Over the Last 200 Years, a Small Library Became One of New York City’s Biggest Museums. A New Showcase Tells the Story of Its Unique Legacy

To mark its bicentennial, the Brooklyn Museum highlights the pieces that have shaped its collection—and the foundational art made in the borough

Jacoba Urist

March 14, 2025

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In 1823, civic-minded merchants met in a tavern to establish a public library, later soliciting book donations with a wheelbarrow. They aimed to provide education for the youth of the village of Brooklyn, then a community of over 7,000 people. By 1825, the founders had a three-story building on the corner of Henry and Cranberry streets for the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library. A teenage Walt Whitman was acting librarian there in 1835. In 1843, the library merged with the Brooklyn Lyceum and formed the Brooklyn Institute. Within several decades, the enterprise began collecting artifacts and art, alongside books.

Today, after 200 years full of name changes and evolutions, that modest community library in Old Brooklyn Heights is known as the Brooklyn Museum, New York City’s third-largest art museum. Housed in a grand fin de siècle edifice by McKim, Mead and White, the architects of the old Penn Station and parts of Columbia University’s neo-Classical campus, the museum of today holds more than 140,000 objects in its collection.

It is celebrated for its permanent installations, from an ancient Egyptian gallery and “Mummy Chamber” (the special section that explores mummification) to The Dinner Party (1974-1979), an elaborate triangle of three 48-foot-long dining tables by feminist artist Judy Chicago that honors mythical and historically famous women. Since its inception, avant-garde contemporary and African art have been central missions. In 1923, curators mounted an exhibition of African objects as art pieces, rather than as specimens, considered a first for a museum in the U.S. At times, artworks have stoked protest and controversy. In 1999, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to close the museum for exhibiting Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996), a painting that he and religious organizations found sacrilegious for its use of nude imagery and elephant dung, a material the British artist discovered in Zimbabwe and experimented with on his canvases.

For generations, the Brooklyn Museum has stood at the forefront of art and culture in a uniquely responsive way, reflecting the borough’s diverse fabric and broad scope. To mark its bicentennial, the museum recently unveiled “Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum At 200,” an exhibition that shares both the story of its inception and growth, and the history of Brooklyn as a hotbed of the nation’s creativity.

The show features artworks, documents and artifacts from the museum’s permanent holdings; spotlights recent paintings, sculptures and photographs donated to the museum by individuals, galleries and various foundations over the past year or so in honor of its anniversary; and pays homage to the artists and designers of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Museum curator of photography Pauline Vermare notes that the museum was one of the first institutions to collect photography, a medium historically marginalized in favor of painting and sculpture. Throughout the exhibition, it’s clear that “there’s a lot of photography and that the Brooklyn Museum has always been supporting women artists,” she says. In the realm of painting, one piece is “a conversation between generations of feminism,” Vermare notes. “The contemporary artist Ewa Juszkiewicz is responding to an 18th century portrait by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.”

Vermare wonders what will be present at the museum 200 years from now: “What are artists doing? What kind of work do you see? What are they talking about? The Brooklyn Museum has always collected contemporary art for the time, so it’s quite exciting.”

The museum’s original ambitions trace back to the Gilded Age, an era of tremendous modern urbanization, in New York. The Brooklyn Bridge, an engineering marvel connecting the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan, opened to the public in 1883; the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886. “In 1892, the idea was to build the biggest museum in the world, bigger than the Louvre,” says Abigail Dansiger, director of libraries and archives at the museum. “The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, our governing body then, had an architectural design competition, won by a very prominent firm, McKim, Mead and White, but they ran out of money. Really, we were meant to be much bigger.”

One way that the museum obtained some of the pieces in its collection is through crowdsourcing, notes Meghan Bill, the museum’s coordinator of provenance, an expert who researches and documents an object’s history. Works by James Tissot, John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer, from 1900 through 1908, were purchased through public subscriptions in local newspapers, popular in the museum’s earlier days.

“There would be calls put out that the Brooklyn Museum is hoping to acquire works from certain artists, and members of the city of Brooklyn pulled together their resources to ensure that would happen,” says Bill. “Today, you have to have a certain amount of capital to purchase the works that end up in museum galleries, and we are grateful for that. Public subscriptions were a unique model where an average citizen of Brooklyn could feel a source of pride and contribution to the collection.”

In 1903, the museum established a Department of Ethnology, tasking curator Stewart Culin with acquiring expedition materials to represent the creativity of the world’s peoples. “Culin was a product of his time and operating under an assumption that Indigenous peoples were dying out and their art-making practices were going to die with them,” Bill says. In those days, “it was called ‘salvage ethnography,’ the idea being that you had to collect the products of people before they disappear.” To that end, the exhibition features Indigenous works that he acquired, as well as other works purchased by the museum, including a ceremonial mantle, or cloak, dated to 100-300 C.E. called a Paracas textile, which Bill describes as a “global icon of Andean weaving and embroidery.” Dyed fibers depict human and supernatural beings, surrounded by native flora and animals. A repeating pattern of 32 colorful faces portray Oculate Being, the deity of agricultural fertility.

Part of the exhibition “considers the way Brooklyn has been conceptualized by artists who are passing through, like Georgia O’Keeffe, residents, native or not,” says Liz St. George, the museum’s assistant curator of decorative arts. “It explores the creative practice of Brooklyn makers, but also how Brooklyn is imagined as the epicenter for this creativity throughout time.”

The Greenpoint section of Brooklyn in particular, she notes, was a dynamic hub for ceramics, glass printmaking and architectural metalwork. One example is an oyster plate from the museum’s significant archive of Union Porcelain Works—located in Greenpoint, and one of the first manufacturers to mass-produce hard-paste porcelain in the United States, from 1863 to around 1922. The firm sold a range of designs at various price points, from utilitarian handles and knobs to skillfully decorated serving plates. “It’s pretty fabulous,” she says. “To do it in this way democratized it.”

An enchanting carousel horse, thought to be made by Marcus Charles Illions—an influential Brooklyn carousel carver who was born in Lithuania and who traveled to the U.S. in 1888 with an animal showman—lends context to the famous ornate Coney Island style of carousel design.

“The magic of Brooklyn is its multitude of peoples,” says St. George. “You will see the contributions of immigrants and migrants, of people not only native to the borough, but of new folks bringing new ideas in.”

Jacoba Urist | Read More

Jacoba Urist is an art and culture journalist in New York City.