Studio Museum in Harlem Set to Inaugurate New Building in 2025

TheStudio Museum in Harlem, New York, has announced that it will welcome visitors to its new home on 125th Street in the fall of 2025. The first exhibition to be held in the building, for which Adjaye Associates served as design architect and Cooper Robertson as executive architect, will feature the work of artist, activist, and educator Tom Lloyd, whose work appeared in the first-ever show held by the museum, in a rented Fifth Avenue loft in 1968.

“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,” museum director Thelma Golden told theNew York Times. “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.”

The five-story, 82,000-square-foot building incorporates stacked volumes of various sizes and provides the museum with 50 percent more exhibition space and 60 percent more public space than it previously enjoyed at its longtime home, a factory building occupying the same site. Visitors to the new structure will encounter a theater, a studio for artists in residence, an education center, and a café, but not the museum’s offices, which will occupy the new headquarters of the National Urban League across the street. The Studio Museum’s new home will additionally feature a rooftop terrace, which is being landscaped by Harlem-based firm Studio Zewde and will host additional programming.

“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 told the Times, noting that the new space “felt like a way to continue to think about our role as a space for everyone, and to be open in ways that allow our audience, our neighborhood, our community to experience the museum, but also each other.”