Brooklyn Museum reveals details of more than 300 acquisitions made over the past year

The Brooklyn Museum has acquired greater than 300 works for its everlasting assortment since late 2022, lots of which can go on view within the establishment’s renovated American wing when it reopens late subsequent yr. The brand new and up to date acquisitions additionally embrace works by African and Asian artists, additional contributing to the variety of the museum’s encyclopaedic assortment.

Highlights from the previous yr’s acquisitions, revealed on 20 November, embrace works by the 2023 MacArthur Fellows Dyani White Hawk and María Magdalena Campos-Pons (the latter of whom is at present the topic of a solo present on the museum), Rashid Johnson and a wallpaper sample the artist Sheila Bridges created in collaboration with the English producer Wedgwood. A major share of the greater than 300 works acquired are by simply two artists: the American photographer Joel Sternfeld and painter Emily Sargent (1857-1936), sister of John Singer Sargent.

The work acquired by Campos-Pons, Voyeurs and Beholders of… (2008), is a 15-part Polaroid work from her present solo present that the artist made in direct response to the US-led warfare in Iraq. It additionally builds on her curiosity in interrogating the legacies of slavery and exploitation of Black and marginalised folks within the US.

The museum additionally deepened its holdings of works by Fashionable Asian American artists this yr, together with by means of the acquisition of Satoshi’s Room (1945-54), a portray by the Japanese-born American artist Hisako Hibi (1907-1991). It depicts the artist’s son finding out in a window earlier than a busy New York Metropolis streetscape, a characteristically contemplative topic for an artist targeted on rendering the challenges of life in America for Japanese immigrants following the Second World Conflict.

One other contemplative inside picture from mid-century becoming a member of the gathering is Nook of Laura Wheeler Waring’s Studio, Cheyney, PA (round 1940), by Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948), a watercolour of the artist’s studio, considered on the campus of Cheyney College of Pennsylvania, the nation’s oldest traditionally Black faculty or college. Whereas Wheeler Waring is finest identified for her portraits of Black American luminaries, this quiet image of her studio gives a richly detailed look into the artist’s life.

The museum constructed up its holdings of Korean calligraphy this yr, too, buying 5 items spanning the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. They embrace an 1830 letter by Gim Jeong-hui (1786-1856), a widely known Korean scholar and calligrapher, written in Korean however utilizing Chinese language characters.