How Brooklyn Museum Is Breaking the Mold: An Interview With Director of Curatorial Affairs Catherine Futter
Late last year, the Brooklyn Museum announced it had acquired more than 330 artworks in 2024—an impressive figure for any institution and ever more so given the intense competition for donations in this city. The works were distributed across some of the museum’s most celebrated collections, including those for American Art, Arts of Africa, Asian Art, Contemporary Art, Feminist Art, Decorative Arts and Design and Photography. More importantly, the gifts coincided with the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary and offer a look at where the museum may be headed in its next century. To discuss all of this, Observer caught up with Catherine Futter, director of curatorial affairs and senior curator of decorative arts.
These gifts coincide with the Brooklyn Museum’s bicentennial. What does this milestone mean for the institution?
The Brooklyn Museum is one of the oldest in the country and has a distinctive legacy as a trailblazer within the art world. The Museum’s history of championing art that inspires compassion and joy while challenging the limits of traditional art history narratives is central to who we are today. The Museum’s founders envisioned an institution that would bring world culture and history to everyone.
The Museum has been commemorating this milestone with current and upcoming shows that celebrate this legacy—“Solid Gold,” “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” and “Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200,” which dives into the Museum’s rich history and evolving future, with incredible new acquisitions and gifts of art, and objects tracing the development of our own collection.
With a gift this large, I’m sure it is hard to name standouts, but what are some of your personal favorites in this donation?
This year the Museum expanded its collection with over 330 acquisitions—more than one hundred of those were gifts of art given by the Museum’s valued donors in honor of its 200th anniversary. A selection will be displayed in the upcoming exhibition, “Breaking the Mold,” which opens February 28, 2025, and runs through February 22, 2026.
While all of the new acquisitions are meaningful and exciting contributions to the Museum’s ever-expanding collection, below are a handful of gifts that are particularly exciting:
Gae Aulenti’s Pool Lounger is one of thirty-five gifts given by renowned collector Dennis Freedman to mark the Museum’s anniversary. Pool Lounger, while not breaking from tradition in form, incorporates colors and shapes derived from Pop Art and is currently installed in the Museum’s fourth-floor Decorative Arts and Design galleries.
Object II by British artist Antony Gormley is part of the artist’s Weave Work series, which engages the question, “How can you begin to describe the indoors of the body, or the body at rest?” The sculpture depicts a human body as an almost architectural work, composed of steel arranged as a gridded scaffolding. In his over forty-five years as an artist, Gormley has used the human figure to understand the notion of bodies in space.
Kyōhei Inukai’s Javanese Coat is a significant new addition to the Museum’s collection of works by Japanese American artists. His works demonstrate a virtuosic Impressionistic style that was influenced by his teacher, William Merritt Chase. Javanese Coat, while primarily a portrait of Inukai’s lover and frequent model Dorothy Hampton, also includes a self-portrait in the upper part of the composition where the artist is visible in the mirror’s reflection.
Another exciting addition to the Museum’s collection is Kyōhei Inukai the Younger’s Untitled (Still Life). This work by Kyōhei’s son depicts a vase of zinnias, a family photo and other personal items on a side table. Created shortly after the artist’s marriage to his second wife, this piece gives an intimate look into the couple’s life at home. The unusual downward angle of the perspective and random-seeming crop of the painting are reminiscent of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, which likely influenced the artist.
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The first work of Winfred Rembert to enter the collection, Looking for Rembert, demonstrates the skills of a non-formally trained artist and presents an alternative narrative of art production. Though Rembert liked to draw throughout his life, his art career officially began in middle age while in prison. It was there when he started crafting small billfolds; later images in leather were created using hammers and dyes.
A gift from the Alex Katz Foundation, Sooner or Later is one of Mark di Suvero’s most organic sculptures and conveys his fluidity and spontaneity as a sculptor. With a storied career of over sixty years, di Suvero is considered to be one of the most important American sculptors of his generation. Di Suvero’s other works can be found in major museums and public sites around the world, and there is no better occasion than the Brooklyn Museum’s 200th anniversary to add this work to the Museum’s plaza alongside the iconic OY/YO sculpture by Deborah Kass.
Large Conical Bowl by Kondō Takahiro was just on display as part of Porcelains in the Mist: The Kondō Family of Ceramicists. A masterful example of the “silver mist” glazing that Japanese artist Kondō Takahiro invented, this object perfectly embodies the artist’s stated goal of “creating
These gifts come from a wide array of donors. How long were you working on this, and was it very hard to coordinate?
The acquisition process is ongoing and continuous, thanks to the generosity of the trustees and the work of the Museum’s director and curators. There are acquisition meetings throughout the year to deliberate on what works the Museum will either purchase or accept as gifts.
The press release announcing these gifts makes note that many of the donated contemporary works are by artists based in Brooklyn. To what extent do you feel your museum is about representing Brooklyn versus bringing the rest of the world to it?
The Brooklyn Museum is home to an extraordinary encyclopedic collection of more than 140,000 objects representing global cultures and over 6,000 years of history—from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to significant American works and to trailblazing installations presented in the only feminist art center of its kind.
Within this large collection spanning an incredible geographic and temporal range, the Museum makes an effort to highlight local artists, such as in the current “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” and “Breaking the Mold.”
Showcasing a snapshot of Brooklyn’s creative output over the past five years, the 215 artists in “The Brooklyn Artists 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.
The Brooklyn Made section of “Breaking the Mold” pays homage to the borough’s artists and designers from the seventeenth century to today. Beginning with a pair of Delaware Lenape youth moccasins to acknowledge the land’s original inhabitants, this section journeys through time to spotlight works by contemporary Brooklyn-based artists such as KAWS, Duke Riley and Tourmaline. Some works speak to the diversity of artists and manufacturers who have called Brooklyn home, while others consider outsiders’ fascination, documentation and exploration of the borough as a place with a provocative history and the subject of popular imagination. Spanning the Museum’s vast collection, from decorative arts and design to painting, photography and works on paper, as well as its immersive period rooms, these works illuminate the borough’s rich histories, including those of its many immigrant communities. Presented throughout the space are historical and contemporary images of Brooklyn, depicting its performances, protests, architecture and design, landscapes and waterways and, most importantly, its people.