A Look Inside the New Studio Museum in Harlem Ahead of Its Reopening

After eight years of renovation and anticipation, the Studio Museum in Harlem—one of the most forward-thinking institutions anchoring both Harlem and the broader New York contemporary art scene—is finally reopening this weekend with a two-day, free-access celebration on Saturday, November 15 and Sunday, November 16. Ahead of the reopening, Observer got a sneak peek, and here’s what you can expect.

The new Studio Museum in Harlem feels, in its very architecture, like a contemporary cathedral rising from the urban fabric to celebrate the community it serves. Designed by David Adjaye in collaboration with Adjaye Associates and Cooper Robertson, the 82,000-square-foot building replaces a century-old commercial structure that the acclaimed African American architect J. Max Bond Jr. adapted in 1982 for the museum’s use. Offering 115 percent more gallery space than before, the purpose-built design is deeply rooted in Harlem’s streetscape, with a façade of textured brown masonry that echoes the neighborhood’s historic buildings. The museum’s “inverted stoop”—a descending set of steps that doubles as public seating—extends a literal invitation to gather.

At the same time, its structure fragments and layers space, creating a sequence of zones for gathering, socializing and connecting while guiding a fluid journey that invites contemplation and participation—a space that welcomes the community while offering representation, identification and acknowledgment.

Porous and filled with light, the building dissolves the boundaries between interior and exterior, public and private, opening directly onto the neighborhood that has long been its spiritual home. In doing so, it reaffirms the Studio Museum’s historic role as both a sanctuary and a civic space, fully honoring the role and contributions of Black art and community in the United States.

“Our founders established our museum in Harlem because they were invested in what it would mean to be in conversation with a community that carries a rich and vital identity that existed long before the museum’s inauguration in 1968 and continues today,” director Thelma Golden told Observer in a recent interview. The institution’s relationship with the community, she affirmed, remains central to both its programming and its broader vision.

A living collection

The inaugural exhibition, “From Now: A Collection in Context,” extends that architectural ethos into curatorial form, offering insight into the outstanding and resonant collection the museum has been building—one that continued to grow during its eight-year closure and now includes nearly 9,000 artworks. Although the Studio Museum was initially founded in 1968 as a non-collecting institution, its community of artists quickly recognized the need to collect, steward and preserve the work of Black artists.

With a calibrated rhythm of shifting themes—dynamic but never overwhelming—the museum’s collection unfolds across two floors through a series of “call-and-response” groupings that will rotate throughout the year, staging idiosyncratic dialogues between works that foreground a plurality of voices and explore motifs that have preoccupied artists of African descent across generations.

One of the first encounters in the opening gallery is David Hammons’s Pray for America (1969), an emblematic work that distills in a single symbol many of the tensions between race and identity, invisibility and hypervisibility. It anchors the exhibition’s multidimensional yet fluid narrative, which flows from the vibrant collages of Jacob Lawrence and the narratively dense quilts of Faith Ringgold to the contemporary sensibilities and human immediacy of painters such as Jordan Casteel.

Works from the 19th Century hang beside recent acquisitions, a curatorial approach that privileges resonance and dialogue over chronology—presenting Black artistic expression not as a linear history but as a living, recursive chorus of shared experiences, histories and futures.

At the entrance, a series of photographs from Lorraine O’Grady’s legendary performance Art Is… (1983) immediately reasserts the museum’s vision as a living institution and an inclusive stage for the community. First performed during Harlem’s annual African American Day Parade, Art Is… saw O’Grady riding atop a gold-framed float accompanied by dancers carrying ornate gilt frames. As the parade moved through Harlem, participants and spectators were invited to step inside the empty frames—literally and symbolically becoming the artwork themselves. O’Grady photographed these moments, capturing faces filled with joy, pride, humor and self-recognition. The piece reframed the parade as a living artwork, asserting that “anything and anyone within the frame is art,” creating a moment and space of celebration for the community—precisely what the Studio Museum aims to offer.

The surrounding works capture the intimacy and intensity of urban life, drawing on Harlem’s architecture and streets to explore how Black communities are built, sustained and reimagined through city living. Through physical and imagined spaces, chance encounters and personal memory, artists document, celebrate and challenge ideas of belonging and cultural resistance, revealing nearly a century of creative engagement with the city as a site of community and inspiration.

The adjacent section examines the deep connection between Black sound and the visual. For centuries, music has been central to Black expression, shaping cultural movements across history. The artists here translate sonic traditions into visual form, transforming rhythm, improvisation and vibration into color, gesture and composition. While Stanley Whitney channels musical rhythm through the structure of his grids, others engage more directly with the historic contributions of Black communities to American music—from jazz to R&B to hip-hop—visualizing sound as both a pulse of liberation and a record of collective experience. The pulse of sound becomes the voice of the community, unfolding into visual narratives and color and revealing how, beyond music, Black sonic expression endures as a language of resistance, joy and transcendence.

If sound provides one current, visibility offers another. The section titled “IN/visibility” takes Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as its conceptual backbone, exploring how artists have navigated the double bind of hypervisibility and erasure. Kerry James Marshall’s Silence is Golden (1986) anchors this section, challenging stereotypes while asserting presence. Nearby, Lorna Simpson’s Necklines (1989) uses stark black-and-white imagery and cryptic text to transform the partial view of a woman’s body into a meditation on visibility and erasure, engaging disappearance as a poetic form of resistance through photography’s fragmented language. Playing on the dual meanings of its words—terms that can suggest beauty and adornment but also violence and constraint—Simpson turns what might appear intimate into something clinical and unsettling.

Intriguing in this context is Isaac Julien’s Incognito (2003), a life-sized sculpture of filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles made from plaster and foam, originally created as a prop for Julien’s film Baltimore. Here it stands as both monument and a meditation on celebrity, representation and the legacy of blaxploitation cinema. The museum’s holdings of figurative works—from Social Realism to the Black Arts Movement—foreground the body as both political agent and spiritual vessel, often engaging with ancestral traditions and African roots. Elizabeth Catlett’s Mother and Child (1940s), carved from mahogany in the style of an African traditional statue, embodies this duality, merging cultural strength with universal intimacy to form a timeless vision of care and protection.

At the center, bridging the two sections and comfortably fitting all three, Lauren Halsey’s cubic slogan, “Yes we’re open and yes we’re black owned” (2021), transforms the familiar language of storefront advertising into a declaration of self-determination and pride. Continuing her ongoing engagement with the aesthetics of community-built environments—hand-painted signage, local businesses, barbershops and street vendors—Halsey reveals this vernacular expression as a cultural statement and a sign of acknowledgment and empowerment for an entire community. Rendered in the Pan-African colors of red, black and green, the work asserts Black ownership—economic, cultural and spatial—as an act of resistance and visibility.

Upstairs, a section devoted to color brings together striking juxtapositions—Emma Amos, Howardena Pindell and Jean-Michel Basquiat alongside the unexpected inclusion of Louise Nevelson, despite her not being of Black descent. Though color exists only through light, absorption and reflection, these artists treat it as something as sculptural and expressive as paint or clay. Here, color becomes not just pigment but emotion, perception and life itself—a meditation on feeling, the subconscious and the liberation of expression beyond the Western canon. This reflection extends into the nearby section dedicated to text, as well as code, storytelling and the reclamation of voice and narrative.

The section devoted to spirituality deepens this reflective mood. Evocative works by Sam Gilliam, Frank Bowling, Simone Leigh, Naudline Pierre and Cassi Namoda serve as portals to other dimensions, tracing a lineage of Black spirituality that flows from Yoruba cosmology to the Black church, affirming art’s role as a site of transcendence and continuity. Anchoring the space is a commanding diptych by Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, Gêmeas (from the Jatobás series, 2023), a powerful testament to ancestral spirituality and its profound ties to nature and its forces. Through it, Paulino celebrates the strength of Black femininity in society and history, confronting and overturning enduring colonial narratives and stereotypes.

The final rooms explore gold’s dual symbolism as sacred and corrupted, as a timeless, precious and energetic channel to other dimensions and as a material emblem of capitalism’s exploitative history. Particularly striking is the inclusion of Melvin Edwards’s Lynch Fragments, which translate through metal an abstract language of grief, struggle and endurance—pain literally forged into form. As provocative as it is poignant, David Hammons’s Too Obvious presents a piggy bank filled and surrounded by shells rather than coins, a nod to precolonial African currencies based on exchange before gold and paper ushered in new systems of dependency and exploitation. In their modest yet luminous materiality, both works gleam with the contradictory nature of notions of value, power and beauty that are never separate from political or colonial charge.

On the second floor, a solo exhibition honors Tom Lloyd, a pioneer of light-based abstraction and community activism. Immersive and luminous, the display reconnects art and technology through pulsing structures that evoke both early visions of digital Black futurism and a distinctly Black interpretation of Pop Art’s critique of mass culture and urban aesthetics.

When the Studio Museum first opened in a rented Fifth Avenue loft, its inaugural solo exhibition “Electronic Refractions II” showcased Lloyd’s colorful light sculptures flashing in electronically programmed patterns—much like the ones now on view. The historical resonance underscores how visionary Lloyd’s approach was. Inspired by everyday urban sights such as traffic signals and theater marquees, his sculptures incorporate modest materials—Christmas lights, plastic Buick backup-light covers and other repurposed components—embodying an aesthetic of resourcefulness akin to arte povera, defined by the ability to create beauty and meaning from very little.

Lloyd was not only an artistic innovator but also a committed advocate for Black artists and cultural institutions, serving as a founding member of the Art Workers’ Coalition and establishing the Store Front Museum, Queens’s first art museum and one of the earliest in the United States devoted to African diasporic arts. Spotlighting his work at this pivotal moment allows the museum to reaffirm the artist-driven values that shaped its foundation and continue to guide its future, Golden told Observer ahead of the reopening.

On the fourth floor, the museum unveils a first-of-its-kind presentation of new works on paper by more than 100 alumni of its internationally renowned residency program, which has shaped generations of artists of African descent for over 50 years. The installation brings together nearly all former residents since the program’s founding in 1968, combining objects from the museum’s collection with loans from friends and families, along with newly commissioned works on paper. More than 130 pieces fill the space in a floor-to-ceiling, salon-style hang, forming a vibrant constellation that celebrates the diversity and dynamism of this chorus of voices—many of whom are now among the most acclaimed and institutionally represented artists of our time.

Together, these two exhibitions portray a museum conceived from its inception as a living one—“a place where our community could look at art, as well as learn and create,” as Golden stated in her remarks to the press.

Throughout the building, a constellation of new site-specific commissions joins long-term installations such as David Hammons’s Untitled (African-American Flag) (2004), now hanging once again on the façade and Glenn Ligon’s Give Us a Poem (2007), which greets visitors in the lobby. Between floors, the architecture creates niches for art interludes, including Barbara Chase-Riboud’s solemn, totemic Le Manteau (Cleopatra’s Cape). Draped in bronze and rope with regal softness, it stands as a sculptural hymn to dignity, diaspora and memory. Meanwhile, the long-running youth program “Expanding the Walls” celebrates 25 years of empowering Harlem teens through photography, linking generations through the lens of James Van Der Zee’s archival portraits.

The climax of the dialogue between art, message and architecture, however, is likely reached on the top floor, where Camille Norment’s newly commissioned sound sculpture, Untitled (Heliotrope), crowns the museum, transforming the terrace staircase into an emotional and psychological echo chamber. With its gentle harmonics and delicate sound narrative, the luminous brass installation evokes both organ pipes and a raft, inviting meditation on migration, dissonance and resilience as it faces south toward the global routes of the African diaspora—a vessel of grief and collective healing.

Standing on the museum’s terrace surrounded by the green spaces designed by Studio Zewde, Harlem stretches out below with all its chaotic yet vibrant energy. The new Studio Museum is more than a building; it is a vessel for collective memory and imagination—a homecoming decades in the making, now ready to welcome and celebrate the richness of Black culture and its enduring contributions to American society, reflected in the very fabric of its neighborhood.

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A Look Inside the New Studio Museum in Harlem Ahead of Its Reopening

A living collection

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