Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art

The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, housed within the Brooklyn Museum, operates as a dedicated space for feminist practice rather than a conventional collecting department. Its organizing principle is not medium or period but a commitment to art made through or inflected by feminist thinking—a constraint that shapes how objects are selected, installed, and interpreted. The center's primary holdings center on figuration, particularly the female figure as subject, maker, and conceptual problem. What distinguishes the space is its willingness to treat feminist art not as a historical category sealed in the 1970s but as an active methodology, one that continues to inform contemporary practice. The architecture of the collection emphasizes dialogue across decades: works from the 1960s and 70s—when institutional critique and the reassertion of craft-based practices coincided with second-wave feminism—sit alongside more recent investigations into identity, labor, and representation. The center addresses a particular viewer: one attentive to how form carries meaning, to the relationship between an artist's stated intentions and what the work actually performs, and to the historical conditions that have rendered certain practices visible and others obscure. The permanent collection remains modest in scale, a deliberate choice that allows for rotation and reframing rather than monumental display.

Signature collections

The center's holdings emphasize American and international women artists working across painting, sculpture, textile, and installation from roughly 1960 onward. The collection engages substantially with figuration—both figurative painting and sculpture in dialogue with abstraction—and with practices that reclaim or interrogate domestic materials and techniques traditionally coded as feminine. Judy Chicago's work anchors certain narratives within the space, particularly her investigations into craft and symbolism. The collection also encompasses conceptual and performance-based practices that may not produce traditional art objects but nonetheless constitute significant feminist interventions. Rather than presenting a comprehensive survey, the holdings reflect specific curatorial commitments: to visibility of artists long excluded from mainstream institutions, to work that theorizes representation itself, and to art that addresses the body and its social meanings. Figuration appears not as a stylistic preference but as a persistent site of negotiation in feminist practice.