About the Museum
For nearly 125 years the massive Brooklyn Museum has housed an ever-expanding collection of art from around the world and across the centuries. Its vast permanent collection drawing from around the world cannot be seen in a single day. However, the museum's vibrant events and rotating exhibitions are the main draws for current visitors. Diverse, contemporary, and often controversial, exhibitions feature rising and established artists from across the country and the world. It's popular *First Saturday* program often fills to capacity.
What You Will See
The museum is home to an impressive collection of Egyptian, African, European, Islamic, and Asian Art, often rivaling Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. But despite the traditional collections and stoic, classical building, the museum's recent energy has tilted towards diverse modern and contemporary exhibitions and collections, including the Slacker Center for Feminist Art, which opened in 2007. Ceding responsibility for traditional art history exhibitions to other institutions, Brooklyn's flagship museum increasingly reflects the energy and diversity of the borough's population.
Why You Should Go
While the number of visitors is down from recent decades, renovations have kept some collections from view for several years, and the museum is often a source of artistic or cultural controversy, none of this should deter you from enjoying one of the great institutions of the city. The museum takes risks with its exhibitions--you will love some and not others. But with a collection this vast, when you find yourself in an exhibition that is not to your tastes, you have entire wings filled with an impressive and accessible permanent collection to fill out your day.
