The Studio Museum in Harlem on Tuesday announced that it will open its new home on 125th Street in the fall of 2025. Its first show there will bring the museum full circle by focusing on the work of Tom Lloyd, the artist, educator and activist who was featured in the 1968 opening exhibition of the institution — which was then just a second-floor rented loft on upper Fifth Avenue.
“This building represents the collective aspirations of all who have been involved in thinking about what it would mean to make a museum on 125th Street devoted to the work of Black artists,” said Thelma Golden, the museum’s director, in a recent walk through the new structure. “This space allows us to fully execute on all of the work that we have been known to do, but gives us so much more capacity and so much more possibility.”
Featuring stacked volumes of differing sizes over five stories, the new building provides 82,000 square feet, increasing the exhibition space by more than 50 percent and the public areas by about 60 percent.
The museum’s news release makes no mention of the building’s architect, David Adjaye, nor those currently credited for the design — Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson. (The museum parted ways with Adjaye in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct. Adjaye has denied the accusations.)
Golden declined to discuss Adjaye, but said, “We are thrilled with and proud of this design and look forward to working in it.”
Golden also avoided discussing her widely assumed candidacy as a successor for Glenn D. Lowry as the director of the Museum of Modern Art, since he recently announced that he would leave next September, just when the Studio Museum’s building is expected to be completed.
“I am so deeply committed to welcoming audiences and working with artists in this new building when we open,” she said.
To ensure future sustainability, the museum has increased its capital fund-raising goal to $300 million from $250 million. The campaign includes construction and endowment funds as well as both operating and capital reserves. More than $285 million has been raised so far, the museum said.
The new facility, located on the site of the Studio Museum’s home since 1979 — the Kenwood Building, a former factory — will include a theater, a studio for artists in residence, an education center, a rooftop terrace and, for the first time, a cafe.
The museum’s offices will be located across the street in the National Urban League’s new headquarters.
The survey of Lloyd, who died in 1996, will include about 20 works, including electronic installations, wall-mounted sculptures made from found metal parts, works on paper from the 1970s and 1980s and archival materials.
When the Studio Museum opened its doors in 1968, its first solo exhibition was “Electronic Refractions II,” with Lloyd’s colorful, abstract sculptures that feature electronically programmed flashing lights.
“In the last 10 years or so, Lloyd’s work has been reimagined through a new generation of artists and scholars,” Golden said, referring to shows like the 2017 exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” at Tate Modern. “It also felt significant because it allowed us to honor the past while projecting into our future.”
“He was an artist interested in technology and an early technologist,” she continued. “When the exhibition opened at the museum in 1968, for some people it posed the question of its validity as a statement of work by a Black artist at a museum in Harlem.
“There was a much narrower view of what constituted relevant work by Black artists,” she continued, “and the Studio Museum in its founding was writing new histories at that moment, which pushed against the narrow ways in which art by artists of African descent were understood.”
The museum has hired the Harlem-based landscape design firm Studio Zewde for its rooftop terrace, which will also feature programming and may have a food cart.
“So much of what we were imagining is what could create the most amazing space to make our mission manifest and to do so in a way that was a gift to our audiences,” Golden said.
“It also felt like a way to continue to think about our role as a space for everyone,” she said, “and to be open in ways that allow our audience, our neighborhood, our community to experience the museum, but also each other.”
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