Studio Museum in Harlem
New York, US, opening autumn, cost $300M
The Studio Museum in Harlem will unveil its brand new 82,000 sq. ft building on New York’s West 125th Street. Designed by Adjaye Associates with a rooftop terrace by the local landscape designer Studio Zewde, the building sits on the footprint of the museum’s former site, which it has occupied since the 1980s. This is the first structure made specifically for the Studio Museum and its design seeks to echo the historic churches, theatres and residential buildings in the neighbourhood.
The Studio Museum was founded in 1968 by artists, activists and philanthropists to promote artists of African descent and their work. An inaugural show in its new home will be dedicated to the late sculptor Tom Lloyd (1929-96), the subject of the museum’s first exhibition 57 years ago. This will be the artist’s first solo museum show since then, comprising 20 sculptures and works on paper as well as archival material. Lloyd was a pioneer in collaborating with scientists to create art, making electronically programmed light sculptures with the help of a sound engineer a year before Robert Rauschenberg co-founded the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) collective. In 1971, Lloyd founded the Store Front Museum, the first art museum in the Queens borough.
Highlights from the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, which contains some 9,000 works, spanning from the 1800s to the present, will also inaugurate its new space, with pieces on display by Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Jordan Casteel, Barkley L. Hendricks, Seydou Keïta, Norman Lewis, Lorraine O’Grady and Faith Ringgold. Works by Houston E. Conwill, David Hammons and Glenn Ligon will populate the building’s façade, lobby and other spaces.
Courtesy OMA/bloomimages.de
New Museum
New York, US, opening 2025, cost $82M
The New Museum in New York will double its exhibition space with a seven-storey expansion project at its Lower East Side home. Designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, the 60,000 sq. ft addition will have spaces for public programming and artist residencies (including for its famed digital-art programme Rhizome), as well as an 80-seat restaurant. A new outdoor public square will serve as host to art installations, performances and gatherings, and both the museum’s lobby and bookstore will be expanded.
Originally founded in 1977 by the art historian Marcia Tucker, the New Museum has made its home on the Bowery since 2007 in a building designed by the architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (founders of the firm SANAA). The Koolhaas and Shigematsu addition will occupy the adjacent lot, with connections between the structures throughout. The additional space’s façade, made with laminated glass and metal mesh, is meant to complement that of the original building.
Courtesy Saadiyat Cultural District
Saadiyat Cultural District
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, construction completion in 2025, total project cost £4.5bn
Opening one major museum is a Herculean task—the city of Abu Dhabi is planning to open not one, not two, not even three, but four of them in the coming years. They will join the Louvre Abu Dhabi to create a dense concentration of cultural venues.
The largest will be Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (pictured above). The museum has built a collection of almost 1,000 works of contemporary art, including pieces by Julie Mehretu, Dia Al-Azzawi and prominent UAE artists including Najat Makki and Hassan Sharif. It will be the largest of the four Guggenheim museums.
The centrepiece of the district will be the Zayed National Museum, which will celebrate the nation’s history and culture, as well as honour the legacy of the country’s founding father, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan. It was designed by Foster + Partners and features five soaring “falcon wings”, which will act as natural cooling towers.
Meanwhile, the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi will take visitors on a journey through time and space, including meeting Stan, a 67-million-year-old T-rex fossil, and seeing a piece of a seven-billion-year-old meteorite. Next door will be an outpost of the Tokyo-based immersive art experience teamLab.
Completion of the construction of the district is expected in 2025, with the opening dates of the individual museums still to be announced.
© Jean Nouvel/ADAGP, Paris, 2024
Fondation Cartier
Paris, France, opening late 2025, cost €230M approx
One of France’s best-known art foundations is due to open a new site, designed by the architect Jean Nouvel, opposite the Musée du Louvre. The Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain will show as many as 800 works from its vast collection in the converted 19th-century Louvre des Antiquaires; Nouvel has promised it will “likely be the institution offering the greatest differentiation of its spaces, the most diverse exhibition forms and viewpoints”. The 6,500 sq. m of exhibition space will include five “mobile platforms” that can be modified to reach up to 11m in height, which will be overlooked by visitor walkways. The 40-year-old Fondation Cartier will leave its present location, also designed by Nouvel, on Boulevard Raspail.
© Diller Scofidio + Renfro
V&A East Storehouse
London, UK, opening 31 May, cost around £50m
The opening date of the V&A East is like a rainbow—every time you think you are getting closer, it disappears just out of reach. Originally planned for 2023, the opening of this outpost of the V&A is now pencilled in for spring 2026.
What is on track to open in 2025, however, is V&A East Storehouse, designed by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. On part of a site built for the 2012 Olympics, a mile away from the main V&A East site, it spans four levels and 16,000 sq. m.
The Storehouse will be the home of 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives from the V&A’s collection and promises visitors unprecedented access. Unlike other similar open storage facilities, people will be free to wander the halls and examine any object they want to see, which will be not be protected by glass. The idea is to “maximise transparency and remove barriers to the creative riches”, the V&A deputy director Tim Reeve told The Art Newspaper in 2023. Six large-scale objects—including a complete Frank Lloyd Wright interior—will also be on show for the first time in decades. In addition, it is the place to see the David Bowie archive, a 90,000-item trove of the musician’s effects acquired with the help of a £10m donation from the Blavatnik Family Foundation (it opens on 13 September).
More openings in 2025
PoMo
Trondheim, Norway, opening 15 February, cost undisclosed
An Art Nouveau former post office in the centre of Trondheim, Norway, is set to open as PoMo: a contemporary museum with a 60% focus on women artists. Its contents will come from the private art collection of the retail magnate Ole Robert Reitan and his wife, Monica. Artists in the collection include Louise Bourgeois, Anne Imhof and Katharina Fritsch. It will hold two temporary exhibitions a year.
Macam
Lisbon, Portugal, opening 22 March, cost undisclosed
An addition to Lisbon’s art scene is scheduled to open in an 18th-century palace. Museu de Arte Contemporânea Armando Martins will also accommodate a five-star hotel. The founder, entrepreneur Armando Martins, is putting his private collection on view; the museum will also show works from other sources. The palace chapel will feature Trinity, an installation dealing with Christianity and war by Spanish artist Carlos Aires that uses the code name given by Oppenheimer to the first atomic bomb test.
Fenix Museum
Rotterdam, Netherlands, opening 16 May, cost undisclosed
The Fenix Museum, sited in a restored 1920s harbour warehouse, will tell the story of migration through the prism of contemporary art. Ma Yansong, of the Beijing-based architects MAD, has created the 16.000 sq. m space, which includes a double-helix structure called the Tornado. The collection has been assembled by Wim Pijbes, the director of the Droom en Daad foundation, which has funded all costs.