MEMPHIS, TENN.- Memphis Art Museum today announced it will open its new 123,500-square-foot cultural campus to the public on December 6, 2026, marking an exciting new chapter for the 110-year-old institution and for Memphis and its Mississippi riverfront.
The museum also released details about its inaugural art program, a sweeping presentation that will bring the institution’s extensive world art collection into fresh dialogue with Memphis, the region, and beyond, and named the artists commissioned to create site-specific works for the opening. In addition, the museum announced that it will offer free admission in perpetuity to every resident of the City of Memphis and the surrounding area.
Designed by Herzog & de Meuron with archimania as architect of record, the new Memphis Art Museum expands the institution’s current gallery space by 50 percent and significantly increases public access, offering six times more art-filled free public space than its current location. The new 2-acre urban campus, situated on a reconstructed bluff along the Mississippi River, will feature a 10,000-square-foot community courtyard, a 50,000-square-foot rooftop art garden, expanded galleries, new light-filled education spaces, an outdoor amphitheater with stunning river views, and an expansive pedestrian plaza. Nearly all of the museum’s public-facing amenities, including the store, café lobby, and galleries, are on one level to bring more accessible arts experiences to Memphis. The building is among the first major U.S. museums constructed using laminated mass timber, honoring Memphis’s legacy as the Hardwood Capital of the World.
“Today marks the official countdown to December 6, when we will open our doors and welcome Memphis and visitors from around the globe to this dynamic new cultural landmark on our riverfront,” said Dr. Zoe Kahr, Executive Director, Memphis Art Museum. “This new museum creates an extraordinary place where world-class art, iconic architecture, and the creative energy of our city come together. It will offer Memphians and visitors alike new opportunities for inspiration, connection, and discovery for generations to come.”
Founded 110 years ago, Memphis Art Museum holds more than 10,000 works of art spanning 5,000 years of global history, with key strengths of the collection including Old Master paintings, American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, contemporary art, and photography. These works will be presented alongside transformative recent acquisitions, including works of contemporary African American and African diasporic art, decorative arts and Asian art. These additions continue to expand the collection’s breadth, further strengthening its position as the largest collection of world art in the three-state region.
The museum’s primary opening exhibition will be Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1907–1984, a major survey of Memphis’s renowned Hooks Brothers Studio, featuring more than 150 photographs. The exhibition centers on the studio’s philosophy of "making beauty" as an act of Black resistance and pride during the Jim Crow era and beyond. Working as artists and visual activists, the Hooks Brothers used their practice to document the extraordinary and everyday aspects of Black life and culture in the urban South. Presented in partnership with the National Civil Rights Museum, the exhibition positions the studio’s robust archive within the global history of photography, in dialogue with contemporaries such as Harlem Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee.
Beyond the main exhibition, 30,000 square feet of gallery space will be dedicated to 19 “short stories”—focused presentations of key selections from the museum’s collection that bring works of art into conversation through shared themes, histories, materials, and ideas. Rather than organizing the collection in a traditional geographic or chronological sequence, the inaugural presentation responds to the architecture of the new building: a single-story loop of galleries encircling an interior courtyard, with multiple entry points and five galleries opening to views of the Mississippi River and Hyde Square. The configuration of the exhibition space allows works of art to resonate both within individual galleries and across the building.
“Museums are storytellers,” said Dr. Patricia Lee Daigle, Chief Curator, Memphis Art Museum. “And the stories they tell often extend far beyond a single gallery. A theme may emerge in one space and reappear several galleries later. A work of art may create a bridge between two ideas. Even a glance across the courtyard can reveal an unexpected narrative.”
Together, the inaugural art program reflects the museum’s ambition to present a global collection that remains unmistakably grounded in Memphis. The building’s openness, regionally sourced materials, abundant natural light, and views of the city and river help orient visitors to place, while the galleries invite discovery and unexpected connections among works created across centuries and continents.
The museum’s inaugural program includes:
• Speaking in Shapes: A focused look at geometric abstraction and its power as a universal visual language. Often seen as precise, detached, and free of personal expression, geometry has long been utilized by artists to make viewers think and feel in profound ways. Works in the exhibition, including selections by Samuel Levi-Jones, Elizabeth Murray, and Dyani White Hawk, are in conversation with one another, crossing time and place, and highlighting the desire for artists to communicate in the most fundamental of forms.
• Medieval Bodies: An exploration of how artists in late medieval and early Renaissance Europe used the human body to make questions of faith, identity, illness, mortality, and the afterlife vivid and personal. Featuring works by artists such as Giovanni del Biondo, Taddeo di Bartolo, and Adriaen Isenbrandt, created from roughly 1000 to 1550 across Europe, the installation looks beyond biblical illustration to consider how religious art shaped social roles, stirred empathy, and helped viewers understand their own bodies and souls. Though made in a distant time and place, these works speak to enduring human concerns: relationships, fear of disease, belonging, suffering, and the mysteries of life and death.
• Rhapsodies in Black: An immersive exhibition exploring the profound influence of jazz—particularly free jazz—on Black American abstraction from the 1970s to the present. Featuring works by Sam Gilliam and Radcliffe Bailey alongside leading contemporary artists like Torkwase Dyson and James Little, the exhibition draws on rhythmic lines and expressive abstraction to evoke the genre’s spiritual depth and liberatory potential. A curated soundtrack of jazz legends further animates the gallery, referencing the dynamic interplay between visual art and musical innovation.
• An Inner Vision: Selections from the Hyde Collection: Highlighting four decades of collecting by Barbara and Pitt Hyde, this exhibition traces the collection’s origins in early formative years of American abstraction from works by Georgia O’Keeffe to global contemporary figures such as Cecily Brown as well as other celebrated artists like Pacita Abad, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Joan Mitchell. The show illustrates the Hydes' distinctive vision as collectors, charting a trajectory from the nature-focused modernism of the Stieglitz circle to the expressive, large-scale works of the contemporary international avant-garde.
• The River Calling: Storytelling in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta: An exploration of the region's unique visual language, this presentation features artists with deep ties to the Delta whose work navigates the complexities of Southern folklore, music, and history, including Frederick J. Brown, Carroll Cloar, William Eggleston, Ahmad George, and Carl E. Moore. It considers how oral traditions and regional dialects are translated into visual forms, revealing how absence and omission within storytelling can be as revealing and consequential as what is made visible.
• Head to the Sky: Taking its title from the 1991 Sounds of Blackness song “Optimistic,” Head to the Sky explores the fullness of Black American life by balancing historical struggles with vital moments of joy, leisure, and labor. Through a diverse range of eras and visual expressions—spanning from Civil Rights documentation to intimate family vignettes—this exhibition highlights the complexity of the Black experience as an invitation for optimism despite the heaviness of the world. Among the artists whose works will be on view are Derek Fordjour, Vanessa German, Titus Kaphar and Jordan Casteel, and Nelson Stevens.
The opening programming will also feature commissioned works by artists Jordan Ann Craig, Yunhee Min, Carlos Rosales Silva, and Memphis-based graphic designer Eso Tolson, installed in indoor and outdoor locations across the new cultural campus. Further details about the commissions will be announced at a later date.
Also today, Memphis Art Museum announced it will offer free admission in perpetuity to all Shelby County residents, which includes every resident of the City of Memphis and an expansive surrounding area. In addition, the museum’s new 10,000-square-foot community courtyard, the central gathering space of the cultural campus, will be named Hyde Square in recognition of lead donors Barbara and Pitt Hyde and the generosity of the Hyde Family Foundation.
“Memphis Art Museum will carry Memphis to the world, but it belongs first and foremost to the people of this city,” said Kahr. “Free admission is a forever invitation to our Shelby County neighbors to come back again and again, bring your family, bring your friends, and make this museum a regular part of your life.”
