The Brooklyn Museum Announces 2022 Exhibition Schedule

Virgil Abloh preparing for his Autumn–Winter 2019 Off-White Womenswear Runway Show (Photo: Bogdan Plakov)

The Brooklyn Museum is thrilled to announce highlights of its 2022 exhibition schedule. This year will mark the conclusion of a multiphase reinstallation of the Arts of Asia and the Islamic World galleries, featuring the Museum’s world-renowned collection of masterpieces from across the continent and introducing several new acquisitions. Of the schedule, Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum, says, “We’re presenting an impressive array of exhibitions this year, from topical collection activations to exciting artist installations.” Visitors will have the opportunity to see a new collection display in the Museum’s Egyptian galleries that recontextualizes ancient Egypt as an African civilization, as well as rediscover familiar jewels from its European collection, now back on view. The Museum’s upcoming artist presentations feature Guadalupe Maravilla’s exploration of intergenerational healing through art and ritual in his solo exhibition; the first museum survey of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering figure in post-Conceptual photography; boundary-breaking art by Nellie Mae Rowe, an important but overlooked figure of twentieth-century American folk art; Duke Riley’s timely examination of the plastic industry’s environmental impact on global and local ecosystems; and finally, a survey of the life work of late visionary artist and designer Virgil Abloh.

Advance schedule of exhibitions follows:

Arts of Asia and the Islamic World
Multiple openings, March–September, 2022
2nd Floor

The suite of galleries dedicated to the Arts of Asia and the Islamic World will be complete in fall 2022 after a multiyear renovation and reconfiguration. After opening galleries for the arts of Korea, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia in previous years, the Museum debuted the new Arts of Buddhism gallery in January and will install an Arts of the Himalayas gallery, to open March 11. The final two spaces—two of the largest in the suite—will feature the Museum’s important collections of South Asian and Islamic art and will open on September 30.

When the galleries are completed, almost 800 works will be on view, representing dozens of cultures and 5,000 years of history. The galleries represent years of research and preparation; all objects on display will have undergone conservation treatment, and many of them are new discoveries uncovered thanks to intensive curatorial surveys of the Museum’s reserve collections. The installations are organized by Joan Cummins, Lisa and Bernard Selz Senior Curator, Asian Art, and Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım, Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator, Islamic Art.

African Ancestors of Egypt and Nubia: From the Green Sahara to the Nile
February 11, 2022
Egyptian Galleries, 3rd Floor

The study of ancient Egypt began with the earliest archaeologists, most of whom made racist, colonial assumptions that ancient Egypt was culturally separate from the rest of the African continent, a premise still evident in Egyptology today, despite a great deal of scholarship to the contrary. African Ancestors of Egypt and Nubia: From the Green Sahara to the Nile, which will be installed within the Museum’s Egyptian galleries, will uncover and challenge these assumptions by focusing on ancient Egypt and Nubia as African civilizations. The presentation includes some of the earliest Egyptian and Nubian pottery and figurines, which illustrate the common origin of these civilizations as well as their parallel development, and Ethiopian objects that demonstrate close ties between Egypt and other African cultures. The display also highlights three of the many African Americans who recognized and published on Egypt and Nubia as African civilizations between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when scholars of “mainstream” Egyptology rejected this notion.

African Ancestors of Egypt and Nubia: From the Green Sahara to the Nile is organized by Yekaterina Barbash, Curator, Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art.

Monet to Morisot: The Real and Imagined in European Art
February 11, 2022–May 21, 2023
European Art Galleries, 5th Floor *

This new thematic reinstallation of the Museum’s renowned holdings of nineteenth- and twentieth century European art features nearly ninety important paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. Featured artists born in Europe or its colonies include Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Francisco Oller, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Gabriele Münter, Yves Tanguy, and Vasily Kandinsky. Casting fresh eyes on the collection, this presentation explores not only the profound and ongoing influence of modern European art, but also how the art historical canon itself is a site of tension.

• The European Art galleries have been relocated from the Beaux-Arts Court, on the third
  floor, to the fifth floor.

Monet to Morisot: The Real and Imagined in European Art is organized by Lisa Small, Senior Curator, European Art, with Shea Spiller and Talia Shiroma, Curatorial Assistants, Arts of the Americas and Europe, Brooklyn Museum.

Presented by Dior.

Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven
April 8–September 18, 2022
Robert E. Blum Gallery, 1st Floor

Brooklyn-based Salvadoran artist Guadalupe Maravilla draws from his own story of migration, displacement, illness, and recovery in this timely solo exhibition. Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven addresses a collective sense of trauma that has grown out of a lengthy pandemic, civil unrest, and displacement. It includes more than a dozen new and existing works by Maravilla as well as objects from the Museum’s Maya art collection and a Healing Room designed by teen staff in the BkM Teens program. The exhibition highlights the ways that care and healing allow individuals and communities to meet the many challenges of contemporary life.

This exhibition is part of Mindscapes, an international cultural initiative examining mental health that is sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, a British foundation devoted to scientific research, advocacy, and policy related to health. For this global initiative, Wellcome is also collaborating with Gropius Bau in Berlin, Germany, the Museum of Art and Photography in Bengaluru, India, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan.

Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven is organized by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, as part of Mindscapes, Wellcome’s international cultural program about mental health. Related Brooklyn learning resources are organized by Lindsay C. Harris, Interim Director of Education and Teen Programs Manager, Brooklyn Museum, with Rebecca Jacobs, Wellcome Trust Mental Health Curatorial Research Fellow, Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY.

DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash
June 17, 2022–April 23, 2023
Period Rooms, 4th Floor

Brooklyn artist Duke Riley takes a critical look at the environmental impact of two major industries that have had a significant effect on global and local ecosystems: whaling and plastics. The exhibition displays Riley’s recent works, which transform everyday plastic waste into scrimshaw, fishing lures, and sailor’s valentines (a type of souvenir made from seashells) in a commentary on the role that major corporations and individuals have had in the destruction of the Earth’s waterways, past and present.

DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash is organized by Liz St. George, Assistant Curator, Decorative Arts, with Shea Spiller, Curatorial Assistant, Arts of the Americas and Europe, Brooklyn Museum.

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech”
July 1, 2022–January 29, 2023
Great Hall, 1st Floor

This is the first museum survey exhibition devoted to the late artist and designer Virgil Abloh, whose work reshaped notions of contemporary fashion, art, commerce, design, and youth culture. The exhibition showcases a mix of fashion, large-scale sculpture, immersive spaces, videos, and sketches spanning nearly two decades of Abloh’s career.

Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” is organized by Michael Darling, former James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is organized by Antwaun Sargent, independent curator and writer.

Major support provided by Northern Trust.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe
September 2, 2022–January 1, 2023
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 4th Floor

Examining autobiographical drawings, experimental sculpture, and “The Playhouse,” the environment the artist built and lived in for decades, this exhibition positions Nellie Mae Rowe as an important yet overlooked figure of twentieth-century American folk art. Rowe’s practice explores themes of girlhood, play, and spirituality, while contextualizing Rowe’s craft as a radical act of self-expression and liberation in the South after the Civil Rights era. This is the first major exhibition of Rowe’s work in twenty years.

Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe is organized by Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator, and Jenée-Daria Strand, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Jimmy DeSana: Submission
November 11, 2022–April 16, 2023
Robert E. Blum Gallery, 1st Floor

This exhibition is the first survey of the work of Jimmy DeSana, a pioneering yet overlooked figure in New York City’s countercultural arts and music scenes during the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout his career, which was cut short when he passed away from AIDS-related illness in 1990, DeSana challenged notions of sexuality and the body; helped to elevate photography within the contemporary art world; and participated in new arts communities outside of traditional institutions and systems of distribution, from mail art and zines to collectives and artist-run spaces. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication and will tour to venues to be determined.

Jimmy DeSana: Submission is organized by Drew Sawyer, Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator, Photography, Brooklyn Museum.