The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is setting its sights on a December 6th opening of the new Memphis Art Museum (MAM) Downtown.
It made the announcement Wednesday afternoon at the Cossitt Library, which is the next door neighbor to the 123,500-square-foot cultural campus that is still under construction. Officials also announced that an anonymous gift is allowing permanent free admission to the museum for Shelby County residents.
A series of exhibitions for the new facility was also announced, beginning with the primary opening show Making Beauty: Hooks Brothers Studio, 1907–1984, a survey of Memphis’s renowned Hooks Brothers Studio featuring more than 150 photographs.
The museum, designed by internationally acclaimed Herzog & de Meuron and local architect of record archimania, will increase gallery space from the Brooks facility by 50 percent and will have 600 percent more art-filled free public space, including a 50,000-square-foot rooftop sculpture garden.
Central to the facility is a 10,000-square-foot community courtyard and free public space named Hyde Square in recognition of philanthropists Barbara and Pitt Hyde of the Hyde Family Foundation.
Zoe Kahr, Executive Director of the museum, said in a recent interview that several teams were working on the move from the Brooks location in Overton Park to the new Downtown site.
“Our internal team has been planning for years for this move,” she said. “Moving 10,000 works of art is not a task for the faint of heart. So we have an incredible internal team that’s been planning to look at every part of the collection and how and when it gets packed. And another part of our team focused on how to make this museum as comfortable in welcoming Memphians and visitors alike with the right furniture, the right lighting.”
Kahr is well-versed in how museums handle big moves such as this one. Her first museum job was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as it was undertaking a 20,000 square-foot expansion, and she learned quickly what happens when contractors, curators, and conservators get into a room and coordinate moving of art in alignment with construction and security requirements.
She later went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where she oversaw major capital projects, including leading the team that planned how the art was going to be reinstalled for the museum’s 300,000-square-foot expansion and permanent collection move. So when she came to the Brooks in 2022, she was more than familiar with how to handle major museum changes.
Kahr also has a deep regard for the museum’s collection. “It touches on many places around the world throughout a millennia of history,” she said. “But like all museum collections, it has areas of incredible depth. In our case, those areas are Old Master paintings. We were fortunate to receive really significant holdings from the Kress Foundation and we have incredible holdings in photography and regional art. We have a newer but equally deep set of holdings in contemporary Black art.”
MAM’s inaugural presentation is designed to hint at those things to show some of that breadth. “The organizing device we came up with was inspired in many ways by the architecture,” Kahr said. “The galleries flow around this central courtyard. There’s no front door, there’s no back door. There are three ways into the galleries. So the organizing device we came up with was to think of our collection as a series of short stories that were strung together in ways that were interesting but not intentionally linear.”
That approach complements MAM’s major opening show, a partnership with the National Civil Rights Museum that is the first major retrospective devoted to the Hooks Brothers Photographic Studio. “That will come with a catalog and is a significant presentation at both of our locations. It’s been years of collaborative research. The Hooks Brothers are really well known in Memphis, but are not yet in the canon of great American photographers — and they should be.”
Founded 110 years ago, the museum holds more than 10,000 works of art spanning 5,000 years. Works on view will include Old Master paintings, American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, contemporary art, and photography. These works will be presented alongside recent acquisitions, including works of contemporary African American and African diasporic art, decorative arts, and Asian art.
Kahr is particularly pleased that the museum will have free admission for Shelby County residents. “We are the city of Memphis’ art museum. We always have been. We always will be,” she said. “Our board views our primary mission to serve the citizens of Memphis, and when you look at peer museums, there’s so much good data about what free admission does in terms of access. Most museums that go free experience some 30 percent to 50 percent increase in attendance.”
The museum’s vision is that visiting MAM becomes a casual available experience as opposed to something that requires planning and budgeting. “My hope is that people working Downtown will come take a walk on our roof every lunchtime, that residents Downtown will come have a drink at the museum or get their coffee at the museum multiple times a week. And then, because the galleries are free, they’ll dip in and see some art too, because why not? There’s no impediments.”
