The Memphis Art Museum will begin its next chapter, in a Herzog & de Meuron-designed mass timber building on the Mississippi riverfront, on 6 December. The institution formerly known as the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art announced on Wednesday (17 June) its opening date in the new complex, the details of its inaugural programme and a free-admission policy for locals.
The main special exhibition on the museum’s reopening will be devoted to a historic, Black-owned photography studio that operated in Memphis for most of the 20th century. The show, Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1907-1984, will be presented in partnership with the National Civil Rights Museum (located nearby at the former Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968) and will feature more than 150 photographs from the studio founded by Henry Hooks Sr and Robert Hooks Sr. A fixture of Black Memphis, the studio’s output offers vivid documentation of Black life in the US’s urban South, including during the Jim Crow era. The exhibition’s title was inspired by the studio’s motto: “Where There’s Beauty We Take It, Where There’s None We Make It.”
Hooks Brothers Studio, Bessie Coleman, 1922 Promised gift from the Rodney and Andrea Herenton Collection. Image Credit: Memphis Art Museum
In addition to its opening date and lineup of exhibitions, the museum revealed that admission for all residents of Shelby County (which includes the entire city of Memphis plus the surrounding area) will be free in perpetuity.
“Memphis Art Museum will carry Memphis to the world, but it belongs first and foremost to the people of this city,” Zoe Kahr, the museum’s executive director, said in a statement. “Free admission is a forever invitation to our Shelby County neighbours to come back again and again, bring your family, bring your friends and make this museum a regular part of your life.”
Hooks Brothers Studio, Fantastic Sounds, 1978 Promised gift from the Rodney and Andrea Herenton Collection. Image Credit: Memphis Art Museum
The new 123,500-sq.-ft building, sited on a reconstructed bluff along the Mississippi River, expands the museum’s gallery space by 50%. The building was designed by the renowned Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, with the Memphis-based firm archimania as architect of record. The building includes a 10,000-sq.-ft community courtyard and a 50,000-sq.-ft rooftop art garden. It is constructed from laminated mass timber, in part to honour Memphis’s historical title as the “Hardwood Capital of the World”: its strategic location on the banks of the Mississippi and at the confluence of several rail lines made it the linchpin of the US lumber industry for a time.
While the budget for the new museum building itself has not been made public, the cost of the entire project—which has also included creating new park space and making infrastructure and pedestrian improvements—is $222m, according to a museum spokesperson.
Rendering of the new Memphis Art Museum as seen from across Wolf River Harbor Credit: Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron
Beyond the Hooks Brothers Studio show, 30,000 sq. ft of galleries in the new building will be inaugurated by 19 capsule presentations of works from the museum’s permanent collection, which is especially strong in Old Masters, American art from the late 19th and 20th centuries, photography and contemporary art. Described in a press release as “short stories”, these selections will revolve around thematic, narrative or conceptual throughlines rather than strictly chronological or geographic groupings. Installations will include, for instance, “Speaking in Shapes”, focused on geometric abstraction; “The River Calling: Storytelling in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta”, spotlighting artists from the region; and “Rhapsodies in Black”, examining the influence of jazz on Black artists working in abstract modes.
The Memphis Art Museum will continue to operate at its longtime home in Midtown Memphis’s Overton Park until the autumn, before relocating all its operations to the new building. Following the move, the museum will be located more centrally in the city’s downtown core. It will be just a short walk upriver from the waterfront green space Tom Lee Park, which opened in 2023 and features public art installations by Theaster Gates and James Little.
