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Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Stadtbahnstation Rathaus-Süd/ LRT station Rathaus-SüdElizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
A gallery accentuates a seminal work of art and gives it a permanent home.
The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art establishes a vital new venue and focal point within the Brooklyn Museum. The design for the new center creates a visually distinctive environment symbolic of the museum’s commitment to creating a permanent home for showcasing feminist art and recognizing and exploring the importance of a woman’s point of view.
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The new center occupies 8,500 square feet on the museum’s fourth floor. It includes permanent and changing exhibit galleries, a study center, and presentation space to promote dialogue and exchange about the exhibits and related issues represented in the galleries.
Organized as a series of distinct yet interconnected experiences, movement through the center allows for a variety of encounters with the permanent and changing exhibits. Judy Chicago’s seminal work, The Dinner Party, is the centerpiece of the overall design and is integrally related to the other spaces within the new center. The primary entrance is located directly adjacent to the northwest overlook to the Beaux Arts Court. The sequence begins through a large portal with double-glass doors and signage announcing the center in the transom above.
The overall design is conceived as a series of concentric layers: the perimeter walls of the nineteenth-century building, the enveloping zone of changing exhibit galleries, and the walls and inner sanctum of the Dinner Party Gallery. This strategy served to reconcile the scale and geometry of The Dinner Party within the structure of the whole. Careful modulation of sound and light levels underscores the experiential qualities of the center: maple flooring in the changing exhibit galleries contrasts with sound absorptive rubber in The Dinner Party Gallery; light levels diminish as the viewer moves from the surrounding galleries into the permanent exhibit.
A dramatic sculptural threshold immediately inside the entry portal signals arrival to the new center. Defined by the large canting walls and glass membrane of The Dinner Party Gallery, this point of arrival permits anticipatory glimpses of the piece within. Changing exhibit galleries flank all three sides of the central gallery. A small vertical window in the perimeter wall of one of the new galleries provides access to filtered daylight and a visual point of orientation by framing a view of one of the columns of the museum’s portico along Eastern Parkway.
Formal name of project: Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Gross square footage: 8,500 sq.ft.
Completion Date: March 2007
Total construction cost: $3.6 million
Owner: Brooklyn Museum
Architect:
Polshek Partnership Architects
320 West 13th Street
New York, New York 10014
212.807.7171
212.807.5917 fax
www.polshek.com/
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