Visible Storage/Study Center Opens at the Brooklyn Museum

The Visible Storage/Study Center is a far denser affair with 1,500 objects - from old wallpaper samples to Eames chairs - packed into only 5,000 square feet. The responsibility of making room for it all fell to Matthew Yokobosky, the chief designer at the museum. He was faced with the challenge of organizing a public exhibition space that still fulfilled the traditional purpose of the reserves. "Even though this is storage, each object there is special," he says.

Good lighting was essential for avoiding the gloom associated with infrequently visited galleries. To this end, the showcases - some lining the walls, others detached towers - were made of "shimmering" aluminum. Each showcase, in turn, was conceived as a "room of shelves," with the shelves illuminated from below. In the galley of plain ceiling lights, Yokobosky included a few panels that were based on designs by Louis Comfort Tiffany that are in the museum's collection.

The inventory for the Study Center was chosen by a committee of curators from six departments under the direction of Linda S. Ferber, the chair of the department of American art. Both Ferber and Barry Harwood, the curator of the department of decorative arts, emphasize that there is nothing second tier about the selection. In fact, many works in the Study Center complement those in the nearby main galleries. "The great advantage is the location, with two entries leading out to 'American Identities,'" says Ferber. The proximity makes it convenient to make back-and-forth comparisons.

Thanks to the new arrangement, the balance of the museum's holdings in American pewter and silver is now on display, as is its selection of Tiffany lamps and vases. There are several shelves of Spanish colonial objects, the fruit of the museum's buying trips to Mexico and South America in the 1940s.

Among local production are some pieces by Union Porcelain, a Brooklyn manufacturer of Aesthetic wares. ("The fancy stuff," says Harwood.) Then there are the works that look like they should be in storage, but are historically informative; hence the rows of Nineteenth Century seating furniture, which is covered in its original and tattered upholstery.

In addition, the curators plan informal rotating exhibitions. Works on paper, beginning with some pre-Raphaelite watercolors, will be shown for a few months, and there is currently a mini-show on metamorphic furniture. Labels are provided, but there is none of the preparation and formality attendant on larger shows - no catalogs, no publicity and no crowds. There are also labels for some designated subcollections, such as Native American ceramics. Works are otherwise identifiable by their accession number.

To compensate for the summary presentation, an online database, searchable by accession number, will have an illustrated record for each object. The database will be available in the Study Center and on the museum's website.

Open reserves have been growing in popularity for more than two decades in the United States. The Strong Museum in Rochester, N.Y., which is believed to be one of the first American institutions to adopt this arrangement, opened its study collections to the public in 1982. Since then, open reserves have been adopted in some of the country's most important museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

The Henry Luce Foundation, which is well known in the field of American art, has supported the trend. According to Ellen Holtzman, the foundation's program director for the arts, open reserves "provide the opportunity for the public to view much more of the respective permanent art collections than can ever be exhibited in the galleries."

The foundation first became involved in the 1980s, when it gave $3.5 million to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for that institution's Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art. In the past decade, the foundation has sponsored three other such projects at museums with strong holdings in American art.

The New-York Historical Society received a grant of $7.5 million in 1995 for the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, and the Smithsonian Museum received a grant of $10 million in 2000 for the Luce Foundation Center for American Art.

The Brooklyn Museum, the most recent beneficiary of the foundation's largesse, received a grant of $10 million for the similarly named Luce Center for American Art. (One consequence of the foundation's commitment is that visible storage centers are sometimes generically known as "Luce Centers.")

The trend toward open reserves is reminiscent of how museums for many years organized their galleries, with paintings covering the walls top to bottom and small decorative objects grouped together by the dozen. In the Eighteenth Century, visitors to Italian museums were impressed by the quantity of art on view, and Grand Tour memoirs often enumerate the "several beautiful cameos" and the "medals in great abundance."

The custom of assembling art in unlabeled clusters continued through the Nineteenth Century, judging by contemporary prints. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was organized in this way, even though it was founded for the education of designers and workmen. Text panels and bare, sparsely filled galleries are a legacy of Twentieth Century museology.

If the experience of the New-York Historical Society is representative, the Brooklyn Museum should expect increased interest in its collections. Seventy-five percent of the society's collections are on display, of which the majority is exhibited in its Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. The society's study collections opened to the public in November 2000, and since then staff members have been handling a wider range of visitors, who often discover the center's catalog posted on the society's website.

Denny Stone, who is the collections manager at the society, calls the open reserves "a great solution to the problems so many museums have. With open storage, a museum gets to show many more of the great things in its collection." In the past, a visitor could conveniently see only a few of the showpieces, and might not be aware of the society's holdings in, say, golf memorabilia.

One drawback for the staff, however, is the necessity of working in front of the public. "The curators are on display when they need to find something in the reserves," says Stone. She adds that the new arrangement entails ensuring visibility of the objects, which are packed on the shelves, often right up against the glass. "There is much more maintenance than there was before."

In contrast with the society, the Brooklyn Museum still has only a small portion of its collections on display. Harwood estimates that of the approximately 60,000 objects in the department of decorative arts alone, only one-sixtieth is now on display.

The Brooklyn Museum, open Wednesday-Sunday, is at 200 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. For information, 718-638-5000 or www.brooklynmuseum.org.