The renovated, redesigned, "reimagined" and rechristened Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts opened Saturday morning in Little Rock's MacArthur Park.
Under a bright blue, cloudless sky, museum officials and supporters were joined by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. to welcome visitors to the grand reopening of the 133,000-square-foot building once known as the Arkansas Arts Center. The space, located at 501 E. Ninth St., had been closed since July 2019 and undergone a major renovation and expansion both inside and out.
"Today, you will see how the museum has been reimagined for the 21st century, transformed from end to end, top to bottom and elevated in truly extraordinary ways," said Harriet Stephens to the crowd gathered in front of the museum's north entrance. Stephens is chairwoman of the museum's building committee and, along with her husband Warren Stephens, co-chair of its capital campaign.
Victoria Ramirez, the museum's executive director, recalled her words from the October 2019 groundbreaking for the expansion.
"We pledged that the new museum would be a preeminent visual and performing arts destination, a source of pride that reflects who we are as people and who we aspire to be. I am proud to say ... we are keeping those promises."
Scott noted the connection of togetherness, which is the theme of the museum's inaugural exhibit, and how the city pulled together after the destruction of the March 31 tornadoes.
"To see all faiths, all races working together puts us in the same vein as today, where our city has been working together to invest in arts, culture and education."
Sanders also mentioned the exhibit and its theme.
"It's as much a reflection of the spirit behind this project as it is the art within," she said. "All of its supporters are tied together by a common thread: That Arkansas deserves a world class capital city, one with access to the best artwork and the best facilities in the country."
After the speeches and performances by the Philander Smith College Gospel Choir and the University of Arkansas Pine Bluff Marching Band, three Little Rock students -- Faith Jeffries of Carver STEAM Magnet Elementary School, Brianna Gutierrez of Horace Mann Middle School and Zoya Kahnof Little Rock Central High School -- were the first visitors to go inside the museum.
All of the more than 3,000 free passes were scooped up before Saturday's opening. After special events this week, the museum will begin regular hours -- Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sunday, 12 p.m.-5 p.m. -- on May 2. Admission is free.
A NEW IMAGE
The origin of the expansion project dates back about seven years and really took off in 2016, when Little Rock voters approved a bond issue paid for by hotel taxes to fund about $31 million of the museum's renovation.
A private fundraising campaign, Reimagining the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, blew past its original goal of $66 million. As of Saturday, $170.8 million has been raised for the museum, said Warren Stephens.
The Stephenses, along with the Windgate Foundation and the Winthrop Rockefeller Trust, were among the leading contributors to the campaign. During a media preview of the museum on Tuesday, Warren Stephens said there had been 34 gifts of $1 million or more to the museum and more than 100 gifts of $100,000 or more. In all, there have have been 464 donors, he said Saturday.
The success of the capital campaign, Warren Stephens said, "is a testament to the philanthropic spirit of the community and the belief that we all share in this museum."
The funds "will support the new museum and ... provide transition and opening support, while also strengthening the endowment, yielding support for operations, exhibitions, acquisitions, and education and outreach programming in the new museum," according to arkmfa.org.
The new building was designed by Chicago-based architectural firm Studio Gang, with construction by Nabholz, Construction and Doyne Construction of Little Rock who teamed with Pepper Construction of Chicago. The museum features nine galleries with more than 20,000 square feet of space, eight classrooms/studios in the Windgate Art School, the 350-seat Performing Arts Theater, a lecture hall, the Glass Box indoor-outdoor performance space, an art reference library, a gift shop and Park Grill, a full-service restaurant that looks out onto the grounds.
Studio Gang was founded by architect Jeanne Gang, a MacArthur Fellow and a professor in practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The firm has worked on cultural institutions such as the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. For the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Studio Gang collaborated with Little Rock-based associate architecture firm Polk Stanley Wilcox.
The museum has undergone several renovations in the past, which made the new project challenging, Gang said Tuesday.
"I recognized right away that the building wasn't organized in a functional way. We wanted to hang on to the core aspects, but fix the functionality. I immediately saw this line that went north to south. Sure enough, when we were able to get that as the primary axis, everything fell into place."
The design features a pleated roof and glass-enclosed spaces at each entrance and retains the original 1937 art deco facade at the north entrance. The layout "preserves and features the building's historic elements, and applies elegant architectural solutions to facilitate inspiring encounters with the arts," according to arkmfa.org.
Among the new amenities in the airy, bright structure is a large, living room-style space above the north entrance with huge, floor-to-ceiling, north-facing windows and comfortable furniture where guests can relax.
"It was really important to us that we created gathering spaces for people," said Harriet Stephens on Tuesday.
"The Architect's Newspaper" awarded the project with a Best Design award in 2019.
Landscaping of the 11-acre campus was done by SCAPE Landscape Architecture of New York City and took inspiration from nearby Fourche Creek, the bluffs of Emerald Park in North Little Rock, the Ouachita Mountains and the landscape of the Delta. Many of the original oaks around the building were preserved, and about 250 native trees were planted, said SCAPE founder Kate Orff on Tuesday.
The new design of the campus "really makes it feel like a museum in a park," said Orff, who is also a MacArthur Fellow and was recently named one of Time magazine's Most Influential People in the World. "One of my goals was to make this beautiful landscape befitting of a fine arts museum as well as to make the outdoors a part of that experience."
NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ART
And while the building and landscape may be works of art, the new galleries are packed with treasures for visitors.
"Together" is the museum-curated inaugural exhibit showcasing works by more than 30 U.S. and international artists including Kerry James Marshall, Wayne Thiebaud, Ryan RedCorn, Elias Sime and Little Rock native LaToya Hobbs. Also on display is "Chakaia Booker: Intentional Risks;" the animated "Sun Xun: Tears of Chiwen," and "Drawn to Paper," which pulls from the museum's formidable cache of works on paper.
Among the visitors to the museum Saturday was Javan Wheeler of Little Rock.
"This is pretty wild art, and it seems pretty top-notch. You see the stuff they have here and you you think, wow! It's a very nice place and a very cool grand opening."
Regular visitors to the old arts center will likely be familiar with some of the pieces in another exhibit that features 150 works from the museum's permanent collection, with several having been cleaned while the museum was closed.
"It's going to be really interesting for people to revisit [these works] and really see how different they look and feel in the new spaces," said Ramirez on Tuesday.
The museum is the only one in the state that collects works from both national and international artists and its collection contains more than 14,000 two- and three-dimensional artworks spanning eight centuries and is especially strong in works on paper and contemporary craft.
The list of artists whose works are included in the holdings is like a who's-who of art history and contemporary art: Rembrandt, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Signac, Pierre-August Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Willem and Elaine DeKooning, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Roy Lichtenstein, Diego Rivera, Andrew Wyeth, Titus Kaphar and more. There are also pieces by Arkansas artists Carroll Cloar, John Miller Howard, William Davis and others.
Chris Phillips, chief financial officer with the Little Rock Convention & Visitors Bureau, attended the opening with his wife, Carrie.
"It's amazing to have something like this in Little Rock that will bring people to the city from across the world to see such a fabulous collection of art in such a beautiful building," he said. "We can't be more excited to have such a wonderful tourism asset to our community."
Carrie Phillips said that the museum "is going to bring our community together in an incredible way to celebrate the great role that art plays in our world."
EARLY DAYS
The origin of the museum dates to 1914 and the forming of the Fine Arts Club of Arkansas, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. In 1937, arts club supporters helped create the Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock's MacArthur Park. In 1958 the art club, the Little Rock Junior League and the city undertook a statewide capital campaign to enlarge the museum and expand its holdings and programs. Helping lead the effort was future governor Winthrop Rockefeller and his wife, Jeannette Edris Rockefeller.
In 1960, the Little Rock Board of Directors adopted an ordinance that created the museum, which was renamed the Arkansas Arts Center. The new building, an addition to the 1937 museum, opened in 1963. A year before, the museum rolled out the Artmobile, a 40-foot-long traveling gallery used to show artworks across the state.
Along with presenting exhibitions, the arts center featured a theater, classrooms, sculpture courtyards and an art reference library. There was also a school for performing and fine arts.
In 1968, Townsend Wolfe was named the center's director and would remain until his retirement in 2002. Part of Wolfe's considerable legacy was to expand the institution's collection of works on paper.
The nonprofit Arkansas Arts Center Foundation was founded in 1972. A few years later, the theater was transformed into the Children's Theater.
Ellen A. Plummer served as executive director after Wolfe's retirement in 2002. She was succeeded in April 2011 by Todd Herman, who served until 2018. Current executive director Ramirez took over in 2019.
The museum has about 80 full-time employees, with more than 20 part-time workers, Ramirez said. After renovation work began in 2019, operations for the museum moved to the Riverdale Shopping Center on Cantrell Road in Little Rock.
Gallery: Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts reopening
