Memphis Art Museum to open with 20 new exhibits. What's planned?

The Memphis Art Museum will open on December 6 at its new Front Street location, featuring 20 exhibitions spanning 30,000 square feet of gallery space—a 50% expansion over its previous home, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. The new building will showcase works from diverse cultures, eras, and regions, including a major survey of over 200 photographs from the Hooks Brothers Studio, which operated on Beale Street and centered on Black resistance during the Jim Crow era. Among the exhibitions, *Power and Absence: Women in Europe, 1500–1680* examines Renaissance and Baroque representations of women, while *All That Glitters: Reframing the Dutch ‘Golden’ Age* critically recontextualizes the museum’s 17th-century Dutch collection alongside objects tied to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. *Rhapsodies in Black* explores jazz’s influence on Black American abstraction, featuring works by Sam Gilliam and others from the 1970s to today. The museum’s rooftop sculpture garden will host *Rooted: Global Gardens and Their Communities*, an exploration of gardens across cultures and time. Other exhibitions include *Towards Liberation*, anchored by the *Black Gospel Window* (1877), the first known public depiction of a Black Jesus Christ, and *How to Carry Water*, which reframes the African Diaspora through contemporary art reclaiming traumatic histories. The opening also marks the museum’s transition from Overton Park to Downtown, with *From Park to River: Building the Museum’s Collection* tracing its institutional history. Additional displays challenge design conventions, like *Design, Interrupted*, and celebrate Memphis’ cultural ties, such as *The River Calling: Storytelling in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta*.