| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 115 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned | The new building lets the museum show off far more of its collection than it could before. And yet, the best thing I saw this visit is the same as it was in 2017. Barkley L. Hendricks’s captivating “Lawdy Mama” from 1969 is an extraordinary portrait. The Frick Collection, of all places, gave Hendricks a fantastic exhibit while it was in the Breuer Building. |
I visited the new Studio Museum in Harlem back before Christmas. This re-review has taken a while to write, but I figured I had better get it in before the end of Black History Month, so here it is, barely beating my deadline. My 2017 review of the old Studio Museum is here.
The Studio Museum in Harlem is an art museum in, yes, Harlem in Manhattan. Its mission statement says the museum serves as “the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by Black culture.”
I joked in my original take on the Studio Museum that, like Chief Brody said in Jaws, they’re gonna need a bigger boat. Well, they got one.
The museum formerly occupied lovingly converted, quirky, too-small space in an old building on 125th Street. It closed in 2018, tore the old building down, and finally re-opened in November of 2025 in a spiffy new building created just for it. Was it worth waiting seven years and a pandemic for a new version of the museum? Maybe.
A Museum for Now & A Museum for Harlem
As befits an institution that has just transformed its physical footprint, one of the exhibits currently on (“To Be a Place”) is a history of the Studio Museum itself, primarily historic photos and documents arranged in a hall timeline style.
The Studio Museum opened in 1968 on Fifth Avenue. Born as The Harlem Museum, its mission statement was long and ambitious and hard to paraphrase. And all in caps, which to contemporary eyes looks like it’s shouting. Which, perhaps it was. My main takeaway is that the Harlem Museum was founded to focus on the new. New artists, new work, new mediums, new pieces that the art-viewing public might find “frequently puzzling.”
The Studio Museum wasn’t supposed to acquire a collection, but it’s hard to prevent that. It still embraces the new, though it’s also clear that after almost sixty years of growing its collection, it has also become a keeper of a canon. I’m a fan of canons, as long as they’re open for reassessment every so often. And it feels inevitable for any museum that amasses a collection. What institution would ever say to donors or visitors, ‘we want to show you the third best art…be a bastion of mediocrity.’? A blessing of the new building is the increased space makes it easier to balance showing the collection and nurturing the next generation of artists.
What I saw at the Studio Museum
Appropriately enough, the big show reopening the Studio Museum is called “From Now,” offering an overview of the collection. Chronology is unfashionable in curation these days, so instead it focuses on themes, like “City,” “In/Visible,” “Bodies,” “Abstraction,” and more. I didn’t love it, but there is so much great and interesting art here, it almost doesn’t matter what order the curators install it in. Still, I’d hope for more complex or interesting or just unexpected themes to group by.
The Studio Museum also celebrated its artist-in-residence program with a show titled “From the Studio,” which was jammed full (almost too full) of art from the fifty years of the program. It’s an interesting mix, though jammed into too small a space. I’m sure that was intended to emphasize how many artists have spent time there. Still, the art would’ve been better served with more spacing, or a judicious edit.
The museum’s showpiece temporary exhibition space is a literal jewel-box of a gallery, to the point of having a soaring, arching ceiling. On my visit, it hosted sculptures by Tom Lloyd, who in the 1960s started making work out of colorful, hexagonal, electric lights, arranged in various abstract shapes and forms. Lloyd’s work reminds me a bit of a large-scale lite brite. It wasn’t necessarily my thing, though I deeply appreciated the choice of someone not a household name for the first show in that space. And I also appreciated a bit of “behind the scenes” explanation of the complexities of building blinking lighted sculptures before microprocessors. How they work was almost more interesting to me than the works themselves.
The Building: The Whatever Museum in Wherever
I’ve thought about my take on the new Studio Museum building for a long time. Clearly, given how long its taken to write this. I think it fails. The old building was inadequate, but it was undeniably Harlem. But the new building is just an austere, modern container for art. You could plunk it anywhere in any city, fill it with any kind of art, and that’s the museum it would be. And this institution, this collection, deserves better. Deserves a space that couldn’t be anywhere but Harlem.
The new building is a textbook example of checking all the boxes of contemporary, high-end museum architecture.
✅ A fancy terrace on the top floor.
✅ A ridiculously massive, impressive, and photogenic staircase running up the core of it.
✅ Strategically placed windows for peering out at the world.
✅ One of those community bleacher / stairs spaces, where they can program performing arts or talks, or where visitors can just hang out, but that’s just uncomfortable enough that people won’t linger too long.
✅ A fancy café.
✅ Boxy gallery spaces that don’t really connect and aren’t especially easy to navigate in a cohesive way, especially if the fancy staircase is hard or impossible for you.
✅ A fun oversized elevator.
The Studio Museum deserves more than check-the-boxes architecture. It deserves something unique. And some exuberance, outside and inside. A facade exploding with color, murals, something evoking, once again, Harlem. Instead the face it presents to West 125th Street is austere, monochrome, and not all that welcoming.
The front windows on the ground floor all open up. Maybe, come warmer weather, when they open those and people can wander in, sit a spell on the bleachers, maybe then it’ll feel more connected to its neighborhood. But my reaction is it’s an impressive building, but a disappointment just the same.
That said, the boxes for art are nice boxes for art. Bright, airy, with high ceilings, they give the museum the thing it most sorely lacked before: space.
One other blessing of the new building is how it leans into the “studio” part of the mission statement. True to its emphasis on the “new,” the Studio Museum has been cultivating young artists for as long as it’s existed. It boasts some impressive alumni, including Kehinde Wiley, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, and Mickalene Thomas, to name just four. Spaces to deepen and expand that program are great, and the building does a nice job making them visible to museum visitors.
Should You Visit the New Studio Museum?
Even though I dislike the building, the Studio Museum’s collection is phenomenal, and its ability to curate shows of interesting and important (and sometimes overlooked) Black artists and themes is hard to match.
If you love art, especially contemporary or modern art, or if you’re interested in the intersection of art and politics, or Black history, culture, and art, then you should definitely go.
If you wanted to make a day of cultural institutions in Harlem you could easily pair the Studio Museum with the Schomburg Center, or if you wanted to contrast contemporary art with something more historical visiting Hamilton Grange or the Morris-Jumel Mansion or General Grant National Memorial would also be interesting pairings.
For Reference:
| Address | 144 West 125th Street, Manhattan |
|---|---|
| Website | https://www.studiomuseum.org/ |
| Cost | General Admission: $16. And admission is free on Sunday! |
| Other Relevant Links |
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