Brooklyn Museum

An encyclopedic collection of more than 140,000 objects across thirteen curatorial areas and over 6,000 years, by the Museum's own account, built inside a building that was itself never finished to its original scale. Its Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Near Eastern holdings are unusually deep for a museum of Brooklyn's size, and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, built specifically to hold Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, gives the Museum a distinction few encyclopedic museums of comparable size can claim: an entire permanent wing organised around a single work of feminist art rather than a period or a geography. American Art, Asian and African galleries recently renovated or scheduled for renovation, and a contemporary programme that commissions large-scale new work for fixed spaces in the building round out a collection that is, by design, broader than any single visit can cover.

The Brooklyn Museum traces its founding to August 1823, when a group of Brooklyn citizens including Augustus Graham set up the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library in Brooklyn Heights, formally incorporated in November 1824. The library merged with the Brooklyn Institute in 1843, and after that building burned down in 1891, its trustees reorganised in 1890 as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and launched an architectural competition for a new home on Eastern Parkway, on the edge of the newly created Prospect Park. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called the competition one of the most important in the history of American architecture; McKim, Mead and White won it.

What they proposed was enormous: a building four times the size of anything that was ever built, arranged around a central memorial hall with four separate light courts. Brooklyn's mayor approved construction bonds in January 1895, ground was broken that December, and the first section opened to the public on 1 June 1897, with a formal opening on 2 October 1897, one of the borough's last major public buildings before Brooklyn was folded into the newly consolidated City of New York in 1898. That consolidation is also the reason the plan was never finished: political and financial support for an independent Brooklyn cultural palace evaporated almost as soon as Brooklyn stopped being an independent city, and only the northern wings and a single light court, the Auditorium Court, were ever built.

Construction limped forward for another two decades rather than stopping outright. A central entrance pavilion, approved in 1899, took until 1903 to near completion and was meant to hold a 1,250-seat lecture hall and a sculpture hall serving as the main lobby. The eastern wing finally opened in December 1907, bringing the building to roughly one-eighth of its originally planned size. Two further wings, contracted in 1911, stalled in November 1914 when the contractor went bankrupt, and by the 1920s only 28 of a planned 80 facade sculptures had ever been installed; the building's main corridor was still unfinished.

In 1934 the city's Parks Department, under Public Works Administration labour, removed the building's original grand entrance staircase entirely, replacing it with ground-level doors; the remodelled entrance was dedicated in October 1935. A rear annex added in 1955 gave the upper floors a new internal stair. The museum spent 1997 to 2004 operating as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, a rebrand it dropped the same year its new entrance opened, reverting to the plainer name it had carried since 1897 and has kept since.

By 2000 the building's ground-level entrance, put in place in the 1930s, was widely regarded as a dead zone rather than a welcome. The Museum hired architect James Polshek, who described the existing front as a wasteland and proposed what he called Brooklyn's new front stoop: a glass entrance pavilion with four metal pylons and a semicircular plaza, built despite preservationist objections and approved by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission. The brick piers that had once carried the vanished 1897 staircase were themselves worked into a new brick arch as part of the project. Completed in April 2004 at a final cost of 63 million dollars against an initial 55-million-dollar estimate, the pavilion also brought air conditioning to the entire building for the first time, and it remains the entrance every visitor uses today, fronted now by the banners of whatever exhibition is running.

The Museum's own account describes an encyclopedic collection of more than 140,000 objects spanning over 6,000 years, organised into thirteen collecting areas: American Art, Arts of Africa, Arts of Asia, Arts of the Americas, Arts of the Islamic World, Arts of the Pacific Islands, Contemporary Art, Decorative Arts and Design, Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Art, European Art, Feminist Art, Libraries and Archives, and Photography. The Egyptian collection alone spans more than 3,000 years and includes the Brooklyn Medical Papyrus and the Book of the Dead of Sobekmose alongside sculpture reaching back to the Predynastic period. American Art runs from Francis Guy's Winter Scene in Brooklyn, the first work acquired for that department, through Gilbert Stuart's 1796 Washington portrait and Edward Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom to Winslow Homer's 1887 Eight Bells.

The single work that gets its own wing is Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, a triangular table with a place setting for each of 39 women from history and myth, given to the Museum in 2002 by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation and housed since March 2007 in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art built specifically to hold it. Asian and Islamic-world galleries reopened in 2022 after a twelve-year renovation, and in early 2026 the Museum hired Peterson Rich Office to rebuild 6,400 square feet of the third floor into new African art galleries, a roughly 13-million-dollar project. A newer addition, the Toby Devan Lewis Education Center, opened in January 2024 with three studios and a gallery for school and community programming rather than the permanent collection.

The Museum has been the subject of genuine controversy more than once, and none of it belongs off this page. In 1999 the exhibition Sensation, drawn from Charles Saatchi's private collection rather than the Museum's own holdings, provoked New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani to threaten to cut the Museum's public funding over Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary; a federal judge ruled the funding threat unconstitutional, and the show went on, but the episode is still the first thing many people associate with the Museum's name decades later, even though the painting itself never entered its permanent collection.

In 2020, facing pandemic-era financial pressure, the Museum sold works at auction, including a Lucas Cranach the Elder painting that made 4.2 million dollars at Christie's and, weeks later, paintings by Monet, Dubuffet, Degas, Miro and Matisse consigned to Sotheby's, aiming to build a 40-million-dollar fund whose income would pay for the routine care of its roughly 160,000-object collection. The sales were made possible by a temporary relaxation of industry rules by the Association of Art Museum Directors, but some observers still called the scale of the sell-off a shortsighted jettisoning of crucial holdings. In 2023, the exhibition It's Pablo-matic, co-curated with the comedian Hannah Gadsby, drew unusually harsh reviews, including from the New York Times, and the Museum's director defended it publicly rather than revising course. Most recently, in February 2025, the Museum announced 47 layoffs and a reduced exhibition schedule against what its director called a cash-flow crisis approaching a 10-million-dollar deficit, driven by inflation and a slow post-pandemic recovery in attendance; increased funding from the New York City Council later averted further cuts.

The Museum has spent its bicentennial, marked across 2023 to 2026, publicly reckoning with both halves of its record rather than only celebrating the founding date. Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200, its own anniversary exhibition, draws on the full collection rather than a curated highlight reel, and a parallel Brooklyn Icons project has singled out 200 objects across the collection's full range. The institution has run First Saturdays, a free or reduced-price evening of programming, for a quarter of a century, and its own materials now include a formal land acknowledgement recognising that the Museum stands on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape people.

Anne Pasternak has directed the Museum since September 2015, through the 2020 deaccessioning sales, the 2023 Pablo-matic controversy and the 2025 budget crisis alike, and remains in the role as the Museum works through a renovation of its African art galleries due to finish around 2027. None of that history changes what a visitor does at the door on any given Wednesday through Sunday: pay whatever amount they choose at the Admissions Desk, or nothing at all if they are thirteen to nineteen years old, and walk into a building whose finished half is still, by any ordinary measure, one of the largest encyclopedic art collections in the United States.

We reproduce no visitor review prose and cite no invented star average beyond the single aggregate logged below. What is consistent across the Museum's own published materials and the named journalism this desk read is that visitors are struck by the scale and range of an encyclopedic collection inside a building most did not expect to be this large, and specifically by the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and its Egyptian and Asian holdings, which visitors describe as unusually deep for a museum of Brooklyn's size. The friction points are not the admission price, which is a suggested pay-what-you-can amount rather than a fixed fee, but the institution's recent history: a 2020 round of deaccessioning sales that divided opinion even among museums that had just been given cover to do the same thing, a widely and often harshly reviewed 2023 exhibition that the Museum's own director publicly defended rather than revised, and a 2025 budget crisis serious enough to cost dozens of staff their jobs and to cut the annual exhibition schedule. None of that is this desk's place to resolve; it is recorded because a museum that asks a reader to trust its account of its own objects is also a party to its own recent record.