Brooklyn Museum (New York, USA)

The Brooklyn Museum is an encyclopedic art museum at 200 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York. Its holdings number more than 140,000 objects and extend across more than 6,000 years, connecting ancient Egyptian material, art from Africa and Asia, American and European painting, Indigenous arts of the Americas, design, photography, contemporary art, and feminist art within one institution. ^[Ref-1]

The scale of the collection is only part of the institution’s identity. The Museum developed from a nineteenth-century Brooklyn educational organization rather than beginning as a conventional fine-arts museum, and that origin still appears in its libraries, educational work, archives, public programs, and research resources.

From the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library to the Eastern Parkway Museum

The institutional story begins with the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library in 1823. The library later became connected with the Brooklyn Institute, and its educational activities gradually expanded into lectures, exhibitions, scientific interests, and the collection of art. The surviving institutional records divide this early history into the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library, Brooklyn Institute, and Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences periods.

1. 1823: The Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library was established.
2. 1843: The library merged with the Brooklyn Institute, extending an educational organization that would eventually support permanent art collecting.
3. 1855: Using funds connected with founder Augustus Graham’s bequest, the Institute commissioned paintings by Asher B. Durand and Daniel Huntington, helping establish what developed into the American Art collection.
4. 1895: Construction began on the new museum building planned by McKim, Mead & White.
5. 1897: The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences opened the first section of its Central Museum building.
6. 2007: The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened with Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party installed at its center.

The 1897 opening created permanent gallery and storage space at a moment when the art collection was still comparatively small. Records from the Museum’s painting and sculpture departments show that the opening exhibition relied heavily on loans. Permanent collecting then accelerated under curator William Henry Goodyear, laying foundations for departments that later separated into American, European, contemporary, decorative, and ancient-art areas. ^[Ref-3]

An Encyclopedic Collection Organized Across Cultures and Media

The Brooklyn Museum does not organize its holdings around a single civilization, medium, or historical period. Its collection structure instead allows visitors and researchers to move between archaeology, painting, sculpture, works on paper, ceramics, textiles, furniture, photography, installation art, religious objects, and many other forms of material culture.

The online collection also makes an important distinction between ownership and display. A work may belong to the Brooklyn Museum without being installed in a gallery at a particular moment; conservation needs, loans, rotations, and changing gallery installations mean that only part of the permanent collection can be seen inside the building at one time. ^[Ref-4]

Egyptian Galleries From Predynastic Art to the Roman Period

Ancient Egyptian art is one of the Museum’s most developed archaeological collection areas. The current Egyptian galleries present more than 1,200 objects and follow artistic production from the earliest phases of Egyptian civilization through the Roman period. Sculpture, painted objects, reliefs, pottery, papyri, coffins, and funerary materials allow the galleries to address both artistic practice and the social settings in which objects were made and used.

• Early Egypt: Predynastic material includes the well-preserved terra-cotta female figure excavated at El Ma’marîya in southern Egypt in 1907.
• Royal and Temple Art: Sculptures and reliefs include material associated with rulers, religious institutions, and elite patronage across several dynastic periods.
• Written Material: Papyri and Books of the Dead connect visual art with writing, funerary practices, and religious texts.
• Funerary Galleries: Coffins, mummy boards, human and animal mummification material, tomb reliefs, and related objects are displayed within galleries devoted to ancient Egyptian beliefs about death and the afterlife.

The galleries include a nearly 25-foot-long Book of the Dead scroll, while another complete gilded Book of the Dead entered public display in January 2026. Individual object records are especially useful here because they separate excavation site, date, material, accession history, and present gallery location rather than treating every Egyptian object as permanently visible. ^[Ref-5]

American Art From Early Commissions to the Fifth-Floor Galleries

The American Art collection has roots unusually close to the Museum’s early institutional history. Augustus Graham, associated with the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library, left money intended to support acquisitions by living American painters. In 1855, the Brooklyn Institute commissioned Asher B. Durand and Daniel Huntington to produce paintings, creating an early foundation for permanent American art collecting.

Today the department covers paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture by artists active in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas, generally from the colonial period through 1960. Among its established strengths are colonial portraiture, Hudson River School landscapes, nineteenth-century sculpture, genre painting, urban realism, early twentieth-century realism, and American modernism. Works by American artists after 1960 may instead be catalogued within Contemporary Art, Feminist Art, or Photography. ^[Ref-6]

This departmental boundary is useful when researching the collection: “American art” at the Brooklyn Museum is not a single container for every object made in the United States. Indigenous material, decorative arts, photography, and contemporary works may belong to different curatorial areas even when their geographic histories overlap.

Asian Art and the Arts of the Islamic World on the Second Floor

The Arts of Asia collection covers East, South, and Southeast Asia as well as the Himalayas, with works ranging from antiquity into the twenty-first century. Its holdings include particularly deep groups of material from India, Korea, and Japan. A long gallery-renovation and reinstallation project concluded in 2022, bringing material from Japan, Korea, China, South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and Buddhist artistic traditions into renewed displays. ^[Ref-7]

Nearby galleries devoted to the Arts of the Islamic World span roughly fourteen centuries. Ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, manuscripts, works on paper, Qur’ans, mosque furnishings, and objects associated with secular courtly and domestic settings demonstrate how the collection crosses both geography and medium. The Museum also holds a particularly large group of Qajar-period Iranian paintings. ^[Ref-8]

The Center for Feminist Art and The Dinner Party

The fourth floor contains an institutional component that differs from a conventional geographic department. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened in 2007 as an exhibition, education, and collection space devoted to feminist art. Its approximately 8,300 square feet include galleries for changing presentations, educational and public-program space, and a permanent gallery built around Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.

Created between 1974 and 1979, The Dinner Party uses a triangular ceremonial table with 39 place settings. Another 999 names appear on the tiled Heritage Floor, bringing the number of historical and mythical women represented by name to 1,038. The Brooklyn Museum acquired the work in 2002, and its permanent installation became the physical center of the feminist-art facility when the Center opened five years later. ^[Ref-9]

McKim, Mead & White’s Museum Building

The building is itself a record of an ambitious late nineteenth-century civic project. In 1891, the Brooklyn Institute announced plans for a new museum, and McKim, Mead & White developed a monumental Beaux-Arts design. Construction began in 1895. The first portion opened in 1897, shortly before Brooklyn became part of the consolidated City of New York in 1898.

The original scheme was much larger than the structure eventually completed. Construction proceeded in phases, but only three phases—roughly a quarter of the initial architectural plan—were realized. Classical arches, columns, exterior sculpture, and the building’s formal massing still reflect the original design, while later alterations changed entrances and interior circulation. ^[Ref-10]

At about 560,000 square feet, the building allows the Museum to combine permanent galleries, temporary exhibition spaces, education facilities, storage, conservation work, libraries, archives, public-program spaces, and the Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden. The size also explains why a visit can involve several distinct collection environments rather than one continuous chronological route.

Libraries, Archives, and Object-Level Research

The Brooklyn Museum’s research infrastructure extends well beyond what is installed in the galleries. Its Art Reference Library follows many of the same subjects represented in the collections, including art, archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, iconography, and religion. The Wilbour Library of Egyptology supports study of ancient Egypt, the ancient Near East, and the Classical world.

• Library holdings: The Libraries contain almost 200,000 volumes, along with journals and specialized research material.
• Special Collections: Holdings include rare books, manuscripts, Brooklyn visual material, artists’ books, and almost 40,000 original fashion sketches.
• Museum Archives: More than 50 archival collections document the institution through curatorial correspondence, expedition records, photographs, lantern slides, scrapbooks, exhibition documentation, and administrative material.
• Collection Online: Individual artwork records can provide creator, culture, date, medium, dimensions, accession number, provenance information, and current gallery location when available.

Visiting the Museum at 200 Eastern Parkway

The Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 am to 6 pm and closes on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. General admission uses suggested pricing, allowing visitors to contribute what they can. Some temporary exhibitions use separate fixed-price tickets, which also include general admission.

• Advance tickets: Online reservations are strongly recommended. General admission tickets are untimed for the selected day, while some ticketed exhibitions use specific entry times.
• Subway access: The Eastern Parkway–Brooklyn Museum station on the 2 and 3 lines is ADA accessible, with an elevator to street level and ramp access toward the Museum entrance.
• Mobility: The Museum building and grounds are wheelchair accessible. Manual wheelchairs and folding stools can be borrowed at Coat Check.
• Parking: An open-air lot is located behind the Museum, with entrances from Washington Avenue and Eastern Parkway.
• Photography: Personal, noncommercial photography and video are generally permitted using existing light. Flash, tripods, and selfie sticks are not permitted, and special exhibitions may impose additional restrictions.
• Bag policy: Bags are subject to inspection, and larger items may have to be checked before entering the galleries.

Accessibility services also include assistive listening devices, captioning on most in-gallery media, seating in many galleries, family restrooms, and programs such as ASL, verbal-description, and memory-focused visits. Care partners accompanying visitors with disabilities are admitted without charge under the Museum’s accessibility policy. ^[Ref-12]

For collection research, the Brooklyn Museum is most useful when its galleries and digital records are treated together: the building presents selected works, while the online collection, libraries, and institutional archives preserve a much wider record of objects, exhibitions, acquisitions, and more than two centuries of museum activity in Brooklyn.