The Brooklyn Museum revealed plans to renovate and build a new home for its African art collection dating back to the early 1900s, making it one of America’s oldest institutional collections of art from Africa and the diaspora it informs. The $13-million project aims to establish a dedicated 6,400-square-foot destination on the museum’s third floor, to open with a display of more than 300 artworks from antiquity to the present in the fall of 2027.
“This is more than a new collection gallery—it’s a bold reframing of how African art is understood and celebrated in American museums,” Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak said in a statement. “At the same time, this renovation is a major step in our larger vision to revitalize the entire Museum, creating spaces that will allow us to continue to entice and engage a breadth of audiences with distinctive art experiences.”
The new gallery spaces, adjacent to the stately Beaux-Arts Court designed by the museum’s architects McKim, Mead & White, will mark a significant change for space currently used for on-site storage. Under the plan orchestrated with the Brooklyn-based architecture firm Peterson Rich Office (PRO), the new area will connect with the museum’s Egyptian art galleries in a way that will unite North Africa with the rest of the continent. About the reorientation, Pasternak told Aruna D’Souza of the New York Times, “It’s always bewildering to me that those collections are so separate. I think in especially in a place like Brooklyn, that framing reads as racist.”
The inaugural installation will draw from the Brooklyn Museum’s 4,500-work Arts of Africa collection under the direction of Ernestine White-Mifetu and Annissa Malvoisin, the institution’s curator and associate curator of African art, respectively. The exhibition will combine historic holdings with contemporary works and take as its purview the African diaspora. “The diaspora is Africa’s story,” White-Mifetu told the Times. “We can’t just focus on the African part and negate that important journey that millions of people took.”
The new building project, which will begin construction this summer, will be funded by the City of New York and federal grants, with additional support from the Ford Foundation, the Sills Family Foundation, and individual donors.
The announcement comes a little more than a year since the Brooklyn Museum laid off some 40 employees in the face of a $10-million budget deficit. In better news, the museum’s Claude Monet show last fall was described as “nothing short of a revelation” by ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger, and the institution’s collection expanded as it took in nearly 600 works to mark its 200th anniversary in 2025.
