All posts tagged collection

Building a little data capture into our admissions process

As I mentioned in my previous post about mapping our digital landscape, we’re not letting the lack of CRM completely get us down. We have…

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Trends Across Time: An ASK Fashion Tour

As a follow-up to our ASK-guided gallery tours for Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving and Pride Month, the ASK team has created a new…

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Tiny Cards, Big Fun: What Impact?

In 2017 we partnered with educational start-up Duolingo and their new digital platform, Tinycards, to produce fun and educational art history flashcard decks. 2 years,…

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Showing Our Pride: A New Themed ASK Tour

“Celebrate Pride Month! Our team of friendly experts guide you on a tour of LGBTQ+ artists and themes throughout the Museum via text message, chatting…

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Labels Provide an Entry Point for ASK (We Think)

In my last post I detailed how I knitted together thematic connections across different collections and what effect in-gallery labels have on object engagement, but…

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What encourages people to ASK about certain objects?

While I wanted to learn more about visitors complete interactions through the app, without the ability to systematically dive into chats, I chose to focus…

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What kinds of questions do users ASK us about art?

I ended my last post with a brief exploration of what people are asking about via ASK. I was particularly interested in going beyond the…

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Initial Insights from ASK Data

During my first semester as the Pratt Visitor Experience & Engagement fellow I was able to learn a significant amount about ASK user behavior—despite limitations…

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Mining Data With Limited Tools

In my last post, I laid out some of the challenges working with the current metrics dashboard and the data exporting process for ASK. Despite…

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ASK and Young Museum Visitors: On the Hunt

Sometimes we plan and execute ASK-related projects on a long timeline, but occasionally a project will happen organically and almost take us by surprise. Using…

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What happens when you put ASK on a kiosk? You learn a few things.

One of the questions we’ve had since the beginning of the project was if ASK is appropriate for a mounted kiosk of some kind. We…

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Before and After: ASKing about American Art

This month marks one year since the reinstallation of the Museum’s fifth-floor American art galleries, formerly known as “American Identities: A New Look.” This anniversary…

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Shifting Traffic Patterns

Early on in the course of ASK, Shelley and I noticed some really interesting patterns related to where people tended to use the app. While…

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Is Bigger Better? Some Most-ASKed About Artworks

In a recent conversation with colleagues from the Peabody Essex Museum, Sara and I fielded a question that frequently arises: which works of art do…

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ASK App + Group Tours: Shaping the Visitor Experience

In my last post I wrote about our process for deciding which collection highlights to include in ASK’s new self-guided tour, titled Highlights and Hidden Gems….

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ASK App + Group Tours: Making Hard Choices

Earlier this week, Sara introduced the topic of ASK’s new collaboration with our Group Tours office and our efforts to shape the content of our…

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ASK App + Group Tours: A Balancing Act

If you’ve been following our blog, you know we spend a great deal of time focusing on getting our ASK app in more people’s hands….

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Tiny Cards, Big Fun

Since time immemorial, nerds have been listing things and memorizing them for fun. 2,000 years ago, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder published his Natural…

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Mummy Mask of a Man Consisting of the Face Only

A New Addition from our Old Collection

Every museum strives to enrich its collection even further, but acquiring new objects is not always possible. Luckily, our storerooms have much to offer and…

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07.447.501

Meet Another Charming Lady

All of us were a little sad to see “Bird Lady” go, even if it is only for a brief period of time, but we…

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Santi Moix

Santi Moix

Perched high on a lift in the fourth floor contemporary galleries, Brooklyn-based artist Santi Moix is drawing directly on the wall with charcoal to create…

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07.447.505

Where is our Bird Lady?

Many of you may be wondering where our beloved Female Figurine, nicknamed the “Bird Lady” is. One of the stars of our Egyptian collection, she…

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Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project

Google Art Project Deux

Starting today, you can find the Brooklyn Museum in Google Art Project. I’m here in Paris at the launch for the second phase where more…

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A Tree Blossoms in Brooklyn

In preparation for the exhibition Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk—An Introspective, conservators took part in preparing and installing Blossom, 2010, a recent acquisition to the collection….

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Trinity Church

On-the-Road Research, or What Curators Do On Their Summer Vacations

One of the projects I’ve been working on is Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum, an exhibition of about 100 of our pre-1945…

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Red Escape II

African Innovations Now Open!

After many months of object review, checklist creation, cross-departmental consultation, budgeting, conservation, design, research, writing, photography, editing, construction, painting, installation, and lighting, I am pleased…

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Elvis Mask for Nyau Society

Elvis is in the building

Elvis is at the Brooklyn Museum and not where you’d expect to find him—in the new installation of the Museum’s African galleries, African Innovations. Brooklyn’s…

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Overskirt

Please Touch

Textiles are a crucial element to the story I wanted to tell in African Innovations. Immensely varied in media, form, content and use, textile arts…

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Case Layout

Installation in Progress

One of the many adaptations that moving the African collection into the South Gallery on the First Floor has required has been adjusting to a…

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Three-Headed Figure (Sakimatwemtwe)

Arts of Africa Gives Way to African Innovations

Recent visitors to the museum may have noticed some increasingly dramatic changes to the first floor—first, a new series of walls began to rise in…

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“Firespitter” Helmet Mask (Kponyugo)

Brooklyn’s Semi-Cameo on Treme—Delving Deeper

Thinking further about our unexpected cameo on Treme the other week, there are even further connections to our own collection that can be made to…

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NOMA Ngafui Mask

“They got that from us” Brooklyn’s Semi-Cameo on Treme

I was recently alerted by Jenny and Shelley that our African collection got an unexpected shout out on a recent episode of Treme, HBO’s drama…

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View of American Identities galleries with works by Feke and Williams

The British Are Coming!

This portrait by the British painter Thomas Hudson has just been added to American Identities, the installation of the Museum’s world-renowned collections of American art….

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Inner Cartonnage of Gautseshenu

Lady Gautseshenu goes to the Hospital

Yesterday, a team of curators, conservators, and art packers and handlers took the last of our human mummies to North Shore University Hospital to be…

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Black Lincoln for Dooky Chase by Skylar Fein

Skylar Fein and Abraham Lincoln: a look into Brooklyn’s collections

With the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War it is a good moment to look back through time and how Americans have been depicted…

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Moonrise Poem

Poetry Comes to our Collection Online

Did you know that April is National Poetry Month?  To celebrate, the Department of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s office is hosting Poem In Your…

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Where in the Wikiverse is the Brooklyn Museum?

Today, we are releasing a new feature in the labs area of the collection online that reports on our recent project to cross-post no known…

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Photo Survey of Historic African Collection

Careful watchers of the museum’s online image collections may have noticed some large new batches of African works begin to pop up over the last…

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Object of the Month: August 2010: Miscegenated Family Album

It’s when a work of art is able to communicate on many different levels at the same time – when it can speak to audiences…

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Hank Willis Thomas on View

Last year I blogged about a great new acquisition, Hank Willis Thomas’ “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America.” I am thrilled that we have…

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Object of the Month: May 2010: Infinity II (Shinso)

Often as I walk through the Asian galleries, I see people sitting on the bench in front of this porcelain sculpture, just sort of blissing…

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Cross-posting the Collection to Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  it’s simply not enough to publish assets on our own website—we cannot expect people to come…

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Object of the Month: April 2010: Pair Statue of Nebsen and Nebet-ta

It is pretty timely that this month’s object for discussion is the Pair Statue of Nebsen and Nebet-ta .  I absolutely adore this sculpture because…

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BklynMuse: failing fast, retooling faster = version 2

This year, I had the privilege of speaking at Webstock and one of the things I learned from listening to the other speakers was the…

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Collection Online: Opening the Floodgates

Today, we are going from 12,598 records to more than 94,000 in our collection online and this increase represents a substantial change in the way…

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Brooklyn Museum Collection Labs

Today, we are taking a page from Google and releasing a labs environment for our collection online.  Having the collection online for 18 months has…

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The First Harvest in the Wilderness

Valerie Hegarty’s evocation of Asher B. Durand’s 1855 painting The First Harvest in the Wilderness in her benefit print for the 1stfans program adds another…

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Teaming up with 20×200 and Valerie Hegarty for 1stfans

I grow more convinced every day that unique partnerships and creative incentives are the key to acquiring and retaining members. With 1stfans, Shelley and I…

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Highlights from the Pacific Islands Collection on the Web

In the spirit of recent discussions about making our collection more available to view online, I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a small…

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Working Guidelines for the Copyright Project

“Any analysis of ownership and duration must be performed on a case-by-case basis for each work.” Copyright & Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S….

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Little Images, Big Art

Some of you may have noticed how, over time, some of the small images on our site—the ones with the “Why is this image so…

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Copyright is complicated

Copyright is complicated. What’s protected? What’s not? And it’s even more complicated for art, where the work may not be dated and there are questions…

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Doing the Right Thing

Did you know that today is the first annual World’s Fair Use Day? We’ve been toiling over an ongoing project to better identify the rights…

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Lulua Mother and Child Figure Returns to View

One of the African collection’s most famous, signature objects has recently returned to view in the first-floor galleries, after well over a year’s worth of…

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Data Entry meets API Synergy

I’m telling you, this has been a long, never ending haul.  We’ve been quietly working on a number of ways to improve our online collection…

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Take a seat…

Starting on December 2nd, that’s exactly what you’ll be able to do in the Museum’s Fourth Floor Schenck Gallery—in a handcrafted replica of our 17th-century,…

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Peace, Love and Posters

The other day I started blogging about the museum’s cool collection of psychedelic posters.  These posters were displayed mostly in hippie boutique windows and on…

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Elephant Mask on View

Once permanent installations are set into place, the opportunities for placing previously unseen works on view are rather rare—even with a collection as deep (with…

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Terence Koh Performa 09

Terence Koh’s Untitled, a stack of thirty-three glass cases, is a striking presence in the Contemporary galleries.  Almost every case contains an artifact that’s been…

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Psychedelic Rock Posters from the Vault

With the exhibition Who Shot Rock & Roll:  A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present, opening tomorrow at the museum, I thought now would be…

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Season Finale of True Blood – We’ll be watching for the Bird Lady!

You better believe we are going to be watching the True Blood season two finale, which is airing on HBO this Sunday night at 9pm!…

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BklynMuse: Going Mobile with a Gallery Guide Powered by People

Ever wish you could remix the gallery experience?  When I walk into a museum I enjoy the structure—the information given, which objects have been placed…

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The Installation of Reception

Through the generosity of Beth Rudin DeWoody, the Museum recently acquired a multiple component installation piece made by the artist Vadis Turner, which will be…

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Male and Female Mummies: Bad Grammar, Bad X-rays, Bad Judgment

It should not be so hard to tell a woman from a man. Yet three of the five male mummies from the Brooklyn Museum that…

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Mummy Transport

As some of you may have seen from the recent press coverage, we took four of our Egyptian human mummies to North Shore University Hospital…

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HBO’s True Blood team kindly answers our “Bird Lady” questions!

Many thanks are due to our faithful community. Their tweets helped us get in touch with @TrueBloodHBO, the official True Blood twitter feed and they…

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Live Tweeting Mummy CT Scanning Today!

We’ve got something very cool going on!  Follow us on Twitter today to get our updates—we are going to be tweeting live as curators and…

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“Bird Lady” on HBO’s True Blood

     We were first notified of this surprise appearance from a comment in our online collection by Marlene F. Emmett, who spotted a statue that…

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Hank Willis Thomas

One major recent acquisition is Hank Willis Thomas’ series “Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America.” The whole series consists of 82 images, two for…

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When Lions and Dragons Fly

In preparation for renovation to the glass corridor roof, two of the museum’s exterior architectural elements, a stone dragon and a zinc lion, needed to…

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Reinstalling the Arts of the Islamic World

For those of you who have been missing the arts of the Islamic world (or wondering what it is you’ve been missing), we are almost…

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Dash Snow

The Museum recently acquired some great new photography. Much of it will be on view this coming August when we open a new show with…

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Crowdsourcing the Clean-Up with Freeze Tag!

As most of our readers know, we encourage tagging on our online collection and we created Tag! You’re It to make that contribution more fun…

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Sarah Baley

Sarah Baley’s show “Bois” opened at Collette Blanchard Gallery on the Lower East Side last Thursday night and we are very happy to have this…

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Specifically, Tag! You’re It!

One of the things we’ve gotten to know about our community is people often have specialized areas of interest.  In just one example, we’ve gotten…

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