Studio Museum in Harlem to Open in the Fall of 2025

The first facility conceived and designed especially for the institution since its founding fifty-six years ago, the new building will provide extensive exhibition, education, and program spaces and public amenities never before enjoyed by the Museum, greatly supporting the Studio Museum’s commitment to artists, audiences, and the Harlem community.

Honoring its history and ushering in a new era, the Studio Museum will inaugurate the building with a comprehensive presentation of the work of Tom Lloyd (1929–1996), the artist, educator, and activist whose pioneering practice was the subject of the institution’s opening exhibition in 1968. An installation drawn from the permanent collection will feature works made as early as the 1800s, as well as those by a host of today’s most renowned artists. This survey showcases more than two hundred years of creative achievements across mediums and underscores the Studio Museum’s role as a steward of art by artists of African descent. Returning to the building’s public spaces are artworks by Houston E. Conwill, David Hammons, and Glenn Ligon.

Raymond J. McGuire, Chairman of the Board of Trustees at the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “With great pride and profound gratitude, we are now able to share the first details of what our community, our city, and the world will experience when we open our new home in 2025. I offer heartfelt thanks to the Board, our many generous individual donors, the numerous foundations that enable the Museum’s work, and our indispensable supporters in the public sphere, with leadership support from the City of New York and assistance from the State of New York.”

Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “The Studio Museum in Harlem will move forward decisively while honoring our past with these revelatory exhibitions. Through the life and career of Tom Lloyd, whose solo exhibition inaugurated our Museum in 1968, we reencounter an artist who was years ahead of his time in both his ideals and artistic practice. Now, thanks to other artists, scholars, and our Curator, Connie H. Choi, his work is coming to light. This exhibition is joined by a breadth of remarkable works from our collection which will be presented in our other incredible galleries. Taken in its entirety, our collection traces, as few institutions can, a history of creativity by artists of African descent that we will continue to nurture far into the future.”

When the Studio Museum opened in 1968 in a rented loft on Fifth Avenue, its first solo exhibition was Electronic Refractions II, a presentation of Lloyd’s colorful, abstract sculptures with lights that flashed in electronically programmed patterns. Lloyd began making these works in 1965 with Alan Sussman, an engineer at Radio Corporation of America (RCA), in a trailblazing cross-disciplinary collaboration that bridged the gap between the arts and sciences. This was one year before a group of artists and engineers founded the organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) to encourage partnerships between these fields. Inspired by everyday urban sights such as traffic signals and theater marquees, Lloyd fabricated his sculptures with common objects, including Christmas lights and plastic Buick light covers, and materials sourced from RCA.

Just one of many of the Museum’s inaugural projects, the presentation of Lloyd’s work will be the artist’s first institutional solo show since that 1968 debut. Installed in the building’s barrel-vaulted, double-height ceiling gallery, the exhibition will present approximately twenty works by Lloyd, including electronic sculptures, wall-mounted sculptures made from found metal parts, and works on paper created in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition will also display an extensive selection of archival materials documenting Lloyd’s activism with the Art Workers’ Coalition and chronicles of the Store Front Museum in Queens—the borough’s first art museum—which Lloyd founded in 1971 and directed for fifteen years.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a catalogue, designed by Miko McGinty, with essays by Choi, Reinhard Bek, Krista Thompson, Studio Museum Senior Curatorial Assistant Habiba Hopson, and artists Paul Stephen Benjamin, Nikita Gale, and Glenn Ligon.

An expansive exhibition of the Museum’s permanent collection, shown in galleries on the second and fourth floors, will emphasize the artists at the heart of the Studio Museum. A new collection catalogue, published by Phaidon and designed by WeShouldDoItAll, will highlight works by more than 250 artists from the Museum’s permanent collection and include texts by more than one hundred contributors, which altogether will illuminate the impact the Studio Museum’s collection has made on art history and the broader cultural landscape. The Museum’s permanent collection, which now comprises about nine thousand artworks, contains work by acclaimed artists such as Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Jordan Casteel, Barkley L. Hendricks, Seydou Keïta, Norman Lewis, Lorraine O’Grady, Faith Ringgold, and many more.

Public spaces throughout the building will also be showcases for artworks. David Hammons’s Untitled flag (2004) will hang from the Museum’s facade; Glenn Ligon’s neon sculpture Give Us a Poem (2007) will be displayed in the lobby; and Houston E. Conwill’s seven time capsules Joyful Mysteries (1984) will be installed on the second floor.

And, as a testament to the Museum’s longstanding commitment to its surrounding community, the Museum has hired the Harlem-based landscape design firm Studio Zewde to carry out the design of its roof terrace. Founded in 2018 by landscape architect Sara Zewde, the firm is acclaimed for projects that foreground community needs and local histories.

As it looks ahead to the opening, the Museum has also announced that it has surpassed the goal of its comprehensive Creating Space capital campaign. In response to the enthusiastic support of donors, as well as to ensure future sustainability, the Studio Museum is extending the campaign’s target from $250 million to $300 million. Encompassing construction, endowment, and operating and capital reserves, the campaign has now achieved more than $285 million.

Main Image: The Studio Museum in Harlem's New Building. Photo: © Albert Vecerka/Esto