Brooklyn Museum Breaks Ground on $13 Million Renovation for New Arts of Africa Galleries
A long-stored stretch of the Brooklyn Museum’s third floor is about to become the institution’s most expansive platform yet for African art. This summer, the museum will begin a $13 million renovation to create a 6,400-square-foot home for its 4,500-object African art collection, with the new Arts of Africa galleries slated to open in Fall 2027.
When the project debuts, visitors will encounter roughly 300 works spanning antiquity to the present, installed across the museum’s third floor. The museum says the rehang will bring together objects by geographic origin while deliberately mixing ancient and contemporary material, underscoring the collection as a living continuum rather than a closed historical chapter.
The renovation also marks a significant institutional moment for a museum that began collecting African art at the start of the 20th century. In 1923, the Brooklyn Museum became the first American institution to present 1,400 African works as art rather than as anthropological specimens, under Stewart Culin, who had established the museum’s Department of Ethnology in 1903. Over the decades, the collection has continued to grow, with selections circulating in exhibitions at the museum and beyond. One such presentation remains on view through April, shortly before construction begins.
The new galleries are being shaped by a curatorial team assembled in recent years. The museum hired Ernestine White-Mifetu as curator of African art in 2022. In 2024, Annissa Malvoisin joined as associate curator after co-organizing the museum’s 2023 exhibition “Africa Fashion” with White-Mifetu. They have been working alongside Yara Doumani, curatorial assistant for the Arts of Africa, Asia, & the Islamic World.
In an email statement, the team described their approach as grounded in close study of provenance and context. “We led by researching object biographies which allowed us to understand the objects’ full histories,” they said. “Listening to the objects became a natural framework to apply to the galleries while firmly recentering African and Afrodiasporic perspectives.”
Press materials indicate that the inaugural installation will include works such as ancient Meroitic ceramics; Ethiopian qäqwami mäsqälät (processional crosses); Imazighen tizerzai (fibula); a Yorùbá paka egúngún (masquerade costume); and one of the oldest Kuba ndop figures. Among the collection’s notable holdings is a Yorùbá masquerade dance costume made circa 1920–48 and donated in 1998 by New York-based fashion designer Sam Hilu.
Architecturally, the project will activate space previously used for furniture storage, converting it into four Arts of Africa galleries. Brooklyn-based Peterson Rich Office has been selected as the architectural firm for the overhaul, while Manhattan-based Beyer Blinder Belle will oversee historic preservation.
Rather than forcing the galleries into a single uniform experience, the renovation will emphasize the distinct character of the existing rooms. One gallery, built in 1904, has 25-foot ceilings and abundant natural light. A second, built in the 1920s, is more intimate and better suited to light-sensitive works. Two interstitial galleries — including a dedicated video room — will connect the spaces. The museum plans to integrate updated lighting, climate control, and bold accent colors that make the new interventions legible against the building’s older fabric.
One of the most consequential changes is also one of the most quietly radical: the renovation will reopen an original 1897 enfilade, reconnecting the Arts of Africa galleries with the museum’s Egyptian collection. The museum frames the move as a corrective to a long-standing art-historical separation that has often positioned Egypt apart from the rest of the African continent.
The scale of the undertaking is notable given the museum’s recent financial challenges, which drew public attention last year. Funding for the renovation, the museum said, brings together city and federal government support alongside philanthropic backing from the Ford Foundation, the Sills Family Foundation, and individual donors.
If the project succeeds on its own terms, the new Arts of Africa galleries will do more than provide a permanent address for a major collection. They will also test how a legacy American museum can reframe African art through scholarship, architecture, and adjacency — and how those choices shape what visitors understand as art history in the first place.
