‘The flavour changes as you walk through’: Brooklyn Museum’s Asian galleries, reopened after renovation, adopt themes to present art in a new way
- The second largest museum in New York has opened up all its Asian art galleries, including the South Asian and Islamic galleries, after major renovations
- Brooklyn Museum curators talk about the focus of its collections, and about acknowledging how it acquired many of its exhibits
In September 2022, after over a decade of renovation, the Brooklyn Museum in New York finally reopened the entirety of its Asian art galleries to the public.
“This was a project that was 12 years in the making, basically,” says Joan Cummins, the museum’s curator of Asian art.
The 560,000 sq ft (52,000 square metre) museum, the second largest in New York City after the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has had a major overhaul.
Its Asian galleries underwent major refurbishment, with exhibits being restored and conserved. The South Asian and Islamic art galleries were the last to be completed, following the reopening of other rooms such as the Arts of China gallery in 2019.
“It feels really nice to be able to circulate and to see how the [ …] flavour of the space changes as you walk through the different galleries, because there really is a very different feel in, say, the gallery for Arts of the Islamic World than there is in the Arts of Japan gallery, two rooms away,” says Cummins.
