After a closure that lasted more than seven years, the Studio Museum in Harlem is finally reopening in a new building. The museum is returning to a vastly different political and cultural climate, not just nationally but also locally. (One of its neighbors is now a Trader Joe’s, which shares the gentrifying block with a Whole Foods and a Target.) That’s to say nothing of the pandemic, which hit Harlem harder than other Manhattan neighborhoods.Undaunted by all this change, longtime Studio Museum director and chief curator Thelma Golden has labored tirelessly to bring the institution to its new home, spending most of her days on site while the museum was under construction. The fruits of her labor have paid off.To efficiently use its relatively small plot of 125th Street, the Studio Museum previously had to host parties in a tiny garden and cram exhibitions into modestly scaled galleries. Now, the museum has expanded its indoor spaces, nixing the garden and putting a large set of stairs inside the museum in its place. Those stairs, officially called the Stoop, are free to the public, though you do have to pay to visit the museum’s remaining outdoor area, a rooftop with views of the city.The starchitect David Adjaye designed the new building, which he began conceiving eight years ago. He had recently completed the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, so it was no wonder than that the Studio Museum would tap him. But in 2023, Adjaye faced allegations of sexual misconduct, leading museums to begin distancing themselves from the architect, who has denied the allegations. (The Studio Museum said that Adjaye handed over the project to Pascale Sablan, the CEO of Adjaye Associate’s New York office, though Adjaye is still listed as founder and principal on the firm’s website.)Interior view of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s new building featuring the Grand Stair (foreground) and the Stoop (background).Photo Albert Vecerka, Esto/Courtesy Studio Museum in HarlemSquaring the allegations against Adjaye and the brilliance of the new building is tough to do, but one must admit the Studio Museum’s new home is a success. The new concrete building is delicately sandwiched between its neighbors, rising in a gray concrete that handsomely contrasts with the buildings of old and new Harlem that surround it. David Hammons’s red, black, and green Untitled Flag (2004) hangs outside as it did in the past, signifying that you’ve arrived.The elegant stoop-like stairs indoors serve as a place for talks and performances and as a space for folks to just sit and chat. In the back corner is a marvelous terrazzo-clad staircase that rises up to the upper floors. Throughout the building is a light wood paneling detail that gives the building a sense of warmth.Upon entering, take the elevator to the top. Up there, the sixth-floor rooftop terrace provides a clear, nearly 360-degree view of New York. (I wish the museum had also offered a nice view of large-scale outdoor sculptures, too, perhaps in the form of new commissions. No artworks are here, though that will hopefully change soon.) The Studio Museum has never felt closer to the surrounding city.The Studio Museum in Harlem’s new terrace, with views to the south.Photo Albert Vecerka, Esto/Courtesy Studio Museum in HarlemFor decades, the opposite was true—the Studio Museum was almost invisible to the mainstream New York art world, whose scenes to the south never paid quite enough attention to what happened up here. After decades of putting in the hours, day in and day out, that is no longer the case. Despite its size, the Studio Museum has had a grand influence, not just in the New York art world but also nationally and internationally. It has achieved its tagline as “the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally,” rewriting the canon and spurring many others to take up the work of spotlighting Black artists.A visual timeline inside, in the form of an exhibition titled “To Be a Place,” attests to all that the museum has done since its founding in 1968. You get a sense of the constellation of Black artists it has supported—and been supported by—from Romare Bearden to Elizabeth Catlett, from Camille Billops to David Driskell, from Al Loving to Jack Whitten, from Melvin Edwards to William T. Williams, who laid the ground work for the Studio Museum’s famed artists-in-residence program, which has had 158 participants to date.All of this was “not inevitable,” as Raymond J. McGuire, the museum’s longtime board chairman, reminded reporters during the press conference. In fact, the road to get here was not easy. For years, the museum didn’t have an endowment; until recently, it had a small one compared to other New York institutions. When the Studio Museum announced that it would construct a new building, many doubted that a Black institution could raise the necessary funds to actually realize the project. Now, the museum is in a very different place: “We have met and exceeded a $300-million goal for a holistic campaign to construct our building, increase our endowment, and create an operating reserve,” McGuire said.Camille Norment, Untitled (heliotrope), 2025, installation view, at the Studio Museum in harlem.Photo Albert Vecerka, Esto/Courtesy Studio Museum in HarlemConstructed at a cost of $160 million, the new building makes the art its star. Installed adjacent to the stairwell that connects the rooftop level to the lower floors is Camille Norment’s 2025 brass sculptural installation Untitled (heliotrope), which resembles a pipe organ. The work emits a low droning that sounds like a choral performance, creating the sense that this building is a spiritual space.The core of its inauguration is a permanent collection display spread across two floors of the museum and some of the surrounding walls. (The hang is intentionally maximalist—an attempt, perhaps, to make use of the fact that the museum can show three times as many works as it used to, as Golden told me in an interview.) Many of the pieces included have never been seen together, especially not like this. The only drawback is that in the galleries feel a bit sterile—a bit too much like your average white-cube spaces for a dynamic collection that requires a less clinical treatment.Installation view of the “1968” section in “From Now: A Collection in Context,” showing Al Loving’s Hex 4 (1968) in the upper left corner. Photo Maximilíano Durón/ARTnewsThe permanent collection display, titled “From Now: A Collection in Context,” is split into 11 thematic sections, the best of which is “1968,” a portion that primarily features work produced between 1968 and 1970, the first years of the Studio Museum’s existence. In this hang, you get the sense of the varied artistic approaches required to deal with the tumult of the late 1960s that necessitated a museum for Black art.At the center of this section is Al Loving’s geometric abstraction Hex 4 (1968), a hexagonal prism incised in a cube all in vivid colors. Flanking it is LeRoy Clarke’s Now (1970), a figurative painting showing Black people breaking the chains that enslave them, and a silkscreen collage synthesizing the 1960s, by Robert Rauschenberg, one of the few white artists represented in the collection. Elsewhere are excellent works by Bearden, Betty Blayton, Beauford Delaney, David Driskell, Sam Gilliam, Mavis Pusey, and Hale Woodruff.Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is…, 1983/2009, installation view, at Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo Maximilíano Durón/ARTnewsThe Studio Museum was founded to be more like a Kunsthalle dedicated to the art of the now. But it was the artists who insisted that the Studio Museum build a collection. They needed a permanent repository for their art at a time when few mainstream institutions would bother to collect their work.Many of those initial acquisitions entered the collection via donations, usually from artists. But the museum has been active in seeking out art through a combination of donations and purchases. “From Now” makes clear that, even during its closure, the museum was actively making acquisitions, the most important of which is no doubt Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Bayou (1984), which was gifted in 2023. That acquisition makes the Studio Museum one of the few US museums to own a Basquiat. Not even the Museum of Modern Art, some 70 blocks downtown, can make that claim.While many of the other works surrounding the Basquiat are important, few are well-known attractions. That’s a good thing—there isn’t one main draw here. The display is much like the Norment sculpture, a chorus in which many voices harmonize with one another.Norman Lewis, Bonfire, 1962. Photo John Berens/©Estate of Norman Lewis/Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York/Studio Museum in HarlemEmma Amos’s sublime Baby (1966) hangs not far from an equally vibrant and alluring abstraction, Norman Lewis’s Bonfire (1962). Barkley L. Hendricks’s majestic gold-leaf portrait, Lawdy Mama (1969), shares a room with Betye Saar’s altar-like assemblage Indigo Mercy (1975). A David Hammons sculpture of a pink porcelain piggy bank split in half to reveal a pile of cowrie shells acts as a powerful commentary on the links between currency and the enslavement of Black people.Downstairs, the second floor-galleries open with a grid of 40 photographs documenting Lorraine O’Grady’s iconic performance Art Is …, staged at the 1983 African American Day Parade in Harlem. For that work, O’Grady brought several gold frames to the street parade and placed Harlem’s residents in the frame. Black people like those celebrating in Harlem rarely figured in portraits shown by most museums. No more, O’Grady, said. Nearby is a genius grouping of cityscapes by an intergenerational group of artists: Bearden, Hughie Lee-Smith, Martine Syms, James Van Der Zee.A section titled “In/Visibility,” focusing on the ways in which Black artists have considered “the hypervisibility and invisibility of African Americans in the United States,” per a wall text, features some of the Studio Museum’s most potent works. There’s Kerry James Marshall’s Silence is Golden (1980), in which a smiling Black man seems to fade into a dark background, and Lorna Simpson’s Necklines (1989), showing three views of the artist’s neck and eight neck-related words, implying a lynching without representing it.Lorna Simpson, Necklines, 1989, installation view, at Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo Maximilíano Durón/ARTnewsThe collection is weighted heavily toward medium-size painting and sculpture. Few videos figure in “From Now”; no performances or dance pieces are planned for the public opening on November 15. A section devoted to sound-oriented art is noticeably quiet. These gaps are ones the museum should be sure to address in the near future. On the whole, the new Studio Museum feels more like a gathering of people than a structured convening—which may even be a point, as evidenced by the dense section devoted to the residency program. There are some big names represented here—Hammons, Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Mickalene Thomas, Adam Pendleton, Simone Leigh, to name just a few—but some of the best work on view in this exhibition is from artists who have yet to achieve their level of fame.Take Conflict (1990) by Paul C. Gardère, part of the 1989–90 cohort, a watercolor of a young Black boy that is framed by cracked dirt, over which the artist has affixed a red-and-blue spike to the composition by rope. Or an assemblage by Grace Williams, from the 1974–75 group, that features two black-painted baseballs and a Coca-Cola bottle atop green turf; behind is a mosaic of the US flag, to which an archival photograph of an all-Black men’s baseball team covers most of the blue-and-white-stars rectangle. The work’s title is simple yet poignant: Black Balled (2005). The mosaics in the piece representing the fracture of this country’s history and how even in the worst of circumstances Black people have found ways to refract the light and shine.Grace Williams, Black Balled, 2005, installation view, at Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo Maximilíano Durón/ARTnewsWhen taken together, no clear narrative emerges from the art on view; the museum insists there are many diverse stories all worth closer study. Years ago, when I was reporting on the role of culturally specific museums at a time when mainstream institutions were only just embracing diverse programming, I asked past and present Studio Museum leadership about the museum’s role at a time like this, often by posing the question: “Is the Studio Museum in Harlem still relevant?” Sandra Jackson-Dumont, who worked at the Studio Museum from 2000 to 2005, responded, “The moment I entered the field, this was the question … I think less about whether or not they’re still relevant, but what are the ways in which they are?” McGuire, the museum’s chairman, put it more directly: “but for the Studio Museum’s existence over the past 50 years,” we would not be witnessing our current moment in which the margins have come to the center. The Studio Museum’s role feels even more crucial now. Its influence now established, there is no time for it to rest on its laurels. There is still so much work to be done, not just in terms of expanding the canon but in terms of expanding our minds and our hearts when it comes to what art and life can be. Now, the work begins anew.