Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives

Last updated
Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives
G1015 Sa5 Sanson Atlas table of contents detail.jpeg
Nicolas Sanson. Atlas nouveau, 1692. Table of contents, detail.
USA New York City location map.svg
Red pog.svg
Location within New York City
Established1823 (1823)
Location200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, NY
Coordinates 40°40′16″N73°57′49″W / 40.6712062°N 73.9636306°W / 40.6712062; -73.9636306
Type Library
Collection size300,000 volumes and 3,000+ linear feet archives
DirectorDeirdre Lawrence (Principal Librarian)
Website www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/archives/

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives holds approximately 300,000 volumes [1] and over 3,000 linear feet of archives related to the history of the museum and its collections. The library collections comprise books, periodicals, auction catalogs, artist and institutional files as well as special collections containing photographs, sketches, artists' books, rare books and trade catalogues. The museum archives contains institutional records, curatorial correspondence, expedition reports, and other related textual and visual records dating to the founding of the institution.

Contents

History

The Brooklyn Museum evolved from the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library Association, founded in 1823, and the first free and circulating library in Brooklyn. In 1831, the library acquired its first painting, joining a developing book collection. According to the Minutes of the Apprentices' Library from January 31, 1835: "Walter Whitman acting librarian presented a Report this evening, in which it is stated that there are now about 1200 volumes in the library in a proper state for being drawn out; and that the number of Readers is 172." [2]

By the 1840s, the public demand for educational programs resulted in the reorganization of the library with the adoption by the association of a revised charter under the name of the Brooklyn Institute and the library was housed in a new building. [3] Evening classes were offered, the first exhibition of paintings was held and library acquisition funds became available. The library accession records document early institutional interest in the world at large. An early acquisition is currently in the museum's long term installation, Connecting Cultures.

Over the next forty years, the Brooklyn Institute grew and was reorganized into the Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences, which eventually became the parent organization of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Children's Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. During the late 1880s, plans were established to revitalize the institute in order ″to make the property of the Institute the nucleus of a broad and comprehensive institution for the advancement of science and art...″ [4] After an architectural competition held in 1893, the firm of McKim, Mead & White was chosen to design a building to house the Brooklyn Museum and its library. [5]

The early 1900s saw reorganization of the original Apprentices' Library by the museum librarians who kept portions of the collection that supported research on the museum's object collections and transferred the rest to other libraries in Brooklyn and other institutions.

William Henry Goodyear, the museum's first Curator of Fine Arts (1890-1923), founding museum librarian Susan A. Hutchinson (1900–35) and Stewart Culin, the museum's first Curator of Ethnology (1903–29), laid the foundation of the research and object collections. Some of the rarest material in the library collection today, such as a set of documentary photographs of Mexico and Central America taken by Alfred P. Maudslay in the 1880s, was acquired under their direction. After Stewart Culin died, the trustees acquired his archives and personal library of nearly 7,000 titles, focused primarily on the arts and culture of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. [6]

The Libraries

Today the Brooklyn Museum has two research libraries—the Art Reference Library and the Wilbour Library of Egyptology—in addition to the museum archives which support research on the museum, its history and collections as well as the broader areas of art and cultural history.

Wilbour Library of Egyptology

The Wilbour Library is named after Charles Edwin Wilbour, 1833–96, one of America's first Egyptologists. During his travels to Egypt, Wilbour visited temples and tombs and copied inscriptions found on monuments in the field. He built an important resource on Ancient Egypt by collecting books from fellow Egyptologists abroad, as well as from dealers and scholarly publishers, developing his personal library as a resource to educate himself. Wilbour's personal library was enriched with scholarly annotations containing corrections and additions to the published text which are of value today as they offer unique information. In 1916, Wilbour's children offered his antiquities and library collection to the Brooklyn Museum as a memorial to their father. [7] After this initial donation, Wilbour's heirs continued to donate objects to the museum. In 1932, the Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund was set up by Victor Wilbour to support both the library and the Egyptian collection at the museum. [8] [9]

Museum Archives

In 1985, the Brooklyn Museum established the archives as part of the library. Textual and visual materials are available to support users in understanding the museum's object collections as well as its history and programs. Exchanges between curators and artists, collectors and donors, as well as exhibition files containing information on specific artists or works of art that have been exhibited at the museum, and object documentation tracing how an object was acquired, and more can all be found in the archives. [10]

Collection highlights

Today the Brooklyn Museum Library collections are encyclopedic in scope and parallel the strength of the museum's collections. In addition to being a research center, the library collections are frequently exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and elsewhere. Collection highlights include special collections of fashion sketches, documentary photographs, artists’ books, trade catalogs and other rare books.

Costume and Fashion Sketch Collection

Highlights of the fashion sketch collection include sketches by Elizabeth Hawes, Bonnie Cashin, Walter Plunkett and a full visual record of every design imported or created by Henri Bendel from 1912 to 1950. The museum's website has images of such collections. [11]

Henri Bendel Collection

In the spring of 1942, the Brooklyn Museum Libraries sent a questionnaire to seventy-five designers requesting biographical information along with sketches of their work. The questionnaire was announced in Women's Wear Daily. Henri Bendel sent a large collection of sketches rendered by design artists employed by the retailer. The artists attended Parisian shows to record the work of more than 170 designers including Balenciaga, Chanel, Dior, Lanvin, Poiret, Schiaparelli, Vionnet, and Worth. In 1944, sketches from the collection were featured in an exhibition at the museum, French Fashion Sketches from the Henri Bendel Collection.

Today, the Henri Bendel Collection represents the largest and one of the first sketch collections received, with more than 11,000 sketches of French couture imported by the company in addition to its own house designs from 1912 through 1950. [12]

Artists Books

Artists books are a special feature of the library collection with a focus on Brooklyn-based artists; artists who are exhibited by the museum or who have work in the museum’s object collection; artists who create work that relates to the objects or cultures that are represented in the museum’s object collections; artists who are considered to be innovators or masters in the artists books world. Recent donations include artists books from the library of Arnold Smoller and the library of Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner.

The exhibition entitled Artist Books, held in 2000, featured 50 books ranging from multiples to limited edition to unique works from the library collection. From 2003 to 2006, the museum featured key works from the Wilbour Library of Egyptology in a two part exhibition entitled Egypt Through Other Eyes: Early Travel and Exploration and the Popularization of Ancient Egypt, that examined how Western writers and artists saw and recorded Egypt from early works on hieroglyphs to the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. [13]

Digital collections

In an effort to provide greater access to the collections, the Brooklyn Museum Libraries have been digitizing parts of its collections. Some digital projects include the Gilded Age Project, the Bendel Fashion sketches, and Brooklyn Visual Heritage. A multi-year collaboration with Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Science is underway to provide a training ground for librarians and archivists and to make the library and archive collections more accessible via digital means.

New York Art Resources Consortium

In 2006, The Libraries of the Brooklyn Museum, The Frick, and The Museum of Modern Art joined forces to form the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC). In addition to other projects, they have collaborated to build an integrated library system, known as Arcade., [14] to provide better access to their respective collections.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stewart Culin</span> American ethnographer and author

Robert Stewart Culin was an American ethnographer and author interested in games, art and dress. Culin played a major role in the development of ethnography, first concentrating his efforts on studying the Asian-Americans workers in Philadelphia. His first published works were "The Practice of Medicine by the Chinese in America" and "China in America: A study in the social life of the Chinese in the eastern cities of the United States", both dated 1887. He believed that similarity in gaming demonstrated similarity and contact among cultures across the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fashion Institute of Technology</span> Fashion school of the State University of New York

The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) is a public college in New York City. It is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) and focuses on art, business, design, mass communication, and technology connected to the fashion industry. It was founded in 1944.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brooklyn Museum</span> Art museum in Brooklyn, New York

The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m2), the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the museum's Beaux-Arts building was designed by McKim, Mead & White.

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive are a combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and archive associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence Rinder was Director from 2008, succeeded by Julie Rodrigues Widholm in August, 2020. The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of Contemporary Art and Design</span> Costa Rican museum

The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, founded in 1994, is a Costa Rican museum, specialising in contemporary Central American art and design, but also representing international work in the field. To comply with this ambitious idea, we define and promote, in a permanent way, the most recent tendencies and dynamics in the world of contemporary art and design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Art Library</span>


The National Art Library (NAL) is a major reference library, situated in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), a museum of decorative arts in London. The NAL holds the UK's most comprehensive collection of both books as art and books about art, which includes many genres and time periods. The NAL is open to the public, and as a closed reference library, items must be requested through the staff and cannot be removed from the reading room. The collections cover a wide range of art and design topics, including books about artists and art techniques, and consists of many different collections materials, including archival materials, artist's books, and children's literature. The library also serves as the museum's curatorial department for book arts. As a reference library, the NAL also serves as a training library for students, curators and museum staff, and the public.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Edwin Wilbour</span> American egyptologist and translator

Charles Edwin Wilbour was an American journalist and Egyptologist. Wilbour is noted as one of the discoverers of the Elephantine Papyri and the creator of the first English translation of Les Misérables.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archives of American Art</span> Collection of primary resources of visual arts in the United States

The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franklin Furnace Archive</span>

Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. is an arts organization-in-residence at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Since its inception in 1976, Franklin Furnace has been identifying, presenting, archiving, and making avant-garde art available to the public. Franklin Furnace focuses on time-based art forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, politically unpopular content or their ephemeral or experimental nature. Franklin Furnace is dedicated to serving emerging artists by providing both physical and virtual venues for the presentation of time-based art, including but not limited to artists' books and periodicals, site-specific installations, performance art, and live art on the internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia</span> Contemporary art museum in Atlanta, Georgia, USA

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia is a contemporary art museum in Atlanta, Georgia that collects and archives contemporary works by Georgia artists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African art in Western collections</span> History of African art in Western collections

Some African objects had been collected by Europeans for centuries, and there had been industries producing some types, especially carvings in ivory, for European markets in some coastal regions. Between 1890 and 1918 the volume of objects greatly increased as Western colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many pieces of sub-Saharan African art that were subsequently brought to Europe and displayed. These objects entered the collections of natural history museums, art museums and private collections in Europe and the United States. About 90% of Africa's cultural heritage is believed to be located in Europe, according to French art historians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cultural property documentation</span> Aspect of collections care

The documentation of cultural property is a critical aspect of collections care. As stewards of cultural property, museums collect and preserve not only objects but the research and documentation connected to those objects, in order to more effectively care for them. Documenting cultural heritage is a collaborative effort. Essentially, registrars, collection managers, conservators, and curators all contribute to the task of recording and preserving information regarding collections. There are two main types of documentation museums are responsible for: records generated in the registration process—accessions, loans, inventories, etc. and information regarding research on objects and their historical significance. Properly maintaining both types of documentation is vital to preserving cultural heritage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clive Phillpot</span> British librarian

Clive Phillpot is a specialist on artists' books, essayist, art writer, curator, and a librarian. Phillpot started his library career at the Charing Cross Public Library in London.

Romana Javitz was an American artist, librarian, and Superintendent of the Picture Collection at the New York Public Library.

June Druiett Blum was a multimedia American artist who produced paintings, sculptures, prints, light shows, happenings, jewelry, art books, pottery, conceptual documentations, and drawings. She was also a feminist curator and activist who worked to advance the women's movement and increase visibility for women artists.

Susan E. King is an American artist, educator and writer who is best known for her artist's books.

NIVAL (National Irish Visual Arts Library) is a public research resource which is dedicated to the documentation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish visual art and design. It collects, stores and makes available for research documentation of Irish art and design in all media. NIVAL's collection policy encompasses Irish art and design from the entire island, Irish art and design abroad, and non-Irish artists and designers working in Ireland. NIVAL is sustained by material contributions from artists, arts organisations and arts workers. Information is also acquired from galleries, cultural institutions, critics, the art and design industries, and national and local authorities responsible for the visual arts. NIVAL is housed on the campus of the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Titzel Riefstahl</span> American anthropologist and archaeologist

Mary Elizabeth Titzel Riefstahl was an American anthropologist and archaeologist who specialized in artwork from the Near East. She also served as a librarian and curator for the Wilbour Library of Egyptology of the Brooklyn Museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of Fine Arts of São Paulo</span> University museum located in São Paulo, Brasil

The Museum of Fine Arts of São Paulo (MuBA) is a university museum located in the neighborhood of Vila Mariana, in the city of São Paulo, Brasil. It opened on September 23, 2007 and was officially registered on April 14, 2008. The museum is connected to the Fine Arts University Center of São Paulo, a private institution of higher learning, and is sustained through the School of Fine Arts Foundation of São Paulo (FEBASP).

Diana Korzenik is an American artist, educator, author, collector, and benefactor.

References

  1. Lawrence, Deirdre E. (2008). "Beyond the Galleries: The Brooklyn Museum Library Shares Its Treasures" (PDF). Fine Art Connoisseur. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-11-24. Retrieved 2014-11-14.
  2. "Minutes of the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library Association, 1:84". Brooklyn Museum Archives.
  3. Lawrence, Deirdre (1999). "The Evolution of a Library: The Brooklyn Museum of Art Libraries and Archives". Art Documentation. 18 (1): 10–13.
  4. Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Third Yearbook of the Brooklyn Institute. Brooklyn: Press of Eagle Book. 1891.
  5. Lawrence, Deirdre (1999). "The Evolution of a Library: The Brooklyn Museum of Art Libraries and Archives". Art Documentation. 18 (1): 10–13.
  6. Lawrence, Deirdre (1999). "The Evolution of a Library: The Brooklyn Museum of Art Libraries and Archives". Art Documentation. 18 (1): 10–13.
  7. Compiled by; Cook, Jr., William Burt (1924). Catalogue of the Egyptological and Other Books From the Collection of the Late Edwin Wilbour. Brooklyn, New York: Brooklyn Museum.
  8. Rose, Mark (August 18, 2005). "Wilbour's Legacy". Archaeology.
  9. Fazzini, Richard A.; Romano, James F.; Cody, Madeleine E. (1999). Art for eternity : masterworks from ancient Egypt. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art, in association with Scala Publishers.
  10. Lawrence, Deirdre (1999). "The Evolution of a Library: The Brooklyn Museum of Art Libraries and Archives". Art Documentation. 18 (1): 10–13.
  11. "Libraries and Archives: Fashion and Costume Sketch Collection, 1912-1950". Brooklyn Museum.
  12. Nancy E. Friedland, ed. (2010). Documenting: Costume Design. The Theatre Library Association. pp. 94–99. Retrieved 20 August 2015.
  13. Rose, Mark (August 18, 2005). "Wilbour's Legacy". Archaeology.
  14. Pogrebin, Robin (March 14, 2010). "Groundbreaking Partnership Unites Decades of Research". New York Times.