brooklyn museum

We are thrilled to receive Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner’s library. These books will enhance the Brooklyn Museum’s Library especially in the areas of modern and contemporary art. For more information about this donation, please view the press release.

Over the past twenty years Arnold Smoller, and his wife Nancy, have been donors to the Brooklyn Museum presenting us with prints from their personal collection and helping us acquire artists’ books when we had the Artists' Book exhibition on view here back in 2000. We are now thrilled to announce that over 40 books from Arnold’s collection have been given to the Brooklyn Museum to enhance its collection of artists’ books and livres d’artiste!

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries held an event on a recent First Saturday featuring splendid 19th century books written at the dawn of the rediscovery of ancient Egypt, spread out on the tables in the reading room. Dr. John M. Lundquist, adjunct professor of Religious Studies at Pace University, presented a primer on ancient Egyptian gods and their influence on the burial rituals of mortals, giving voice to the exhibit downstairs, To Live Forever. Digital images of illustrations on pages from the very books before us were shown on the screen in Dr. Lundquist's presentation.

Some say the future of art museum libraries will be the rare or unique research resources we collect. With that in mind at Brooklyn, we have been focusing our collection development policy on “rarer” items that are not readily available in other libraries. One recent acquisition falls into this category with the donation of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake (London: Camden Hotten, 1868).

Check out these NYARC library events and exhibitions featuring library materials from our collections:

Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library
The Museum of Modern Art
April 7-July 5, 2010

Paul Rosenberg and Company: From France to America
The Museum of Modern Art
January 27-April 5, 2010

Somehow, advertising just seemed more charming a hundred years ago. Long before the days of pop-ups on websites and garish LCD billboards, businesses promoted themselves with delicate, artistic, finely printed cards, suitable for collecting, trading, and compiling in scrapbooks.

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives comprise one of the largest and oldest art museum libraries in the country. The collection, established in 1823 has been developed to encourage understanding of the Museum's collections and history. Paralleling the Museum's encyclopedic collections, the Museum Libraries and Archives are particularly strong in the arts of the Americas (North and South), Africa, Asia, Ancient Egypt and Islam. The Wilbour Library of Egyptology is one of the world's most comprehensive research libraries for the study of ancient Egypt.