NEW YORK, April 21 (UPI) -- Brooklyn's world-famous art museum unveiled its new look this week the results of a $63 million renovation.
The makeover includes a dramatic semicircular glass entrance pavilion that extends out from its 1897 Neo-Classic façade and is surrounded by a landscaped garden with a spectacular fountain featuring dancing jets of water.
The Brooklyn Museum's new lobby doubles the size of the old one and contains visitor services and a 25-foot-wide mural by Alexis Rockman picturing an apocalytic vision of Brooklyn under water as the result of an environmental disaster.
The redesign was the work of the New York firm Polshek Partnership Architects and was paid for out of funds being raised by an ongoing building campaign that has a goal of $130 million.
The unveiling of the new pavilion is being celebrated with an exhibition of 300 works by 200 artists living and working in Brooklyn, a retrospective of the late black fashion designer Patrick Kelly, and the reinstallation of the museum's celebrated pre-Columbian and Native American collections in a vast gallery setting of bright purples and yellows. A new Center for Feminist Art will be opened in 2006.
