The American South will have a new and expanded museum to visit come December 6, when Tennessee’s Memphis Art Museum (formerly the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art) reopens. The 123,500-square-foot cultural campus, designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architects Herzog & de Meuron, expands the institution’s gallery space by half and, per the museum, offers “six times more art-filled free public space.”
The new facility was initially tagged at $180 million, reported a local news outlet in November, adding that the actual cost is expected to be higher. The City of Memphis contributed $30 million, while the State of Tennessee gave $12 million toward the expansion. Residents of Shelby County, which includes Memphis, will receive free admission.
The two-acre campus is structured around a reconstructed bluff on the Mississippi River, known locally as the promenade. It will offer a 10,000-square-foot courtyard, a 50,000-square-foot rooftop art garden, an outdoor amphitheater with river views, a large pedestrian plaza, and light-filled education spaces.
“This new museum creates an extraordinary place where world-class art, iconic architecture, and the creative energy of our city come together,” Zoe Kahr, the museum’s director, said in a statement. “It will offer Memphians and visitors alike new opportunities for inspiration, connection, and discovery for generations to come.”
The Memphis Art Museum.
Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron
The museum, which bills itself as the Volunteer State’s largest and oldest, opened as a city-owned institution in 1916 in the Overton Park neighborhood. It was initially called the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, named for founding donor Bessie Vance Brooks. It occupied a Beaux Arts–style building designed by James Gamble Rogers that was enlarged in 1955, 1973, and 1989 as the collection grew. It changed its name to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in 1983 and separated from the city, becoming a private institution, in 1989. It changed to its current name in 2023 after promising naming rights in return for the lead gift in a $180 million fundraising campaign; Barbara and J.R. “Pitt” Hyde III, founder of AutoZone, who gave $40 million through the Hyde Foundation, opted to honor the city.
The new museum is designed by the architects behind institutions including the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, and others.
The museum boasts a collection of more than 10,000 works of art spanning 5,000 years of history. It touts particular strength in Old Masters, 19th- and 20th-century American art, contemporary art, and photography. It promises to place those works alongside recent acquisitions including works by African American and African diasporic artists, decorative art, and Asian art.
Photography will be the subject of the museum’s main opening exhibition. With more than 150 images, “Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1907–1984” will survey the titular Memphis artists, Henry A. Hooks Sr. and Robert B. Hooks, whose philosophy was that “making beauty” was an act of Black resistance. The New York Times last year described them as “the go-to photographers of Black life in a city renowned for it.” Presented in partnership with the National Civil Rights Museum, the exhibition situates their work in context with contemporaries including Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee.
A rendering of the galleries at the Memphis Art Museum.
Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron
Meanwhile, some 30,000 square feet of gallery space will also be devoted to a collection exhibition divided into 19 “short stories,” as the museum describes it. Departing from traditional geographical or chronological arrangements, the show aims to take advantage of the layout of the galleries, which encircle a courtyard and allow multiple entry points. Among the works on view will be examples by contemporary artists Cecily Brown, Jordan Casteel, Torkwase Dyson, Elizabeth Murray, and Dyani White Hawk, as well as historical figures such as Francesco Botticini and Arthur Dove.
“Museums are storytellers,” Patricia Lee Daigle, the museum’s chief curator, said in a statement. “And the stories they tell often extend far beyond a single gallery. A theme may emerge in one space and reappear several galleries later. A work of art may create a bridge between two ideas. Even a glance across the courtyard can reveal an unexpected narrative.”
Some of those “stories” include a study of geometric abstraction as a universal visual language; an investigation of how medieval and Early Renaissance European artists treated the human body; an exploration of the impact of jazz music on Black American abstraction; and a look at the Mississippi Delta region’s visual language.
Also to be unveiled in December are commissioned works by artists Jordan Ann Craig, Yunhee Min, Carlos Rosales Silva, and Memphis-based graphic designer Eso Tolson, situated throughout the campus.
The new museum represents a legal triumph over a group of Memphians who sued in September 2023 to stop the project, saying that the promenade on which the museum was to be built, though managed by the city, belongs to the citizens of Memphis, whose property rights would be violated by the construction. A Shelby County judge dismissed the case “completely” in March, per a local Fox affiliate.
