Memphis Art Museum prepares for a new chapter on the Mississippi River
When Memphis Art Museum reopens on December 6, the institution will do so from a dramatically expanded 123,500-square-foot campus designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The project more than reshapes the museum’s footprint: it doubles down on public access, with gallery space increased by half and six times more art-filled free public space, according to the museum.
The new campus sits on a two-acre site organized around a reconstructed bluff known locally as the promenade. Visitors will move through a 10,000-square-foot courtyard, a 50,000-square-foot rooftop art garden, an outdoor amphitheater with river views, a pedestrian plaza, and light-filled education spaces. For a museum that has spent more than a century adapting to growth, the move marks its most ambitious transformation yet.
Founded in 1916 as the city-owned Brooks Memorial Art Gallery in Overton Park, the museum later became the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and, in 1989, a private institution. It adopted its current name in 2023 after a $180 million fundraising campaign in which Barbara and J.R. “Pitt” Hyde III, founder of AutoZone, gave $40 million through the Hyde Foundation and declined naming rights in favor of honoring the city. The City of Memphis contributed $30 million to the project, and the State of Tennessee added $12 million.
The museum’s collection now exceeds 10,000 works spanning 5,000 years, with strengths in Old Masters, 19th- and 20th-century American art, contemporary art, and photography. Those holdings will be presented alongside recent acquisitions by African American and African diasporic artists, as well as decorative art and Asian art, in a building intended to encourage movement, overlap, and surprise.
Photography will anchor the opening program. “Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1907–1984” will survey Henry A. Hooks Sr. and Robert B. Hooks, whose studio documented Black life in Memphis and framed image-making as an act of resistance. Presented with the National Civil Rights Museum, the exhibition places their work in dialogue with James Van Der Zee and other contemporaries.
A second exhibition will spread across about 30,000 square feet and unfold in 19 “short stories,” a format that rejects strict chronology in favor of thematic connections. Works by Cecily Brown, Jordan Casteel, Torkwase Dyson, Elizabeth Murray, Dyani White Hawk, Francesco Botticini, and Arthur Dove will appear in a sequence designed to reward wandering rather than linear viewing.
The museum’s leadership has described the building itself as part of that narrative. Patricia Lee Daigle, the chief curator, said museums are storytellers, and the new layout is meant to let those stories surface across galleries, courtyards, and sightlines. A lawsuit filed in September 2023 to halt the project was dismissed in March by a Shelby County judge, clearing the way for the reopening. For Memphis, the result is not only a larger museum, but a more porous one — a civic space built to connect art, architecture, and the riverfront in a single frame.
