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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.
This fall, when it closed completely to replace the HVAC system, fix leaks and install a new freight elevator — a process made possible through public and private donations that is expected to last up to three years — the digital realm became the museum’s, “front door,” J. Bradley Wilson, the museum’s interim director said in a phone interview.
“The appetite for the digital was whetted during Covid, and we know now the appetite is growing,” he said. According to Mr. Wilson, across the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, of which the museum is part, there has been a 25 percent increase in digital engagement in recent months. Embracing this interest, the museum is offering its popular education tool, History-In-a-Box Kits, in a new digital format, in addition to continuing online programs like “History and Highballs.”
Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton University Art Museum closed in 2020 during the pandemic, but with construction on its new Adjaye Associates-designed building set to begin in 2021 and last through 2025, it remained closed when restrictions were lifted.
Instead, the team pivoted to engage visitors through digital programming and two pop-up exhibition spaces that helped strengthen community outreach. The museum has also spent its closure developing a network of experts, “not in the academic sense, but rather local figures who are experts in their communities,” James Steward, the museum’s director said in a phone interview. Visitors may notice the fruits of this work in the interpretive materials, some of which are written by these experts.
“Four and a half years later, we’ve realized how beneficial this outreach is,” Mr. Steward said. “Without it, we would have been perpetuating a tradition of well-intentioned folk coming in and pretending to know what’s best.”
New Museum
In New York, the New Museum is closed until next year as it awaits an expansion designed by the OMA partners Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas. The $82 million renovation, funded through public and private donations, will include additional gallery spaces, house the museum’s cultural incubator, New Inc, and feature a larger bookstore and new restaurant.
While closed, the museum is hosting artist panels with Cooper Union and is organizing walking tours of the Bowery led by the poet Rosed Serrano to explore the neighborhood’s artist community.
In June, New Inc organized Demo2024, a three-day convening hosted off-site that showcased work by members of the yearlong program. “Several thousand people attended the event,” Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director, said in a phone interview. “There’s real interest in what these creatives are doing. They’re running in full force even while the museum is closed.”
Museum of Nebraska Art
The Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney closed in 2021 to renovate and expand its building, a $36.5 million project expected to be completed in the spring of 2025.
While closed, the museum increased online engagement, including launching a digital escape room. The interactive education tool transforms work from the collection into virtual puzzles that students must solve to escape. In one room, they are “trapped” in a farm cellar, a scenario inspired by “A Prairie Wind-storm” (1874), an engraving of a storm on the Nebraska plains by Jules Tavernier. Developed by the museum’s director of learning and engagement, Christine Brown, the initiative reaches hundreds of students each month. “It’s due to her efforts that programming stays alive during our closure,” the executive director Andrew Dunehoo said in an email.
In addition to digital engagement, the museum has been organizing pop-up exhibitions in local spaces like libraries and hospitals and hosts movies at a nearby theater. It also organizes painting classes at breweries across central Nebraska, another program Ms. Brown developed. Called Art on Tap, participants learn how to paint using boiled-down beer.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
As part of a campuswide renovation, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. closed its outdoor Sculpture Garden in 2023 for a three-year revitalization project. Designed by Hiroshi Sugimoto, the $68 million project will widen the museum’s entrance on the National Mall and is expected to increase visitation threefold. In addition to adding shade and seating, the redesigned garden will allow the museum to display more of its outdoor sculpture collection and add space for large-scale commissions.
To compensate for the lack of access to the garden and outdoor sculptures, the Hirshhorn is leaning on online engagement, what it calls its “digital front door.” which includes the Hirshhorn Eye, a smartphone-based guide launched in 2018 that allows visitors to scan an artwork or image in the collection book and access a video of artists and experts explaining it.
“Museums are fundamentally about the direct encounter with artwork, but that doesn’t fit the reality of the times,” Melissa Chiu, the museum’s director, said in a phone interview. “Today, most people have some life in the digital world.”
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
For the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where the palatial building and its furnishings are as important to the institution as the artwork it contains, renovations can be particularly tricky. The museum has closed galleries over the years, such as the Yellow Room, which was recently closed for over a month to update lighting and redo the floors, but when it came to renovating the Dutch Room, it was clear that it had to remain open.
The Dutch Room contains stunning examples of northern European art. However, it’s what is not on view that attracts many visitors. Hanging on the walls are the empty frames remaining after thieves stole 13 artworks, six from the Dutch Room in 1990, including Rembrandt’s only known seascape, “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” (1633).
Instead of closing the room, the museum is undertaking a major restoration project in plain sight. Over the next two years, it will remove objects and artwork for conservation, adding signage to ensure visitors have a full experience and to avoid misleading the public into thinking empty hooks are representative of a stolen work.
Starting next spring, visitors will be able to watch conservators work on the room itself, cleaning the floor and ceiling and stripping the walls for reupholstery. “Even at points where someone just sees drywall, visitors are still engaged,” Holly Salmon, the museum’s director of conservation said in a phone interview.
According to Ms. Salmon, keeping the Dutch Room open serves another purpose: “We want the theft to remain at the forefront of people’s minds. We want the stolen works back.”
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