Bringing the 'Art of Manga' to the Brooklyn Museum

The Art of Manga exhibit, which made its debut at the de Young Museum in San Francisco last year, arrives on the East Coast at the Brooklyn Museum. The collection of 658 artworks on display is mostly the same as the de Young version, though bringing these pieces to a new space was its own undertaking.

Introducing an early tour of the exhibit for press, exhibit curator Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere said, “What Brooklyn has done is really highlighted each of the artists in their own individual fashion, really beautifully spacing it out, and I think it's the most immersive format they could have done.”

Speaking to Anime News Network, Brooklyn Museum curator Joan Cummins said, “It's almost an identical show, but it's in a very different space. We're in a circa 1900 room right now with these big columns, and figuring out how to make it fit into this crazy space that has two different heights and all that, that was challenging.” While San Francisco did the difficult work of getting all the different artists and publishers on board with the exhibit, the “hard part” for bringing it to Brooklyn “was just putting 658 things up on the wall in the proper order.”

One note Cummins got from the manga publishers about organizing the exhibit? “You can't put rival artists next to each other.” She declined to elaborate on what rivalries might be, though she hinted that alternating between male and female artists was key to avoiding such conflicts. For reference, the eight main artists showcased in the exhibit are, in order, Rumiko Takahashi, Jiro Taniguchi, Mari Yamazaki, Hirohiko Araki, Fumi Yoshinaga, Gengoroh Tagame, Kazumi Yamashita, and Eiichiro Oda. You can make your guesses on who didn't want to be next to whom.

Another hard part in bringing Art of Manga to the Brooklyn Museum was convincing the rest of the museum leadership to get on board. Many board members didn't even know what manga was, or confused it with anime, so Cummins — herself a manga neophyte — had to do a lot of educating. She admits her first brushes with manga while traveling in Japan weren't the most positive — “I felt like every time I opened a manga, it was kind of misogynistic” — but she's read at least one volume of every series showcased in the exhibit and is particularly a fan of series with historical settings such as Yamashita's Land, Yoshinaga's Ōoku, and Takahashi's MAO.

There is at least one new addition to the Brooklyn exhibit that wasn't at the de Young: during the tour, Rousmaniere called attention to pages from Taniguchi's short manga Hundred Year Lineage (from the anthology To Own a Dog and Also a Cat). Unpublished in English, this emotional story opens with a girl forced to abandon her hungry dog amid World War II rationing. The girl and the dog reunite after the war, and the dog goes on to have puppies, starting the titular “lineage.”

On the other hand, some things from San Francisco didn't make it over here. Where the de Young's “ONLY ONE PIECE” room showcased a full-scale printing press in an exhibit on the manga publishing process, here we only get a video installation detailing that process.

The most interesting new addition isn't technically part of the exhibition itself, but the area right before you walk in: a collection of traditional Japanese art from the museum's collection organized as “Manga Before Manga.” It's fascinating to see how the form of comics emerged—some of the ukiyo-e prints and emaki scrolls even show the evolution of word bubbles. The curatorial notes link older pieces to the manga in the main exhibit. Kawanabe Kyosai's comical warring frogs play as precursors to Fujio Akatsuka's Beshi, the frog character used as the “Art of Manga” mascot, while Utagawa Kuniyoshi's woodblock of folk hero Kaidomaru parallels many a shonen protagonist. I can nitpick including a Sekini Junichiro print from 1976 in an exhibit supposed to be “before manga” — that's newer than most of the Akatsuka and Tetsuya Chiba pieces used in the exhibit's introduction — but it's a beautiful image that works in comparison with Yoshinaga's designs in Ōoku.

Note that while close-up photography is allowed in this pre-exhibit area, photos within “Art of Manga” must be taken from some distance from the artwork, and video is prohibited. Though the Brooklyn Museum doesn't hold set “Cosplay Days” like the de Young (outside of its Halloween party), it encourages cosplay throughout the exhibit's run.

Art of Manga at the Brooklyn Museum is open from October 3, 2026 to January 31, 2027.