American Identities: A New Look

This major installation of more than three hundred fifty objects from the Brooklyn Museum's premier collection of American art integrates a vast array of fine and decorative arts (silver, furniture, ceramics, and textiles) ranging in date from the colonial period to the present. For the first time, major objects from these exceptional collections are joined by selections from the Museum's important holdings of Native American and Spanish colonial art. The galleries are organized according to a set of eight innovative themes, through which visitors can explore historical moments and crucial ideas in American visual culture over the course of nearly three hundred years. Featured within these sections are American masterworks for which the Museum's collections have long been known, by such artists and makers as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, Herter Brothers, Union Porcelain Works, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, William Edmondson, David Smith, Richard Diebenkorn, and Robert Colescott. Visitors are invited to tour the galleries using an audio guide that offers a variety of voices and perspectives, or they may follow the comprehensive program of signage that provides detailed discussions of the gallery themes, individual object labels, and "Community Voices" labels written by members of the extended Brooklyn Museum community. Also included in the galleries are four video stations, one showing excerpts from the Museum-produced slide show Facing History: The Image of the Black in American Art and three others featuring continuous loops of early films by Thomas Edison that relate to the gallery themes. The tour begins in a gallery called A Brooklyn Orientation (just off the main elevator lobby on the fifth floor), offering an introduction to the Museum's collections of American art and to Brooklyn as a center of art making and production from the colonial era to the present. Introductory signage and a gallery map are also provided at the secondary entrance to the gallery (just off the Cantor Galleries). Visitors are invited to enjoy four seating areas within the galleries for comfortable extended viewing of the works on hand.