Art Museums Reach Out to Visitors From Behind Closed Doors

This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.

When you think of museums or galleries or auction houses you can’t help but think of buildings. Sometimes old stately stone ones with statues lurking on high. Sometimes modern ones decked out with glass. But what happens when there isn’t a building — when it’s closed for reconstruction, reinvention or rethinking? Without a building what’s an art house to do?

From Florida to Oregon, dozens of museums across the country are wrestling with that question. Take the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, for example, which is awaiting a $75 million wing designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners, a project that includes new programming spaces and will become home to Gnatalie — the 75-foot green sauropod skeleton — when it opens in November. Or the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which is undergoing a $33 million renovation to integrate an existing extension into the building and relocate the entrance. Designed by Marvel, the renovation is expected to last until 2026.

How institutions operate during renovations varies greatly. While the Natural History Museum is remaining open, the Bronx Museum has closed its south galleries. The Florida Holocaust Museum is closed entirely through early 2025 while it updates its galleries and improves security, a decision made in light of recent vandalism of Holocaust remembrance sites around the world.

Museums with multiple buildings can get creative and maintain some or all of their existing spaces, like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which retained two buildings on its campus and is constructing a Peter Zumthor-designed building around them, a project with a price tag of around $715 million that was recently extended to 2026.

Just as the physical makeup of this growth varies, so too do the institutions’ responses to an age-old question in museology: how should a museum engage its audiences? As the following organizations show, the answer is far from one-size-fits-all.

North Carolina Museum of History

When the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh began closing parts of its building to undergo a $180 million renovation this summer, the museum looked to lessons learned during the pandemic to continue public engagement. In 2020, it bolstered digital outreach and launched “History and Highballs,” an adult-only happy hour-inspired series that explores North Carolina’s cultural heritage. The initiative became so popular the museum made it a recurring part of its programming.