Top 10 Amazing Facts about Brooklyn Museum

Photo by Jim.henderson. Wikimedia Commons.

Top 10 Amazing Facts about Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum. It is the second largest museum in New York City covering an area of 52,000 meters square. The museum has an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Brooklyn Museum is located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.

The museum was designed in the Beaux-Arts architectural style. The design was done by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. The museum’s significant areas of the art collection include antiquities, specifically their collection of Egyptian antiquities that span over 3,000 years. It also has  European, African, Oceanic, and Japanese art. Let’s have a look at the Top 10 Amazing Facts about Brooklyn Museum.

1. Brooklyn Museum received art from many artists

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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.

The Brooklyn Museum has among others late Gothic and Early Italian Renaissance paintings by Lorenzo di Niccolo (“Scenes from the life of Saint Lawrence”), Sano di Pietro, Nardo di Cione, Lorenzo Monaco, Donato de’ Bardi (“Saint Jerome”), Giovanni Bellini. It has 19th-century French paintings by Charles Daubigny, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, and Eugène Boudin.

2. It was designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White

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The Brooklyn Museum building is a steel frame structure clad in masonry. It was designed in the neoclassical style. The design was done by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White.

The construction was done by the Carlin Construction Company. The original design for the Brooklyn Museum proposed a structure four times as large as what was built from 1893 through 1927, when construction ended.

3. The museum has art from Africa

Photo by Brooklyn Museum. Wikimedia Commons.

The oldest acquisitions in the African art collection were collected by the museum in 1900. The collection was expanded in 1922 with items originating largely in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1923 the museum hosted one of the first exhibitions of African art in the United States.

With more than 5,000 items in its collection, the Brooklyn Museum boasts one of the largest collections of African art in any American art museum. The African art collection includes sculpture, jewelry, masks, and religious artifacts from more than 100 African cultures.

4. A library is embodied in the museum

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives hold approximately 300,000 volumes and over 980 meters of archives. The collection began in 1823 and is housed in facilities that underwent renovations in 1965, 1984 and 2014.

Find out more about the top 10 amazing facts about New York Public Library.

5. There is an apprentice museum program conducted every once in a while

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In 2000, the Brooklyn Museum started the Museum Apprentice Program. This was in a bid to include the teens in the museum’s activities. The museum hires teenage high schoolers to give tours in the museum’s galleries during the summer.

They also assist with the museum’s weekend family programs throughout the year, participate in talks with museum curators, serve as a teen advisory board to the museum, and help plan teen events.

6. The number of people visiting the museum has declined over time

Attendance at the Brooklyn Museum has been in decline in recent years. The New York Times attributed this drop partially to the policies instituted by then-current director Arnold Lehman. Lehman chose to focus the museum’s energy on “populism”.

This focused exhibits on topics such as “Star Wars movies and hip-hop music” as opposed to classical art topics. “The quality of their exhibitions has lessened”, said Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art and a Brooklynite.

Read the top 10 amazing facts about the Guggenheim Museum.

7. Brooklyn Museum was founded in 1898

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The Brooklyn Museum was founded in 1898 as a division of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. It was planned that it would be the largest art museum in the world. Initially, the museum struggled to maintain its building and collection.

This changed after major renovations were made in the late 20th century. The Brooklyn Museum changed its name to Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1997. It reverted back to it’s old name in 2004.

8. Some sculptures around the museum were designed by Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French was the principal designer of the pediment sculptures and the monolithic 3.8 meters figures along the cornice. The figures were created by 11 sculptors and carved by the Piccirilli Brothers. French also designed the two allegorical figures Brooklyn and Manhattan currently flanking the museum’s entrance. French was also the sculptor of the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial.

9. The museum’s youngest director was Thomas S. Buechner

Photo by Chloe Pollack. Wikimedia Commons.

In 1960, Thomas S. Buechner became the director of Brooklyn Museum. He was then one of the youngest directors in the country. Buechner oversaw a major transformation in the way the museum displayed art. He brought some one thousand works that had languished in the museum’s store rooms and put them on display.

Buechner played a pivotal role in rescuing the Daniel Chester French sculptures from destruction. This almost happened due to an expansion project at the Manhattan Bridge in the 1960s.

10. The museum gets funding through various means

To run the day to day businesses, the museum needs funds. In 2005, the museum was among 406 New York City arts and social service institutions to receive part of a $20 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation.

The corporation had been funded by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Also, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and its negative impact on museum revenue, the museum raised funds to pay for collections care by selling or deaccessioning works of art.

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