The Studio Museum in Harlem reopens after seven years on 15 November. Its new residence was created from the bottom up on the museum’s former footprint at 144 West a hundred and twenty fifth Avenue. The primary purpose-built area in its 57-year historical past, the 82,000-sq.-ft constructing was designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson as govt architect—the 2 groups additionally collaborated on the not too long ago opened new Princeton College Artwork Museum. The Studio Museum’s $300m price ticket—absolutely fundraised, virtually 1 / 4 from public sources—contains building, working prices throughout closure and a $50m endowment (the establishment’s first).
The architect David Adjaye, the founding father of his namesake agency, was accused of sexual assault in 2023 (he denies the allegations). “In July 2023, the board of trustees of the Studio Museum in Harlem and David Adjaye agreed that David Adjaye would step away from the museum’s constructing undertaking,” the Studio Museum mentioned in a press release to The Artwork Newspaper. “At the moment, the design imaginative and prescient was almost full and the constructing was properly into building.”
A muscular and syncopated stack of dark-grey precast-concrete volumes, of various heights and framing expansive home windows, rises six storeys and cuts a dramatic profile on the busy industrial road. The constructing goals to undertaking the ability and voice of Black artists within the artwork world immediately, in no small half because of the Studio Museum’s sustained efforts over the a long time to assist, exhibit, acquire and amplify long-marginalised works.
The Stoop, a large flight of picket steps, is a spot for guests to collect Photograph: © Dror Baldinger FAIA, courtesy the Studio Museum in Harlem
“The façade actually is a solution to what it meant to create a brand new constructing on a hundred and twenty fifth Avenue, one block east of the Apollo [theatre], one block west of the Nationwide Black Theatre, on this cultural hall with establishments which have held Black tradition in such profound methods,” mentioned Thelma Golden, the museum’s director and chief curator, throughout a tour of the finished constructing in September, earlier than the artwork was put in.
In her transient to the architects, “I supplied three experiences of Harlem that I assumed have been important to know the ethos of this neighborhood—the road, the stage and the sanctuary,” Golden says. “Then the architects added the stoop.” These 4 pillars are mirrored all through the constructing, the place exercise contained in the museum will probably be extremely seen from outdoors, simply as the road might be seen at completely different factors from inside.
A broad set of picket steps, envisioned as an inverted brownstone stoop, descends gently from the glass façade of the hovering double-height foyer to the decrease stage. It is going to function a versatile place to sit down, eat and collect for public programmes, with a tall curtain that may encircle the entire area for performances and screenings.
Tom Lloyd’s Narokan (1965) options within the museum’s opening exhibition Photograph: John Berens, courtesy the Studio Museum in Harlem
A monumental sculptural terrazzo-clad stairway wends its means up the central backbone of the constructing, which stretches the width of the block to 124th Avenue, with beneficiant galleries flanking both facet of the stairwell. A barrel-vaulted, 29ft-tall area on the third flooring in the direction of a hundred and twenty fifth Avenue will probably be put in with an inaugural present of vibrant wall-mounted digital sculptures by Tom Lloyd (1929-96), a pioneer of sunshine as an artwork medium. Lloyd was the primary artist proven when the Studio Museum opened in a second-floor loft area above a liquor retailer on Fifth Avenue simply north of a hundred and twenty fifth Avenue.
“The chance to do the primary actual Tom Lloyd exhibition since 1968 felt like an extremely highly effective and poetic method to undertaking into our future on this second of opening, but additionally to honour the previous of this establishment,” Golden says.
Pioneering artist-in-residence programme
Galleries on the second and fourth flooring in the direction of 124th Avenue—the higher one with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking brownstone rooftops and church spires—will showcase almost 200 works from the greater than 9,000 objects within the museum’s everlasting assortment. The inaugural set up will embrace artwork by, amongst others, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, Lorraine O’Grady, David Hammons, Religion Ringgold and William T. Williams—who proposed the museum’s defining artist-in-residence programme, initiated in 1969.
Set up view of From Now: A Assortment in Context, 2025 Photograph: Kris Graves, courtesy the Studio Museum in Harlem
That programme, which yearly provides round the clock studio entry to a few artists inside the museum throughout an 11-month residency and an exhibition with work from the residency, has been a major launching pad for a lot of artists of color early of their careers. Distinguished alumni embrace Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Simone Leigh, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Kevin Beasley and Jordan Casteel. Every of the roughly 150 artists who’ve been via the programme will probably be represented by a piece on paper to be displayed within the fourth-floor studios and lounge overlooking a hundred and twenty fifth Avenue earlier than the subsequent cohort of artists takes residence in 2026.
“They’ve 24-hour entry to the studios, one of many issues that’s so particular in regards to the programme,” Golden says. “The artists have a relationship to the museum in a really intimate means. Simply strolling out of their studios, they’re within the galleries.”
Whereas the brand new constructing has the identical sq. footage because the museum’s earlier residence—a repurposed financial institution constructing it moved into in 1982—the exhibition area has elevated by greater than 50% and public areas by virtually 60%, as a result of places of work have been relocated throughout the road.
Set up view of From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, 2025 Photograph: © Albert Vecerka/Esto, courtesy the Studio Museum in Harlem
“We have been the epitome of a multipurpose area,” says Golden of the museum’s former constructing, the place each instructional and public programme occurred inside the gallery and not one of the partitions have been the identical peak. Now there are devoted areas for the teenager workshop and for 2 faculty lessons at a time. “All of those areas enable us to do the work that we’ve lengthy performed, however to have the ability to do it at scale and with actual capability,” Golden says.
A sixth-floor undertaking area, resulting in the rooftop terrace, may have a present of archival materials on the historical past of the museum. Within the late Nineteen Sixties, when artists of African descent have been virtually utterly excluded from mainstream museums and artwork galleries, “we have been began by a gaggle of artists, activists, neighborhood leaders and philanthropists who believed {that a} museum dedicated to the work of Black artists was a crucial a part of the best way this neighborhood that birthed the Harlem Renaissance might outline itself via tradition”, Golden says. The museum’s seventh director, Golden labored on the Studio Museum for a 12 months as a curatorial intern in 1987 and returned in 2000 as deputy director earlier than taking the helm in 2005.
Earlier than the museum closed for building in 2018, it averaged between 80,000 and 100,000 guests yearly. Golden declined to provide a brand new projected attendance quantity aside from to say she hopes to welcome as many individuals as doable. “In 1968, this was not doable,” she says. “However I imagine deeply our founders had this ambition. They knew precisely what they have been doing. It truly is the impetus of that religion that has powered proper via into this second.”
