More than Two Hundred Artists Selected for The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition

The sweeping group show celebrates the diversity of Brooklyn’s creatives and the Brooklyn Museum’s rich history of championing the borough’s artists.

On view October 4, 2024–January 26, 2025

The Brooklyn Museum is proud to announce the selection of more than two hundred artists for The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, which will open on the occasion of the Museum’s 200th anniversary. This extensive group show highlights the remarkable creativity and diversity of Brooklyn’s artistic communities. Reflecting on a rich history of fostering creativity and championing artists of all backgrounds, the Museum’s bicentennial is an opportunity to honor the borough’s artistic heritage while looking ahead to its bright and creative future. Artists were selected through a collaborative effort led by esteemed Artist Committee members Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli, all of whom are Brooklyn Museum Artist Trustees. The selection process consisted of two phases: invitations from the Artist Committee and a public Open Call that garnered nearly 4,000 applications

“For years artists have been asking us to organize a big Brooklyn artists exhibition, and now we’ve done it!” says Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum. “Brooklyn has more artists than anywhere, and we are thrilled to expand the ways we support the excellence of our incredible borough.”

The artworks selected for the exhibition reflect Brooklyn’s vibrant and dynamic art scene, spanning a wide range of artistic disciplines including drawing, painting, collage and assemblage, video, multimedia, installation, and sculpture. Throughout the exhibition’s run, a series of public programs will highlight selected artists whose practice involves performance.

Showcasing a snapshot of Brooklyn’s creative output over the past five years, the artists in this exhibition explore and challenge contemporary themes that resonate both locally and globally, such as migration, cross-cultural exchange, identity, history, and memory.

The presentation also highlights collective care, healing, joy, solidarity, uncertainty, and turbulence, intertwined with material experimentation.

Together, these works paint a rich portrait of what makes Brooklyn uniquely “Brooklyn”: a borough teeming with a vast diversity of people, vibrant and pulsing with energy and activity. The exhibition celebrates the inventiveness and innovation of Brooklyn’s artists, connected by mutual love and respect as collaborators, neighbors, friends, and family.

Sylvia Maier

Through Nov. 1. Malin Gallery, 515 West 29th Street, Manhattan; 646-918-7696,

Sylvia Maier’s beautifully crafted canvases in “About Sangomas and Soothsayers and Mischief” at Malin Gallery, which you can visit in person or view online, are ideal for this moment in New York. Coinciding with the reigniting of the Black Lives Matter movement, and recalling the 2018 exhibition “Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today,” which opened in New York at Columbia University and later moved to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris,

Ms. Maier’s paintings portray activists, dancers, musicians and denizens of Brooklyn with a cool and masterly approach drawn primarily in classical European painting.

“Activist Row/Reclaiming Her Time” (2018) shows a young woman taking a break from insurgency (presumably) with posters and fliers in the background depicting earlier civil rights and radical movements. “The Festival” (2018) captures people at the Afropunk Festival in Brooklyn, while “Drummer’s Grove” (2017) focuses on a vibrant group of percussionists in Prospect Park. A young man with a Maori-style tattoo on his face appears in many paintings, adding a contemporary element to her work that is countered by works like “The Beheading” (2020), an update of Renaissance and Baroque compositions drawn from biblical stories like Judith beheading Holofernes and referencing the 18th-century Haitian revolution that overthrew the French colonial regime. Here, it is women of color beheading a white man.

Ms. Maier’s work is bold in its narratives and deft in its execution. Yet it could depart more from historical models like those of Caravaggio, Manet or Puvis de Chavannes. Her subjects are inspiring, disruptive and sublime. It would be nice to see Ms. Maier’s compositions, brush stroke, palette or general approach emulate some of that same vital energy and revolt. MARTHA SCHWENDENER.