More than 600 original manga drawings are going on public display at the Brooklyn Museum starting Saturday, giving East Coast fans a rare look at hand-drawn pages from some of the medium's biggest names. The traveling exhibition, titled Art of Manga, gave members of the media a preview Wednesday, showcasing booths dedicated to 10 manga artists whose work spans decades of the genre's history.
The show was conceived by San Francisco's de Young Museum, according to Kyodo News, which reported on the Brooklyn Museum's media preview Wednesday. Each artist booth highlights that creator's distinctive style, creative process, and use of manga as a means of expression, the Brooklyn Museum said, with the overall exhibition built around showcasing manga's immersive power and social impact. Featured artists include Rumiko Takahashi, known for Urusei Yatsura; Mari Yamazaki, creator of Thermae Romae; Tetsuya Chiba; the late Fujio Akatsuka, described as a foundational figure in manga; and Eiichiro Oda, creator of the blockbuster series One Piece.
Five Years of Negotiation for Rarely Loaned Artwork
Organizers at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco worked with major Japanese publishing houses, including Shueisha, Kodansha, and Shogakukan, to secure original hand-drawn artwork known as genga, according to Anime News Network. The feature describes publishers' concerns about genga conditions and their unfamiliarity with exhibitions involving multiple publishers abroad. The Brooklyn Museum has said it is rare for so many original manga drawings to be displayed together in one place, per Kyodo News.
Beyond the 10 featured booths, the exhibition includes original artwork from creators behind other major international hits, including Hirohiko Araki of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Tite Kubo of Bleach, horror artist Junji Ito, and Riyoko Ikeda of The Rose of Versailles, the same Anime News Network feature reports. Together, the works span genres from shonen action to gothic horror, reflecting the breadth of what the exhibition argues manga can be as an art form.
The Curator Behind a Landmark Show
The exhibition was curated by Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, a professor at the University of East Anglia and deputy director general of the MOA Museum of Art in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, according to Kyodo News. Rousmaniere called manga an art and said that seeing original manga drawings firsthand reveals the details of artists' techniques and enhances the overall experience, per the same report. She previously curated The Citi Exhibition: Manga at the British Museum in London in 2019, a show that was, at the time, the largest manga exhibition ever held outside Japan, according to the British Museum.
From San Francisco to Brooklyn, With a Right-to-Left Twist
Before arriving in New York, the exhibition premiered at San Francisco's de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, where it ran from September 27, 2025, to February 1, 2026, drawing over 168,000 visitors during an extended run, according to the de Young Museum. In San Francisco, the galleries were arranged in a right-to-left, clockwise flow that required visitors to navigate each room in the traditional reading direction of Japanese manga rather than the standard Western left-to-right sequence, as KQED reported. The design choice explicitly challenged Western museum-going habits by mimicking how manga is actually read in Japan.
At the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition opens to the public Saturday and runs through January 31, 2027, Kyodo News reported. In the lead-up to the opening, the Brooklyn Museum partnered with the Anime NYC convention in August to launch a special Manga Fan Pass, granting passholders unlimited admission throughout the Brooklyn run along with event presales and a collectible badge, according to the Brooklyn Museum. The museum also instituted specific visitor guidelines that encourage cosplay while requiring prop weapons and oversized outfits to be held at coat check, and prohibiting hate symbols.
Manga's Moment in New York
New York's manga moment follows a related wave of programming across the city, including a free pop-up manga library scheduled to run in Hudson Yards from October 9 through October 18, 2026, ahead of the fall season's broader manga push.
