See Inside the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Powerful New Home

Seven years after closing its former building, the Studio Museum in Harlem reopened this past weekend inside its first purpose-built home. For decades, it occupied an early 20th-century bank building that architect J. Max Bond, Jr. adapted for the museum in 1982. While it offered an essential platform for artists of African descent during a period of exclusion from mainstream institutions, the structure’s modestly sized galleries and lack of basic amenities like air conditioning no longer supported the museum’s rapidly expanding vision or the demands of ambitious, technically complex exhibitions. A setting with the scale and infrastructure to match its influence in Harlem and beyond had become essential.  

Defined by stacked concrete modules and large windows arrayed in a Mondrian-esque grid, the museum’s new 82,000-square-foot home base meets those needs, and then some. The structure rises with muscular confidence, its airy galleries paying subtle homage at once to the neighborhood’s soaring church sanctuaries, lively sidewalks, brownstone stoops, and masonry architecture. Designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson as executive architect, the handsome building doubles the amount of space for exhibitions and visitor areas, affording the museum ample room to present its collection at a scale previously out of reach.  

Achieving this was a feat of Herculean proportions. Longtime director Thelma Golden—who first joined the museum in 1987 as a curatorial fellow—raised more than $300 million to make this next chapter a reality. The pandemic stymied progress, as did a scandal that engulfed lead architect David Adjaye when three unnamed women in his office accused him of sexual misconduct in 2023. He denied the allegations and stepped away from the project shortly afterward, handing it over to Pascale Sablan, CEO of the firm’s New York office.  

The result justifies the wait. The building now stands ready to again serve as a vitalizing force within the community it has long championed. That ambition registers immediately in “From Now: A Collection in Context,” a sweeping multi-floor installation charting two centuries of works by artists of African descent. Although the Studio Museum was founded in 1968 as a non-collecting institution, its artist community quickly pressed for a permanent collection that would preserve, steward, and champion Black creativity. That effort has grown into nearly 9,000 objects by more than 800 artists across a multitude of mediums. The opening array honors that legacy with 200 works drawn from these holdings, organized into thematic groupings that will rotate through the building. Rarely seen pieces appear alongside works by Dawoud Bey, Sam Gilliam, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Martine Syms, and James Van Der Zee, forming a vivid cross-section of an era-spanning collection that continues to grow in depth and ambition.  

The most arresting section of “From Now” gathers works made during the museum’s earliest years, when artists confronted the era’s political upheaval. That historical current leads naturally into a survey of the late artist Tom Lloyd, whose innovative practice was the subject of the museum’s opening show in 1968, the final solo presentation of his lifetime. His electronically programmed works gain new resonance in the building’s barrel-vaulted third-floor gallery, bringing together sequenced light constructions built from everyday components such as Christmas lights and plastic Buick backup-light covers.  

Crucially, the new building proves how thoughtful architecture can heighten the presence of art. Floating above the 125th Street sidewalk is a flag designed by conceptual artist David Hammons that overlays the black, green, and red palette of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African flag on top of the stars-and-stripes pattern of Old Glory; it has been displayed on the museum’s facade since Hammons designed it in 2004. Inside, near the entrance, a neon sculpture by Glenn Ligon spells a two-word couplet—“me, we”—first uttered by Muhammad Ali. On the terrace stair, an installation by Camille Norment evokes a pipe organ as handwoven brass wires and tubes carry a droning chorus of voices, alluding to Harlem’s houses of worship. In the Education Workshop, metal silhouettes by Christopher Myers depict Harlem icons as mythic beings gathered under a night sky: a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar strides forward as a basketball-carrying centaur while jazz legends Thelonious Monk and Count Basie sprout butterfly and angel wings. 

Even sans art, the architecture is monumental enough to inspire awe. A towering terrazzo stair climbs from the lower level to the fourth floor, offering multiple lookout points. Polished concrete, engineered wood, and brass trim give the gallery spaces a refined yet grounded character that complements the building’s concrete massing. Furnishings by Black creatives—Ini Archibong, Stephen Burks, Mac Collins, Charles O. Job, Peter Mabeo, Michael Puryear, and Marcus Samuelsson—animate lobbies, lounges, and passageways. Custom tables made from beams salvaged from the former building add a subtle historical thread. On the roof terrace, Galerie Creative Mind firm Studio Zewde devised a landscape of native plantings and sculptural seating that poetically frames panoramic views of the Manhattan skyline. 

The museum’s enlarged footprint also brings the impact on its famed Artist-in-Residence program into full view. “From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence” fills the new fourth-floor studios and lounge with over 130 works assembled in a floor-to-ceiling salon hang that brings together nearly every program alumnus. Conceived as a founding initiative in 1968, the program has garnered renown for its vital role in advancing the work of artists of African and Afro-Latinx descent, supporting the likes of Jacolby Satterwhite, Julie Mehretu, Nari Ward, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, and Mickalene Thomas. Here, their voices converge in one room for the first time, elevated by architecture that provides newfound visibility. 

The reopening arrives at a pivotal moment in New York, when cultural institutions face mounting pressure to broaden access and sustain meaningful engagement with their communities. The Studio Museum now meets that charge with a home that reflects Harlem’s creative legacies and asserts its position as one of the contemporary art sphere’s most important cultural incubators. “We welcome Harlem and all the world into the home we have dreamed of having,” Golden says. “Our mission as champions of artists of African descent and their practices is as urgent today as it ever was and is made all the more possible because of our remarkable new building.”