Copyright The New York Times
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.
