing the juxtaposition of thematically linked works, you are invited to consider the importance of place, of self-representation in art, and of the role that objects play in supporting personal and cultural identity. Works on display include Gaston Lachaise’s monumental Standing Woman, Nick Cave’s Soundsuit, and kero cups used in Andean ritual.
Double Take: African Innovations
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Celebrating Africa’s continual dynamism and long tradition of artistic creativity, Double Take: African Innovations opens the doors to our storied African collection with a new, experimental installation that invites surprising and unexpected ways of looking at African art. It suggests universal themes that link seemingly dissimilar works, often across vast distances of time and space, while also presenting them within their own specific context of history and place.
In the main Double Take gallery, nearly forty objects, including a number of recent acquisitions, are organized into fifteen pairs or small groups that explore themes, subjects, and techniques that recur throughout African history, including performance, portraiture, the body, power, design, satire, and virtue, among others. A deeper look into our extensive African holdings can also be found in an adjacent “storage annex” display of an additional 150 African masterpieces, with an area for making new connections and responding to the works, including suggestions for other themes. These responses will help shape a case with regularly changing objects, and will also inform the larger presentation of our African collection in the years to come.
Egyptian Galleries
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In April, 2003, we completed the reinstallation of our world-famous Egyptian collection telling the story of Egyptian art from its earliest known origins (circa 3500 B.C.E.) until the period when the Romans incorporated Egypt into their empire (30 B.C.E.–395 C.E.). 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.E., a relief from the tomb of a man named Akhty-hotep, and a highly abstract female terracotta statuette created over five thousand years ago.
Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks
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Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat filled numerous notebooks with poetry fragments, wordplay, sketches, and personal observations ranging from street life and popular culture to themes of race, class, and world history. The first major exhibition of the artist's notebooks, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks features 160 pages of these rarely seen documents, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings.
A self-taught artist with encyclopedic and cross-cultural interests, Basquiat was influenced by comics, advertising, children's sketches, Pop art, hip-hop, politics, and everyday life. Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks emphasizes the distinct interplay of text and images in Basquiat’s art, providing unprecedented insight into the importance of writing in the artist’s process. The notebook pages on display contain early renderings of iconic imagery—tepees, crowns, skeleton-like figures, and grimacing faces—that also appear throughout his large-scale works, as well as an early drawing related to his series of works titled Famous Negro Athletes.
Diverse Works, Director's Choice
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Diverse Works: Director’s Choice, 1997–2015 includes a selection of one hundred works from the nearly ten thousand acquired during Dr. Lehman’s tenure, including objects that range from an ancient Chinese mythical carved figure (5th‒3rd century B.C.E.) to contemporary works by Kiki Smith and Chuck Close. Additional highlights include Kara Walker’s Keys to the Coop (1997), a linocut that depicts an African American woman in silhouette, holding the severed head of a chicken; a silver Song dynasty reliquary (986) inscribed by the artist Li Lingxun; and the biomorphic Spacelander bicycle (1960), one of the rarest and most sought-after industrial designs of the mid-twentieth century.
American Identities: A New Look
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This major installation of more than three hundred fifty objects from our 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 our important holdings of Native American and Spanish colonial art.
The galleries are organized according by eight innovative themes, through which you can explore historical moments and crucial ideas in American visual culture over the course of nearly three hundred years.
Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic
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The works presented in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic raise questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture. The exhibition includes an overview of the artist’s prolific fourteen-year career and features sixty paintings and sculptures.
Wiley's signature portraits of everyday men and women riff on specific paintings by Old Masters, replacing the European aristocrats depicted in those paintings with contemporary black subjects, drawing attention to the absence of African Americans from historical and cultural narratives.
Visible Storage ▪ Study Center
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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 breadth and scope of our extensive American collections. As huge as our 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.
Dining
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Visit Michelin-starred Saul restaurant and bar or The Counter café. Planning a group tour? Consider a catered lunch for your group.
Prospect Heights
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Accessible via the Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum 2-3 trains, Prospect Heights is notable for it's cultural diversity, tree-lined streets, and brownstone residences.
Along the southern boundary, Eastern Parkway, from Grand Army Plaza to Washington Avenue is reminiscent of Fifth Avenue's "Museum Mile" in Manhattan. Immense, opulent buildings line the north side of the parkway, and the south side features the Brooklyn Public Library, Prospect Park, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Visitors can enjoy a bite from a number of regular food trucks, dozens of local, trendy restaurants, and even a farmer's market just north of Prospect Park at Grand Army Plaza.
