Brooklyn Artists at the Brooklyn Museum's Bicentennial

The Brooklyn Museum is celebrating its 200th anniversary with a year of planned events and celebrations.The museum pays tribute to works of art and design, created in Brooklyn, from the 17th century to today.

Included in Brooklyn Made are works by  Derrick Adams, and Alex Katz and KAWS who have had solo shows and retrospectives at the museum, and whose works are included in the museum’s permanent collection.

Alex Katz, the consummate New Yorker, was born in Brooklyn in 1927, raised in Queens and has lived and worked in his SoHo studio since 1968.

He spends summers in his Maine farmhouse, where he has established a strong relationship with the Colby College Museum of Art. Katz has donated many artworks to the museum; not just his own, but works of modern masters and younger painters. The museum has an entire wing solely dedicated to Katz’s works. 

In 2007, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Design in New York. He received a 2023 National Medal of Arts at the White House.

Katz’s works are currently on view at Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin in Paris and at the Frye Museum in Seattle. Works from his recent White Lotus Series, available at VFA, will be on view at the Gray Gallery in Chicago from June 11, 2025 through September 20, 2025.

 Brian Donnelly (b.1974) a.k.a. KAWS lives and works in Brooklyn. He had his first New York museum show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2021. The show focused on KAWS’ talents as an artist who draws, paints and sculpts and whose works have instant recognition and universal appeal.

KAWS is also an avid art collector. Works from his collection, much of it by ‘outsider’ artists, were shown at the Drawing Center in New York last year. 

KAWS’ prints and sculptures are available at VFA.

 Derrick Adams was born in Baltimore in 1970. He  has lived and worked in Brooklyn for more than twenty years. Adams paints, does performance art and is a a tenured assistant professor at Brooklyn College’s School of Visual, Media and Performing Arts.

His bold and beautiful works are playful (in 2023 he designed a fully functional, interactive playground at the National Mall, that served as a memorial to the desegregation of public schools in Washington, D.C.) and thought provoking. “(My work) has all the symbolism and all of the entry points that could make it way more complex,” he said in an interview with CNN. “But it also allows people to have an escape if they don’t want to do that.”

 
Adams works are currently on exhibit at Gagosian London through March 22, 2025.

Works from several of Derrick Adams’ series are available at VFA.

Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200 will be on view from February 28, 2025 through February 22, 2026.