Studio Museum Unveils Exciting New Details on Inaugural Exhibitions, Installations, and Commissions

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HARLEM, NEW YORK, NY, June 17, 2025 – The Studio Museum in Harlem today announced further details about the landmark exhibitions, celebratory installations, and major artist commissions that will inaugurate its new building when it opens in the fall of this year, with more to be announced in the coming months.

The Museum will open with a major presentation of the work of Tom Lloyd, the innovative artist whose practice was the subject of the Studio Museum’s inaugural exhibition in 1968; and the first installment of a rotating installation of works from the Museum’s distinguished permanent collection. Inaugural exhibitions will also include a presentation of archival photographs and ephemera from the institution’s fifty-six-year history; a first-of-its-kind presentation of new works on paper by more than one hundred alumni of the Artist-in-Residence program, which places intergenerational artists in conversation with each other and pays tribute to this foundational program that has nurtured artists of African descent for more than half a century; and, over the course of the Museum’s inaugural year, new site-specific commissions from Camille Norment, Christopher Myers, and Kapwani Kiwanga will join the institution’s long-term, hallmark commissions by David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, and Houston E. Conwill.

Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “I am thrilled that our reopening offers us a singular opportunity to celebrate those artists whose work has long shaped the Studio Museum’s legacy, while also championing the new voices redefining art in our time. This moment is deeply rooted in the collective vision of our founders, whose aspirations continue to guide us. As we take this historic step, I look forward to welcoming our communities into a transformed Museum—where we will continue the work that defines us on a scale that reflects the magnitude of our mission.”

The Studio Museum also shared that its capital campaign, which supports the creation of its new home and ensures the institution’s long-term sustainability, has raised more than $300 million. The campaign’s broad-based and ongoing support from the Museum’s Board of Trustees; the City of New York; and individuals, foundations, and corporate partners testifies to the widespread appreciation for the vitality and necessity of the Studio Museum’s mission.

Raymond J. McGuire, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said, “We are profoundly grateful to the City of New York, the visionary philanthropists who have been with us since the beginning, and the new generation of patrons who have come forward to support us in this critical moment in our history. Their investment extends far beyond the amazing bricks-and-mortar of our new building. Theirs is an investment in the artists who have and will continue to influence the way people see the world.”

The new 82,000-square-foot building, designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson serving as executive architect, provides state-of-the-art galleries, an expansive lobby, flexible program spaces, and a dedicated education center, which altogether foster deeper engagement with visitors of all ages and elevate the Museum’s service to artists, museumgoers, and the Harlem community. The new facility also includes a rooftop terrace with striking views of the surrounding area, with landscape design to be carried out by the Harlem-based firm Studio Zewde. On the Museum’s lower level, local family-owned restaurant Settepani will operate the Museum’s café, further enhancing the Museum’s commitment to organizations and businesses in its neighborhood.

Collection and Historical Exhibitions
The inauguration of the Studio Museum’s new home will feature:

• Tom Lloyd, a comprehensive presentation of the work of Tom Lloyd. The pioneering artwork of artist, educator, and activist Tom Lloyd was the focus of the Studio Museum’s first exhibition, Electronic Refractions II, in 1968. Based on extensive new scholarship and intensive conservation work, Tom Lloyd will explore the artist’s prevailing contributions to the interplay of art and technology and pay tribute to his activism with the Art Workers’ Coalition and his founding of the Store Front Museum in Queens—the borough’s first art museum.
  
  Accompanying the exhibition will be a catalogue of the same name, designed by Miko McGinty Inc. and published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., with new essays by Studio Museum Curator Connie H. Choi, conservator Reinhard Bek, historian Krista Thompson, Studio Museum Senior Curatorial Assistant Habiba Hopson, and artists Paul Stephen Benjamin, Nikita Gale, and Glenn Ligon. Tom Lloyd will be the first catalogue on the path-breaking artist and will feature an exclusive selection of never-before-seen images that chronicle Lloyd’s career, including photographs of the artist collaborating with engineer Alan Sussman, nonextant works, and archival installation photos.
  
  
• Rotating installations from the Studio Museum’s permanent collection. Throughout the opening year, the Museum will present a dynamic and evolving presentation of its permanent collection, unveiling a series of thematic displays that will unfold over time. Works will span from the 1800s to the present—highlighting more than two hundred years of artistic achievements by artists of African descent—and will range from those newly acquired to those that have been recently conserved and not shown for decades. Drawn from the Museum’s expansive collection, which today holds nearly nine thousand artworks and represents artists including Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Jordan Casteel, Barkley L. Hendricks, Rashid Johnson, Seydou Keïta, Norman Lewis, Wangechi Mutu, Faith Ringgold, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and many more, this installation reenvisions the artistic canon through the diverse interests, practices, and concerns of artists of African descent.
  
  Augmenting the installation will be a new collection handbook, Meaning Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection, which highlights works by more than two hundred and sixty artists, including Derrick Adams, Emma Amos, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Elizabeth Catlett, Nick Cave, Samuel Fosso, Theaster Gates, Cy Gavin, Arthur Jafa, Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Gordon Parks, Martin Puryear, Betye Saar, Augusta Savage, Tschabalala Self, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many more. Published by Phaidon and designed by WeShouldDoItAll, the handbook—the first on the Museum’s collection in fifteen years—will also feature new texts by more than one hundred contributors and will chart the impact the Studio Museum’s collection has made on art history and the broader cultural landscape.
  
  
• An archival display of the Museum’s history. A showcase of historical documents, archival video, media, and programming ephemera will visually chronicle the Studio Museum’s transformative and indelible mark on the ecosystem of art and artists of African descent. The exhibition will lay out a concise and detailed narrative of the Museum’s history—from its former building on Fifth Avenue to its new site on 125th Street—offering visitors an opportunity to discover the host of exhibitions, events, programs, and communities that have engaged with and defined the institution throughout nearly sixty years of cultural, political, and societal change.

Artist-in-Residence Alumni Installation
In celebration of the influence of the Museum’s signature Artist-in-Residence program, the inaugural presentation will include a showcase of newly created works on paper by nearly all former artists in residence. Featuring more than one hundred works—to be installed in the Artist-in-Residence studios on the fourth floor—this installation will reflect on the history and impact of the program before the next cohort of artists arrives in early 2026, with applications to open late summer 2025.

Participating artists include Candida Alvarez, Kevin Beasley, Sanford Biggers, Bright Bimpong, Willie Birch, Chakaia Booker, Jordan Casteel, Vladimir Cybil Charlier, Gregory Coates, William Cordova, Ada Pilar Cruz, sonia louise davis, Leonardo Drew, Cameron Granger, Lauren Halsey, Allison Janae Hamilton, Maren Hassinger, Cynthia Hawkins, EJ Hill, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Noah Jemisin, Autumn Knight, Eric N. Mack, Jacob Mason-Macklin, Dave McKenzie, Jeffrey Meris, Wardell Milan, Devin N. Morris, Wangechi Mutu, Marilyn Nance, Clifford Owens, Kamau Amu Patton, Naudline Pierre, Zoë Pulley, Alison Saar, Jacolby Satterwhite, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith, Mickalene Thomas, William Villalongo, Nari Ward, Cullen Washington Jr., Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Saya Woolfalk, among many others.

Inaugural Artist Commissions
Throughout the opening year, the Studio Museum will unveil a range of commissioned artworks and returning site-specific projects that will respond to the new building’s purpose-built project spaces. 

• Camille Norment, a multimedia artist born in the United States and residing in Oslo, will debut a sonic sculptural installation in the passageway leading to the Museum’s top floor and the view toward the south. Inspired by the phenomena of odyssey, Norment’s new work emerges from the social, psychological, and cultural experiences of diasporic migratory journeys. Composed of brass tubing, a material commonly used for musical instruments, the sculpture will feature a chorus of voices, offering a sensory experience for visitors as they traverse the Museum’s terrace staircase.
  
• Christopher Myers, an artist born and residing in New York, will create a wall-mounted, metal-based installation for the Museum’s new Education Center. Taking inspiration from a memorable encounter on 125th Street nearly fifteen years ago, Myers’s work envisions an intergenerational community of hybrid figures gathered in a fantastical landscape, inviting audiences of all ages who enter the space to imagine and learn in a creative and meaningful exchange. 
  
• More commissions will be presented throughout the inaugural year, including a second-floor project space installation by multimedia artist, Kapwani Kiwanga.

The new building will also feature the reinstallation of artworks that are synonymous with the Studio Museum. 

• Installed on the facade of the Studio Museum, David Hammons’s black, red, and green Untitled flag (2004) is inspired by the pan-African flag adopted by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. The flag, which was first raised outside the Museum in 2004, serves as an emblem for the institution and its mission as a champion for artists of African descent. 
  
• Glenn Ligon’s Give Us a Poem (2007) will hang in the Museum’s new lobby, welcoming visitors into the building. Initially created as a site-specific installation for the lobby of the Museum’s previous building, Ligon’s sculpture translates an improvised poem by Muhammad Ali into flashing neon. 
  
• Houston E. Conwill’s seven bronze time capsules, The Joyful Mysteries (1984), contain confidential written testaments by seven distinguished Black Americans: Romare Bearden, Lerone Bennett Jr., Richard G. Hatcher, A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., Eleanor Holmes Norton, Toni Morrison, and Leontyne Price. Originally buried in the sculpture garden of the Museum’s previous home on August 12, 1984, the capsules will be reinstalled on the second floor of the Museum’s new building and will be opened in September of 2034, fifty years after their creation, at the artist's direction.

Elsewhere in the building, a collaboration with Black creatives will bring original furniture and design to key spaces. Designers include Ini Archibong, Stephen Burks, Mac Collins, Charles O. Job, Peter Mabeo, Michael Puryear, Marcus Samuelsson, and Sefako Tolu.

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Funding Credits
Bank of America is the Studio Museum in Harlem’s lead opening and inaugural exhibitions sponsor. Major support for the inaugural exhibitions and publications has been provided by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Funding for Tom Lloyd provided by the Holly Peterson Foundation and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with publication support from Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.

Support for the collection handbook, Meaning Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection, is thanks in part to the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The Artist-in-Residence alumni installation is supported by a grant from the Robert Lehman Foundation.

Inaugural artist commissions by Camille Norment and Christopher Myers are supported by funds from the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Acquisition Committee and Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins. Additional support for Camille Norment’s installation is provided by Dawanna Williams.

Additional funding is generously provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.

About the Studio Museum in Harlem
Founded in 1968 by a diverse group of artists, community activists, and philanthropists, the Studio Museum in Harlem is internationally known for its catalytic role in promoting the work of artists of African descent. The Studio Museum’s new home, situated at its longtime location on Manhattan’s West 125th Street, will open in the fall. Designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson serving as executive architect, the building—the first created expressly for the institution’s program—will enable the Studio Museum to better serve a growing and diverse audience, provide additional educational opportunities for people of all ages, expand its program of world-renowned exhibitions, effectively display its singular collection, and strengthen its trailblazing Artist-in-Residence program.

While the Museum remains closed, its groundbreaking exhibitions, thought-provoking conversations, and engaging art-making workshops continue at a variety of partner and satellite locations in Harlem and beyond. For more information, visit studiomuseum.org.

Media Contacts
Sasha Cordingley
Studio Museum in Harlem
[email protected]

Meagan Jones
Polskin Arts
[email protected]