The Studio Museum, Harlem’s gem, is back and brighter than ever

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The Studio Museum in Harlem is back, bigger and bolder than ever. Since the early 1980s, the Studio Museum operated out of its 125th Street property in Harlem in a former bank building cleverly retrofitted to become a working studio, gallery, and community space.

Within five stories and 60,000 square feet, the Studio Museum accomplished plenty. Globally, it became known for helping launch the careers of up-and-coming artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, and David Hammons through its famous artist-in-residence program. Locally, it became institutionalized as the place to witness Black art and to see the Black experience enshrined.

After decades in operation, it was clear to the Studio Museum team that its physical space was not scaling fast enough for its programming or future growth. “I loved the old building, but it was a bank, and sometimes still felt like a bank,” said Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

By 2017, the museum quietly raised $175 million in a capital campaign to create an entirely new building on the same property. To date, it has raised more than $300 million to secure not just the building but the future sustainability of the museum as part of its Creating Space Campaign.

After seven years of construction, the Studio Museum is ready to welcome the public back through its doors with a grand (re)opening on Saturday, Nov. 15.

Addressing members of the media in a press opening, Golden said, “We chose to build this completely new home on the same ground where we stood for so many years. We could’ve looked for a different site in Harlem. We could have relocated to a space in an existing building. But we knew, and our public knew, that this site, which the museum has occupied since the early ‘80s, is where we belong.”

She continued, “We are rooted in 125th Street, just as we are rooted in the history, the heritage, the imagination, and the inspiration of all those who came before. Today, we welcome a new future for ourselves by staying true to our past.”

Building a Space for Black Art

The Studio Museum began in the 1960s, with the protests and discourse of the Civil Rights Movement in the backdrop. Before the ’60s, it was difficult for Black artists to find homes for and display their works anywhere. From museums and academia to commercial art galleries and scholarly publications, Black artists were often excluded from the art world, whether by law or social norms.

In 1968, a group of artists, philanthropists, and community activists came together to address the exclusion. The Studio Museum’s first home was located at 2033 Fifth Ave., just north of 125th Street, in a second-story loft space.

Under the leadership of Charles Inniss, who became the museum’s first director, and co-founders Eleanor Holmes Norton, Campbell Wylly, Betty Blayton Taylor, Carter Burden, and Frank Donnelly, they opened the doors to the public on Sept. 24, 1968. The museum became not just a display of Black art, but also a place where Black creators could produce their work and engage with the community at large.

The museum received an upgrade in square footage and cultural capital, not even 10 years into operation. The museum was gifted a building that was once the New York Bank of Savings, at 144 W. 125th St., its current location. The iconic 125th Street is the main vein of Harlem, and the change of location helped ensconce it in the pantheon of other Black institutions like the Apollo Theater and the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building.

J. Max Bond Jr., the mind behind the Schomburg Center and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, led the renovations of the building, leaving most of the exterior intact but redeveloping the interior.

In its new home, the museum’s ideas grew within and beyond its walls, as the team found more ways to engage the public with free admission days and family activities, alternative education pathways, and innovative multimedia installations that attracted Black creatives, musicians, and filmmakers from all around the world.

Then, on the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2018, the Studio Museum offered patrons a “Last Look” before it shut its doors to the public for seven years. After a few necessary hurdles and a temporary pause during the pandemic, the former building was demolished and excavated in August 2020. A construction wall shielded the progress of the new building from the eyes of the community for years.

Without a site of its own, the Studio Museum, as it had always done, operated beyond its physical space, partnering with MoMA PS1, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others to keep up programming and exhibitions.

The construction wall came down earlier this month, revealing a seven-story, dark charcoal, brutalist-inspired building towering above classic New York brick buildings. It was designed by Adjaye Associates, led by Cooper Robertson, and boasts 82,000 square feet — an increase of 60%.

Among its features are double- and triple-height walls, multiple galleries, workshops, archives, a forum for lectures and talks inspired by the city’s stoops, studio spaces, and movable and false walls that will open, close, expand, and contract depending on the museum’s needs.

Addressing members of the media during the press opening on Nov. 6, Raymond J. McGuire, chairman of the Studio Museum’s board of trustees, said, “This magnificent building says to the world: Harlem matters. Black art matters. Black institutions matter.”

Meeting the Need and Making a Statement

Much of the work of museums happens outside their walls. But it does help when there is a dedicated space where that work can blossom into ideas, which can be nurtured into art and discourse. At least that is the philosophy of the Studio Museum’s chief program officer, Natasha Logan.

This isn’t to say that those things didn’t happen in the old building — they did. In fact, programs like Family Days, teen programming, and artist residencies were wildly popular and well-known. But the new museum now has so many purpose-built and adaptive spaces (they can literally move walls and ceilings), Logan said, they can now respond quicker and more thoughtfully to their community’s needs.

“I think the beauty of this building is that it is needed. This is a building that came out of explicit needs that a previous space couldn’t provide. The design was so intentional,” said Logan. “So in some ways, the building is responding to things that we needed in order to fulfill the scope of our mission: classrooms with sinks for wet work, ceiling heights that could expand so that we could say yes to any type of scale project, among a few examples.”

Much of the programming will stay the same unless it’s expanded or rebranded — like Free Family Days becoming Studio Sundays, where families are invited to participate in art workshops, Logan confirmed.

The museum, in its transmuted form, will be a much-needed third space for the local community. And after raising more than $300 million to sustain its future, it is also, symbolically, a statement of Black artistic legacy and its future.

As federal policies take aim at the nation’s well-known and well-documented history with enslaved and marginalized peoples, and actively work to defund, push out, and rewrite the social and artistic experiences of Black people, the Studio Museum stands firm that art — and Black art in particular — and all the debate, collaboration and creation that it sparks, is worth the public’s investment. And they’ll persist, with or without federal dollars.

“In our 58 years, we really have been a model of what it means to imagine ‘museum,’ in broad ways. Not just as an institution that collects and presents art, but also an institution that embeds it in important ways,” said Golden. “Our ability to raise the money for this project was really a testament to not only the vision that our founders left us with, but the ongoing ways in which many have understood the role of this institution and wanted to join us in this journey to create our first purpose-built home.”

The Studio Museum reopens to the public for free on Saturday, Nov. 15, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., with tours of the museum and a variety of exhibitions based on the museum’s permanent collection. For more info, visit studiomuseum.org.