The Brooklyn Museum dropped this bombshell in my inbox at 5:23 p.m.:
Because of an air-conditioning outage, the Brooklyn Museum will be closed tomorrow, Friday, July 8 through Sunday, July 10. Our team is working around the clock to replace the damaged systems during this time. All museum collections are being constantly monitored and sensitive materials are being moved to climate controlled spaces.
Please check www.brooklynmuseum.org for updates and for more information on rescheduled programs.
New York City is in the midst of a high-humidity heat wave, which sometimes can cause widespread brownouts or power outages. But from the wording of the press release (“Our team is working around the clock to replace the damaged systems.”), this sounds like an internal museum problem.
Climate control has long been sticky at the Brooklyn Museum. Six years ago, I learned from then director Arnold Lehman that Brooklyn was “the last major museum in the United States that is not fully climate-controlled.” He told me that was working on the problem.
But even when all its systems are working, the galleries are still not fully climate controlled, as I learned last month from Edward Bleiberg, curator of Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Near Eastern art. He told me that two-thirds of the Egyptian galleries—the ones recently reinstalled at the behest of the museum’s new director, Anne Pasternak—still lack climate control, including the area where I photographed him:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Here’s what Arnold had told me about the climate-control situation, back in August 2010:
There’s an old museum joke: Years ago, when people were in the Egyptian galleries and it was very hot, the guard would come over to them and say: “We try to simulate the climatic conditions of the country where the materials come from.”
Someone once said to me that I’m going to have on my tombstone: “He Loved Ductwork.” It’s been an issue that no one wished to tackle: We’ve got this gigantic building, and our temporary-exhibition galleries are climate-controlled, but, basically, our permanent-collection galleries aren’t….
It’s an extraordinarily complicated project that has required tens of millions of dollars and it’s the kind of investment that people don’t even notice. We ultimately will have to provide a stable environment for all of these great works of art.
No one has ever written about this: “Arnold, I’d like to come in and interview you about climate control!” It’s going to take maybe six more years to get this done…
…or maybe not: Next month will be six years since we had that conversation.