Low-Profile Museum Expansions

Virginia Woolf plate from Judy Chicago's "The Dinner Party" (1974–1979)

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In the city that invented the skyscraper, monumental new architecture translates into notoriety, but it isn’t the only way for a museum to introduce important expansions. After relatively discreet construction periods, two New York museums christen impressive new galleries this spring that will have the public paying attention—even without new locations or celebrity architects.

On April 21, The Metropolitan Museum of Art unveils the magnificent, two-story Leon Levy and Shelby White Court as the centerpiece of its new Greek and Roman galleries. The construction alone has taken five years, and the much-anticipated opening will conclude a 15-year project dedicated to completely redesigning and reinstalling the museum’s world-famous collection of Classical art.

This means that 6,000 long-stored works, many of them collected in the earliest years after the museum’s founding in 1870, will be returning to public view in the new space.

What has been created is nothing less than a “museum within the museum” that centers on the atrium created by the renowned architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White between 1912 and 1926. (More recent visitors will recall when it served as the museum’s restaurant and cafeteria.)

The atrium space, which evokes the ambulatory garden of a large private Roman villa, has been transformed, through the addition of a second story and a dazzling colored marble floor, into a much grander space.

Although the new design introduces several features, it remains faithful to the architects’ original concept: a classically inspired architectural style with a glass roof, which now allows the objects below to be viewed in natural daylight.

Meanwhile, over the East River at the Brooklyn Museum, the 8,300-square-foot Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened on March 23. The first public space of its kind in the country, the center celebrates the influence of feminist art and the principles that underpin it—not only on the development of the arts in the last 50 years or more, but on every aspect of our lives.

It is difficult to imagine the furor that key works of feminist art provoked when they first appeared. One such work—the epoch-making Dinner Party, which Judy Chicago created in 1979—is now installed as the permanent centerpiece of the new Sackler Center.

When it was first exhibited here in 1980, The Village Voice called it “the first epic feminist artwork,” and with its triangular table and its infamous vulvic place settings, dedicated to some of the most powerful women in history, it forms an unforgettable focus for the new galleries.

On opening day, the center also premiered two special exhibitions: “Global Feminisms,” a large-scale international survey of contemporary art, and “Pharaohs, Queens and Goddesses: Feminism’s Impact on Egyptology,” which is the first in a series of biographical shows the center will present on an ongoing basis.

“Global Feminisms” assembles works in all sorts of media by more than 100 women artists from at least 50 countries. Most of the artists are under the age of 40, and two-thirds of them have never exhibited in New York before.

The show has been brought together by Maura Reilly, who is curator of the new center, and—notably—Linda Nochlin of New York University Institute of Fine Arts. It coincides with the 30th anniversary of the first major exhibition to explore the role of women in the history of Western art. “Women Artists: 1550-1950” was organized by Nochlin with Ann Sutherland Harris and was presented right here at the Brooklyn Museum in 1977.

“Low-Profile Museum Expansions” was originally published in the Spring 2007 issue of Museums New York magazine.