On view in Luce Center for American Art, 5th FloorAugust 2004: The Luce Center for American Art will be significantly expanded with the opening of the 5,000-square-foot Visible Storage/Study Center, providing public access to some 1,500 objects from the Brooklyn Museum’s renowned collection of American painting and sculpture, as well as material from the rich holdings of the Decorative Arts, Native American, and Prints, Drawings and Photographs collections. Designed to provide a glimpse of the breadth and scope of the Museum’s enormous American collections, the Visible Storage/Study Center is scheduled to open on January 14, 2004. It will be located in galleries adjacent to the first phase of the Luce Center for American Art, American Identities: A New Look, the critically acclaimed 2001 reinstallation of some 350 works from the Museum’s American painting and sculpture collection, presented with related objects from the decorative arts, Native American, and Spanish colonial holdings.
Established by a $10 million grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Luce Center for American Art, comprising 17,000 square feet, encompasses the new Visible Storage/Study Center and American Identities: A New Look.
“By offering far greater access to the Brooklyn Museum’s superb collections of historical American paintings, watercolors, sculpture, and decorative arts, this center will be a preeminent resource for the study of American art in the United States,” said Henry Luce III, Chairman Emeritus of the Henry Luce Foundation.
“The Luce Foundation has provided a great gift to the people of the City of New York and, indeed, to students, scholars, and the general public from all over the world,” comments Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman. “This remarkable presentation is an important and dramatic example of the Brooklyn Museum’s mission to improve the visitor experience and to provide increasingly enhanced accessibility to its collections.”
The Visible Storage: Study Center, an interdepartmental collaborative project, is being directed by Linda S. Ferber, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art and Chair, Department of American Art. Other members of the curatorial team include Barry Harwood, Curator, Department of Decorative Arts; Charlotta Kotik, Chair, Department of Contemporary Art; Elizabeth Easton, Chair and Judith Dolkart, Assistant Curator, Department of European Painting and Sculpture; Marilyn Kushner, Chair, Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs; Nancy Rosoff, Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Chair of Arts of the Americas; Kevin L. Stayton, Chief Curator; Susan Kennedy Zeller, Assistant Curator, Arts of the Americas, and Karen Sherry, Project Coordinator. It is designed by Matthew Yokobosky, Chief Exhibition Designer.
Displayed in a much more compact fashion than in a gallery presentation, objects will be organized in much the same manner as they are in closed storerooms, by medium and type-such as “pewter objects” or “bronze sculptures.” Visitors will enter the galleries by glass doors, through which masses of lighted Tiffany lamps may be seen. Two large, glass-walled bays will contain nearly six hundred paintings, all on rolling racks, which will be periodically rotated to show selections from the Museum’s holdings. This new area will also contain glass-walled storage for large- and small-scale sculptures. Double-tiered storage will display American and Spanish colonial furniture, as well as silver, ceramics, and glass.
The new facility will also have areas where small focused exhibitions will present rotating selections of works on paper, decorative arts, paintings, and sculpture. For the opening, the decorative arts displays will be Metamorphic Furniture presenting furniture with more than one use, including a late nineteenth-century upright piano that converts to a bed, as well as a presentation of nineteenth-century wallpaper. The first rotations for the works-on-paper area, Watercolors by the American Pre-Raphaelites and An Artist Abroad: The Sketchbooks of William Trost Richards, have been selected from the rich holdings of the American Art Department and Prints, Drawings, and Photographs departments.
Throughout the new Visible Storage/Study Center, select objects will be highlighted with in-depth information on conventional wall labels, but most works will be identified only by the Museum identifying accession number. This number will be the key to locating information about the object in an on line catalogue by using one of several computers in Visible Storage. Images of all objects in the presentation will also be available online, allowing closer views of the works displayed.
On view in Luce Center for American Art, 5th Floor