Planting a Flag, and a Flagship, for Black Art
The reopening of the Studio Museum in Harlem, after seven years of construction, comes with dazzling alumni and collection shows.
By Holland Cotter, Nov 6, 2025.
Some museums, just by existing, plant a bright radical flag in history. Fifty-seven years ago, when it opened in a drafty rented loft space over a liquor store on upper Fifth Avenue, the Studio Museum in Harlem did that.
At the time, 1968, racist Jim Crow laws had ended only a few years earlier with the passing of civil rights legislation. African American history was a story still waiting to be fully told. Black art and culture had almost no institutional visibility anywhere.
Now that bright banner is unfurling as in a fresh wind, with the opening next week of the museum’s fine new purpose-built home on West 125th Street. And the arrival comes at yet another pressure-point political moment around issues of diversity and equity.
The new structure is an ebony-dark, seven-story composition of wide windows, recessed niches and shadowy voids. Suggesting a stack of speakers and amplifiers, a giant sound system on an always sonically vivacious thoroughfare, it fills the footprint of the rehabbed bank building that the museum had occupied since 1982. But at 82,000 square feet, it vertically doubles the gallery space and affords views from the front, the back and —
breath-catchingly — from above of the Harlem neighborhood.
Indeed, the design, by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson as executive architect, was conceived around an alliterative list of urban references: Harlem’s streets, stoops, stages and sanctuaries. And the street is where we begin a visit. With a flag.
The flag was designed in 2004 by the conceptual artist David Hammons, and displayed on the Studio Museum’s facade ever since. It overlays the stars-and-stripes pattern of Old Glory with the red, green and black palette of Marcus Garvey’s 1920s Pan-African flag, a combination that defines, as this museum itself does, how expansive and unifying — globally and locally — Black identity is. ( … )
( … ) And a 40-image photographic piece by the late, great Lorraine O’Grady places us on nearby Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (a.k.a. Seventh Avenue) as spectators at the 1983 African American Day Parade, for which O’Grady built a celebratory float. She equipped it with empty gold-painted picture frames, which she passed out to the crowd, inviting jubilant marchers to become instant masterpieces. ( … )