History

Guided by inaugural director Charles E. Inniss, the Studio Museum secures the second floor of 2033 Fifth Ave. Under the leadership of a diverse group of artists, activists, philanthropists, and Harlem residents, the institution aims to play a crucial role in pivoting the artistic canon and making space for artists in Harlem.

Charles Inniss directs the inauguration of the Studio Museum and its programs. Inniss, a businessman previously at Dun & Bradstreet Corporation, also served as a member of the Army National Guard at its Harlem-based 369th Artillery Battalion, famously known as the Harlem Hellfighters.

The Studio Program begins, with Tom Lloyd selected as the first artist. The program initially provides financial support for the creation of new works, with priority given to artists working in non-traditional materials; opportunities for young people to assist; and an exhibition.

The Film Unit, one of the first foundational programs of the Studio Museum, launches in July 1968. Directed by Randy Abbott and Rodger Larson, Director of the Young Filmmakers Foundation, the Film Unit offers free filmmaking instruction and materials to local students from Harlem and other parts of New York City.

The opening of the Studio Museum is celebrated with a ribbon cutting ceremony with director Charles E. Inniss and Museum trustees Betty Blayton-Taylor, Carter Burden, Frank Donnelly, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Campbell Wylly on September 24, 1968.

The Museum’s first exhibition, Electronic Refractions II, features the work of Tom Lloyd. His sculptures embrace abstraction and technology at a time when Black artists are expected to create representational work. 

Edward S. Spriggs, a poet, painter, and filmmaker, is named the second director of the the Museum; he will head the institution from 1969 to 1975. Under Spriggs’s leadership, the institution develops exhibitions on artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner and pushes for the Museum to become a site of community engagement.

The Black Masters series is conceived to rectify the systemic historic absence of Black artists from the art historical canon. Exhibitions include major solo presentations of the work of Beauford Delaney (1978) and Hale Woodruff (1979).

Courtney Callender is named the third director of the Studio Museum. As the institution outgrows its space at 2033 Fifth Avenue, Callender works tirelessly to keep the Museum close to its mission of serving the surrounding arts community by continuing programming that focuses on strengthening diasporic connections.

The Fine Art of Collecting seminar launches as a forum for artists, collectors, gallery owners, curators, and scholars to exchange information on collecting Black art. Topics include how to purchase and bequeath art, and insurance considerations. Its inaugural session hosts studio visits with many prominent Black artists.

Scholar and curator Mary Schmidt Campbell is named Director. Campbell oversees the Museum’s move from above a liquor store at 2033 Fifth Avenue to its current location at 144 West 125th Street in the early 1980s. The new, larger space allows the Museum to accommodate expanded exhibitions, programming, and storage.

The Museum is gifted the building at 144 W. 125th St., the former site of the New York Bank of Savings. Celebrated Black architect J. Max Bond Jr. is selected to renovate the site to suit the needs of a pioneering museum. 

Ritual and Myth: A Survey of African American Art is the first exhibition installed in the Studio Museum’s West 125th Street location. The exhibition assembles over seventy works by forty-five artists, spanning African art to contemporary installation.

Excavation of an adjacent vacant lot at 142 West 125th Street, leased from the City of New York, begins. Over the following two decades, the Museum, in partnership with the City, completes further renovations to the building and lot, adding an additional gallery and lobby space, a theater, and flexible outdoor space.

Including 150 works by fifty-five artists, Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963–1973 marks one of the most ambitious exhibitions ever mounted by the Studio Museum, as it presents the artistic achievements and importance of Black artists during a ten-year period.

The Studio Museum inaugurates the Hale Woodruff Memorial Exhibition series, designed to provide exhibition opportunities for a national group of emerging and underknown Black artists, with Emerging Artists from the Southwest.

Kinshasha Holman Conwill serves as Director from 1988 to 1999. As Director, she supervises continued renovation of the Museum’s building and helps transform the new space into a vibrant place of community growth, a forum for discussion, and a center of creativity and imagination.

After three years of research in Africa and the US, Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, featuring the work of nine artists from six African countries, opens. A version of the show is exhibited at the 1990 Venice Biennale, marking the first official inclusion of contemporary African artists at that venue.

The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s opens. The exhibition is a collaboration with the New Museum for Contemporary Art and Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art and brings together works by ninety-four artists of Hispanic, Asian, African-American, Native American, and European heritage. 

The 25th Anniversary Exhibition: Recent Acquisitions and Selected Works from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection Part I celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum and is comprised largely of works that entered the collection in the 1990s, deemed the “Decade of Collecting” at the institution.

The Listening Sky: An Inaugural Exhibition of The Studio Museum in Harlem Sculpture Garden, featuring the work of twelve artists, marks the opening of the first public space dedicated to the exhibition of outdoor sculpture by artists of African descent.

Lowery Stokes Sims becomes Director with Thelma Golden as Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs. In focusing on the scholarly interests and growth of the institution, Sims dedicates her time at the Museum to cultivating a new generation of Black artists by implementing radical community programming.

Expanding the Walls: Making Connections Between Photography, History, and Community launches as an annual program for New York City youth enrolled in a high school or GED program to learn the techniques and history of photography. 

Uptown Fridays begins. This summer event invites visitors to dance in the Museum’s courtyard, browse the galleries, and attend curatorial talks. Uptown Fridays are presented with exhibitions on view and allow writers, scholars, and critics to share conversation.

Organized by Thelma Golden with Christine Y. Kim, Freestyle, the first of the "F" Shows exhibiting the work of emerging artists of African descent, opens. The Museum mounts four additional exhibitions, which become landmarks of contemporary art.

Harlem Postcards, an ongoing project consisting of limited-edition postcards, launches. This series invites artists of diverse backgrounds to reflect on Harlem as a site of cultural significance, creative production, and artistic contemplation.

StudioSound, a series that invites musicians, producers, and musical innovators to create original compositions inspired by the art on view, launches. This commissioned project adds a parallel dimension to the Museum’s permanent collection and exhibitions.

Thelma Golden is named Director and Chief Curator after previously being a Curatorial Intern (1987) and Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs (2000–2005). Her tenure is characterized by a deep commitment to advancing the work of contemporary artists and the stewardship of the Museum’s expansion with its new building.

The Museum installs David Hammons's Untitled (2004) outside of its building. The work combines the Pan-African colors with the pattern of the United States flag to evoke a conversation about the country's deeply racialized and oppressive history.

Created by jazz impresario, musician, and philanthropist George Wein to honor his late wife, Joyce Alexander (1928–2005), a long-time Trustee of the Studio Museum, the first Wein Artist Prize is presented to Lorna Simpson.

Expanding the Museum’s engagement with digital and new media practices, VideoStudio, a series of video and time-based art, launches. This program focuses on emergent projects and reflects the influence of recent technology on contemporary art.

Target Free Sundays arrives at the Studio Museum, providing visitors free admission to the Museum and access to a number of activities designed for family engagement. These activities include gallery tours, artist talks, and art-making workshops, among other special monthly events.

Studio Lab, a program built on the concepts of cultural specificity, performance, and making publics, launches. The series offers selected artists freedom to develop these concepts, including making projects that respond to Harlem as a cultural site.

The Studio Museum announces The Bearden Project, a dynamic exhibition initiative that invites one hundred artists to create new works of art inspired, influenced, or informed by the work and legacy of Romare Bearden, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, in celebration of the centennial of his birth.

Organized by El Museo del Barrio, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Studio Museum, Caribbean: Crossroads of the World comprises over five hundred works spanning four centuries. It interrogates the relationship between the Caribbean and United States by including artists from both locales.

The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture announce a major collaboration honoring the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Ellison. Ellison at 100: Reading Invisible Man includes a year of programs and initiatives celebrating the Ellison Centennial.

The Studio Museum and the Museum of Modern Art develop a joint two-year fellowship program aimed at mentoring and diversifying the next generation of museum curators and professionals.

The Studio Museum announces inHarlem, a new set of initiatives built upon three critical institutional pillars: artists’ projects, the permanent collection, and collaboration. In partnership with civic and cultural organizations in the neighborhood, inHarlem encompasses a wide range of artistic and programmatic ventures.

Exhibitions as part of the new inHarlem initiative open. inHarlem: Kevin Beasley, Simone Leigh, Kori Newkirk, Rudy Shepherd is organized in partnership with the NYC Parks along with the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance.

After closing its J. Max Bond Jr. building to the public in January 2018, the Museum begins the work toward its new home in Fall 2018. The design of the building, created for the needs of the institution and its surrounding communities, takes its inspiration from local architecture and the bustling Harlem sidewalks.  

Arts patron, educator, and civil rights activist Peggy Cooper Cafritz (1947–2018) donates the largest gift of contemporary art by artists of African descent. Over four hundred works from her collection go to the Studio Museum, and over two hundred fifty to the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

The Studio Museum partners with the American Federation of Arts to present Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, a major traveling exhibition of over one hundred works by nearly eighty artists from the 1920s to the present.

While the Museum is closed for construction, MoMA PS1 hosts the Studio Museum’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibitions as a facet of the multiyear partnership between MoMA, MoMA PS1, and the Studio Museum. MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19 is the first exhibition of this collaboration.

MoMA and the Studio Museum partner on collaborative exhibitions for MoMA’s Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series. The first installment of the collaboration, Projects 110: Michael Armitage, is organized by Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, with Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions.

The Studio Museum, joined by civic leaders, artists, patrons, and members of the vibrant Harlem community, presents Creating Space, a ceremony marking the next phase in constructing the Museum’s home on West 125th Street. 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in partnership with the Studio Museum announces the establishment of the James Van Der Zee Archive, a collaborative initiative to catalogue, research, conserve, and make accessible the holdings of photographer James Van Der Zee (1886–1983).