The Brooklyn Museum Presents Everyday Rebellions: Collection Conversations

This fall, the Brooklyn Museum will open Everyday Rebellions: Collection Conversations in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, marking the first collection-focused show presented in the Center for Feminist Art since Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection in 2021. The exhibition pairs newly acquired works with objects from across the Museum’s diverse holdings, including Arts of the Americas, Arts of Asia, Contemporary Art, and European Art. Everyday Rebellions: Collection Conversations opens on October 10, 2025.

Inspired by Gloria Steinem’s bestselling 1983 autobiographical essay collection, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, the exhibition highlights how artists use juxtaposition, scale, and unexpected materials to spark dialogue about our place in the world. Featured works include Beverly Semmes’s Chorus, a dynamic installation made from oversized red velvet dresses; Sarah Sze’s Cave Painting, a complex mixed-media landscape; Sahana Ramakrishnan’s intricate Jackal Brings a New Era; and Judith Shea’s textural Noah’s Pair. These works and more will captivate visitors with their monumental scale and invite close looking.

Presented in curatorial vignettes across three gallery spaces, distinct conversations emerge both within and between artwork groupings that connect socially rich themes. One such grouping features Brooklyn-based artist Alison Kuo’s found-object sculpture You Pick the Moon, alongside an eighteenth-century Chinese Imperial basin-shaped jar, highlighting the social significance of adapting historically important objects to domestic settings. In another, a late-nineteenth-to-early twentieth-century Iñupiaq raincoat from the Arts of the Americas collection is set in dialogue with Sonia Kelliher-Combs’s Idiot Strings, a sculptural installation honoring the lived experiences and creative labor of Alaska Native Women. Nicole Eisenman’s Three Walkers, a satirical critique of hollow political rhetoric, stands alongside Auguste Rodin’s monumental Burghers of Calais bronzes, which celebrate the brave men who were prepared to sacrifice themselves to save the citizens of their city.

Everyday Rebellions celebrates the artists who employ subversive, subtle gestures as part of their commitment to creating a better future with humor, conviction, and persistence.

“This exhibition offers a timely moment to turn our focus back to the Center for Feminist Art’s growing collection, highlighting significant acquisitions and objects rarely on view. After several seasons of traveling retrospectives and non-collection-based programming, we’re excited to showcase the dynamic feminist throughlines that connect objects within our holdings—and across the Museum’s wider collection,” says Catherine Morris, Curatorial Chair andSackler Senior Curator for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

Everyday Rebellions: Collection Conversations is organized by Catherine Morris, Curatorial Chair and Sackler Senior Curator, with Carla Forbes, Curatorial Assistant, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art.

About the Brooklyn Museum

For 200 years, the Brooklyn Museum has been recognized as a trailblazer. Through a vast array of exhibitions, public programs, and community-centered initiatives, it continues to broaden the narratives of art, uplift a multitude of voices, and center creative expression within important dialogues of the day. Housed in a landmark building in the heart of Brooklyn, the Museum is home to an astounding encyclopedic collection of more than 140,000 objects representing cultures worldwide and over 6,000 years of history—from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to significant American works, to groundbreaking installations presented in the only feminist art center of its kind. As one of the oldest and largest art museums in the country, the Brooklyn Museum remains committed to innovation, creating compelling experiences for its communities and celebrating the power of art to inspire awe, conversation, and joy.