Current & Upcoming Exhibits 

Truman Capote’s Brooklyn:
The Lost Photographs of David Attie

July 20, 2016 - July 2017

 

In the spring of 1958 a young photographer named David Attie was led through the streets of Brooklyn Heights and to the Brooklyn waterfront by an unexpected guide—33-year-old Truman Capote. The images Attie took that day were to illustrate Capote’s essay for Holiday magazine about his life in Brooklyn. Decades later, these largely unseen photographs are being exhibited for the first time.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Portraits of Hunger in NYC

November 5, 2015 - November 13, 2016

 

Brooklyn-based photojournalist Joey O'Loughlin has spent over two years documenting Food Bank For New York City member agencies, including soup kitchens and food pantries throughout the five boroughs. She has focused her lens on workers, clients, recipients, distribution and meals. O'Loughlin's beautiful and vivid images tell compelling stories about hunger today.



Hear from Dina Garcia, featured in the exhibit:


See more on our Vimeo page!

This exhibition is presented in partnership with:

 

Additional support provided by:

Seth Sprague Educational and Charitable Trust

Sewers: What's Up Down There?

Opening Date: June 9, 2015

BHS is pleased to be opening an exhibition that explores one of Brooklyn's oldest and most extensive infrastructure projects: its sewer system. This exhibition tells the story of the creation of the Brooklyn sewer system through a historical look at four corners of Kings County: Flatlands, Bushwick, Coney Island and Fort Greene. Visitors are invited to look beneath the surface into the problems, challenges, and issues that each of these neighborhoods faced in the creation of the sewer system, and the factors that made an integrated municipal system for sewerage an absolute necessity. The exhibition was curated by a team of teen curators who participated in BHS's free afterschool museum studies program known as Exhibition Laboratory, or Ex Lab.

Brooklyn Abolitionists/In Pursuit of Freedom

January 15, 2014 - Winter 2018

This major, long-term exhibit explores the unsung heroes of Brooklyn's anti-slavery movement -- ordinary residents, black and white -- who shaped their neighborhoods, city and nation with a revolutionary vision of freedom and equality. The exhibit is part of the groundbreaking In Pursuit of Freedom public history project that features new research on Brooklyn's abolition movement in partnership with Weeksville Heritage Center and Irondale Ensemble Project.

Learn more on the exhibition website here.

The Emancipation Proclamation 

October 16, 2013 - Winter 2018

View a replica of Brooklyn Historical Society's rare copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, and examine its dramatic and polemic impact on Americans at the height of the Civil War. The exhibit suggests ways that the document's social and political meaning has evolved in the 150 years since it was signed, and invites visitors to reflect on its legacy in the twenty-first century.

Permanent Collection Installations

Chronicling Brooklyn's Landscapes

Features paintings of Brooklyn from many eras alongside a copy of Brooklyn Historical Society's rare Ratzer Plan of New York.
2nd Floor Parlor

Portraits of Prominent New Yorkers 

Includes paintings from Brooklyn Historical Society's historic collections as well as a recent artist commission by Meredith Bergman, Historia Testis Temporis: Pinky.
2nd Floor Hall and 3rd Floor Landing