The Brooklyn Museum, housed in a 560,000-square-foot,Beaux-Arts building designed by McKim, Mead, & White, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the country. Its world-renowned permanent collections range from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art, and represent a wide range of cultures.
Only a 30-minute subway ride from midtown Manhattan, with its own newly renovated subway station, the Museum is part of a complex of nineteenth-century parks and gardens that also includes Prospect Park, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Prospect Park Zoo.
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 public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.
Learn more about exhibitions on view at the Brooklyn Museum between March 19-22 2014, including African Innovations, Connecting Cultures and Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties.
You can also visit an archive of past exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, including Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey, Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, and Yinka Shonibare MBE, among others.
African Art at the Brooklyn Museum
The first art museum in America to display African objects as works of art, in a landmark 1923 exhibition, the Brooklyn Museum has one of the country’s largest and most important African collections, particularly noted for its artworks from Central Africa.
The current installation of the permanent collection, African Innovations, opened in 2011, marking the first time that the Museum’s African collection has been arranged chronologically, as well as the debut of its first dedicated space for contemporary African art. This installation invites the visitor to examine the continent’s long record of creativity, adaptation, and artistic achievement, from antiquity through the present day. Items displayed include a carved ivory gong by an Edo artist from the kingdom of Benin and a wooden figure of King Mishe miShyaang maMbul by an eighteenth-century Kuba artist, from the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo, both of which are the only objects of their kind in North America. Masks, statues, jewelry, and household objects are also on view.
Explore the Brooklyn Museum’s African art collection.
