Brooklyn is home to some pretty sweet museums at the moment. The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arta, the Reliquary Museum, the Morbid Anatomy Library and the Coney Island Museum just to name a few. Now we’ve got a new person on the Brooklyn museum scene trying to open a museum of ancient African art in Bed-Stuy, using his entire huge collection of artwork he’s collected over the course of his life. He’s asking for your help with a Kickstarter, and we think you should give him that help.
The Kickstarter for the Cultural Museum of African Art is being run by Eric Edwards, a Clinton Hill resident who has a collection of ancient African art that’s more than 2,500 items strong and spans 4,000 years of African history, Edwards says in the Kickstarter video. Having collected the artifacts over 44 years, Edwards says that he wants to share them and have them used to educate people, instead of merely collecting them. In addition to his collection, the plan is for the museum to house a library and a media and research center.
The good news is that two of the hardest parts of museum building are down. Edwards already has a huge collection to donate, and according to Gothamist, he also has a potential home in Bed-Stuy for the museum, 375 Stuyvesant Avenue. The Kickstarter, which is seeking $35,000, is looking for funds to hire a publicist to help the museum get funding in non-Kickstarter ways, pay appraiser fees, pay for an administrative assistant and pay for architectural designs (which are being done by Rodney Leon, famous for the UN’s slave trade memorial).
The rewards for helping the museum get off the ground, beyond your own good feelings for assisting in the birth of another hub of knowledge in Kings County, are things like half-price museum admission ($15), and either a six-month ($50) or a one-year museum membership ($75). If everything goes according to plan, the museum will open with an exhibit in September of this year and will have another one in February/March 2016. So keep things on track and toss Edwards some cash!
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