At 200, the Brooklyn Museum looks ahead

Later in his life, the great poet Walt Whitman recalled the events of July 4, 1825. When he was about six years old, he wrote, he attended the cornerstone-laying ceremony of the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library, which had been founded a year earlier.

The man who later wrote “Song of Myself” said he was proud to be lifted into a better viewing position by none other than the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat turned general and Revolutionary War hero who stood ready to place the cornerstone.

The library's name and mission changed over time, beginning to focus on displaying art in the 1840s—with Whitman on hand to view and describe the exhibits in his newspaper work—and eventually evolving to the Brooklyn Museum.

This year, the museum will sing a song of itself to mark its 200th anniversary, with a series of events and exhibitions, including a major group exhibition of Brooklyn artists and a reinstallation of America's art galleries.

“We seek to reflect our deep roots as a center for social good in the arts and a place where people of all backgrounds come together,” said Anne Pasternak, director of the museum since 2015.

She added: “We're going to do it the Brooklyn way – with curiosity, courage and joy.”

“The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” which opens on October 4, will be the largest exhibition the museum has ever organized. It is conceived as an open, invitation-style call show that will be installed in the Great Hall on the first floor of the museum and will feature around 300 local makers.

It will be put together with the help of a committee of notable artists, including Mickalene Thomas, Jeffrey Gibson, Fred Tomaselli and Vik Muniz.

Pasternak said she has wanted to do a show like this since she arrived at the museum, and was considering making it a permanent fixture. “Nothing gives artists more joy than when other artists select their work,” she said.

In preparation for the reinstallation of America's art galleries, which will also debut on October 4, some galleries will close on a rolling basis on February 5. She said the new presentation of approximately 400 works will emphasize people of color, indigenous groups and historically marginalized voices.

“Many museums are good at telling that classic American story,” Pasternak says. “So we wanted to see what other stories we could tell. We bring the past into conversation with the present.”

The reinstallation will be the final iteration of the current spaces before their eventual overhaul, part of a major renovation that will be funded by a $50 million gift from the City of New York that the museum received in 2021.

Another anniversary show, titled “Solid Gold,” opens Nov. 15 and explores gold as a material and as a color in Renaissance paintings, Japanese screens and other works.

This summer, in a pilot program, Museum on Wheels – a mobile, interactive art bus housed in an Airstream trailer — will roll across Brooklyn to deliver cultural programming, especially to underserved communities.

The museum became known for its innovations in the early 20th century, when it developed a collection of Egyptian antiquities, and in 1945 it was one of the first museums to devote an exhibition to the work of contemporary black artists. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art debuted in 2007.

Brooklyn itself eventually became the “best city brand in the world,” as Pasternak put it.

Along the way, some controversies erupted at the museum, the most notable being the 1999 show 'Sensation', featuring the so-called Young British Artists in the collection of advertising magnate Charles Saatchi.

“Sensation” included “The Blessed Virgin Mary,” Chris Ofili's 1996 painting of a Black Virgin Mary on a canvas littered with elephant dung. Then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was so enraged by it that he tried, but failed, to cut off the museum's funding and evict it from the city building.

With that in the rearview mirror, this fall's celebrations will also include an Oct. 5 celebration the museum is calling Birthday Bash, currently planned as a daylong version of the monthly First Saturdays program. But Pasternak said she was toying with the idea of ​​making it a massive, three-day event.

“I'm trying to get the staff excited about the idea,” Pasternak said. “They are exhausted just hearing about it.”