Underrated: The Brooklyn Museum and “The Dinner Party”
It’s tough to stake your claim when the second-most-popular museum in the world is a few miles away
With so much to see in New York, there are lots of great sights that remain more or less overlooked, not because of any fault of their own, but simply because of competition that’s bigger, more famous, or just easier to get to.
One of the biggest cases of this unfortunate also-ran problem is the Brooklyn Museum. Of course, it’s hardly obscure: its annual attendance, somewhere around 400,000, sounds decent until you realize that the Metropolitan Museum gets more than ten times the number of visitors. And Brooklyn’s collection of about 1.5 million pieces begins to pale only when you find out that the Met has roughly 2 million things on view at any one time.
It is true that New Yorkers themselves like the Brooklyn Museum: it gets lots of love for its First Saturdays parties and for many of its exhibitions, both permanent and temporary. Still, I think that most tourists have heard of it only vaguely, or don’t know exactly what would make a visit worth it.
The first thing to realize is that the museum would be a major attraction just about anywhere else. When the museum’s current building opened in the 1890s, Brooklyn was still its own city. The museum’s grandeur reflects those times, and the many stunning works it had already amassed could never be labeled as mere also-rans.
For starters, its holdings include the largest collection of Egyptian art in the Americas—sorry, Met!—and an enviable collection of American art that includes standout paintings by John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart, Mary Cassett, and many artists of the Hudson River School.
As for the building itself, it was designed by the firm McKim, Mead, and White, which also designed the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library, the Washington Square Arch, and seemingly every other important institutional building of the Gilded Age.
The Dinner Party
That said, one of my favorite pieces in the museum has only been there since 2007. It was that year that the museum opened its Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the majority of which is given over to Judy Chicago’s obsessive, monumental, and slightly batty Dinner Party.
Chicago’s mixed-media installation, which dates from the late 1970s and has spent much of the intervening decades on tour, is primarily a celebration of 39 women leaders—real ones, ancient ones, imaginary ones—from the “Primordial Goddess” and Sappho to Sojourner Truth and Georgia O’Keeffe. Each woman’s place at the table has its own runner, dinnerware, and goblets, all of them hand-crafted. At the center of a triangle formed by the three sides of the table are porcelain tiles with the names of 999 other female luminaries.
This haunting work took Judy Chicago and her team of hundreds of volunteers six years to finish, and it’s well worth a special trip.
I’d never tell anyone to just skip the Met, but the Brooklyn Museum is more than worth its own visit, especially at a time when more and more tourists are willing to venture beyond Manhattan and see what they want to see, not what they think they must.
