Brooklyn Museum’s African Art Collection to Get Huge Upgrade

Rendering of the Brooklyn Museum’s new Arts of Africa Galleries. (Photo: Peterson Rich Office)

Since it began collecting African art in the early 20th century, the Brooklyn Museum has accumulated more than 4,500 pieces from across the continent. All told, the collection stands as one of the largest and most comprehensive in the United States, but that fact isn’t necessarily apparent to visitors. The museum is now looking to change that through an ambitious $13 million renovation.

This spring, construction will officially begin on a new 6,400-square-foot gallery, offering a new home for the museum’s renowned Arts of Africa collection. The space, whose design is spearheaded by the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office (PRO), will showcase about 300 works from the collection and span some 2,500 years of history. Complete with an airy atmosphere and high ceilings, this permanent installation will direct greater attention toward lighting, wall placement, and casework to fully celebrate the collection’s breadth and beauty. Previous displays, by contrast, were “on the ground floor in these low-ceilinged spaces,” per the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak. “It was not a dignified place,” she adds.

What truly distinguishes the new gallery, though, is its decolonial ethos. Rather than grouping objects based on present-day borders—many of which were established during European colonization during the 19th and 20th centuries—the space unfolds geographically. Regions of focus include the Nile and Niger Rivers, the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, the Loango Coast, and the Sahara desert.

“We wanted to highlight transcultural interactions—what happens when different communities and cultural entities were talking to each other,” Annissa Malvoisin, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, recently told The New York Times. Aside from being a curator, Malvoisin is also a scholar of ancient African art with a specialization in Egyptian and Nubian art.

By effectively forgoing these colonial models, then, the museum seeks to visualize not just the artistic networks within Africa, but also the continent’s relationship with Asia, Europe, and the Americas across time. Historical and contemporary art exemplify these global exchanges, with featured works hailing from the African diaspora and from the places to which enslaved people were taken. Beyond this, Islamic and Christian visual traditions will be explored as well, resulting in a nuanced portrait of African artistic production.

“The diaspora is Africa’s story,” says Ernestine White-Mifetu, the curator of the Brooklyn Museum’s Arts of Africa department. “We can’t just focus on the African part and negate that important journey that millions of people took.”

Also challenged is the historical separation between North Africa and the rest of the African continent. Ancient Egyptian art, for example, will be more clearly united with the museum’s larger collection, thanks in large part to the new gallery’s location. Nestled beside the ancient Egypt section on the third floor, visitors can seamlessly travel between the two galleries, revitalizing rather than segregating the connections throughout the continent.

“It’s always bewildering to me that those collections are so separate,” Pasternak says. “I think especially in a place like Brooklyn, that framing reads as racist.”

White-Mifetu and Malvoisin echoed the sentiment in Hyperallergic: “The museum is already doing this work throughout the building, so this connection feels natural both contextually and realistically.”

Notably, the new gallery will repurpose underutilized storage space, providing additional avenues through which to engage with art history. “I’m a big believer in less storage, more galleries,” Pasternak concludes. “People deserve to see masterpieces, and they deserve to see their cultures represented with dignity.”

To stay updated about the new Arts of Africa gallery, visit the Brooklyn Museum website.

This spring, the Brooklyn Museum will break ground on a $13 million renovation to add a new 6,400-square-foot gallery for its renowned African art collection.

Rendering of the Brooklyn Museum’s new Arts of Africa Galleries. (Photo: Peterson Rich Office)

The gallery will offer a permanent home for the museum’s more than 4,500-piece collection, all while visualizing the transcultural connections across the African continent and beyond.

Chokwe artist, “Tesa Ya Ma Kanya” (Snuff Container). Northeast Angola or Bandundu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 19th century. Wood, iron, and fiber. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Gora Mbengue, “Al-Buraq,” 1975. Glass and paint

Yorùbá artist, “Paka Egúngún“ (Masquerade Dance Costume). Lekewọgbẹ compound, Ògbómọ̀ṣọ́, Ọ̀yọ́ State, Nigeria, ca. 1920–48. Cotton, wool, wood, silk, synthetic textiles, indigo, and aluminum. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

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