The Newly Reopened Studio Museum in Harlem Is Shockingly Huge and Shockingly Accessible

The new home of the Studio Museum in Harlem is well worth your time, and your money—$16 for an adult ticket, though the museum is free to visit on Sundays. After being closed for seven years to move into its new building on 125th Street, the cavernous new space is frankly magnificent. And the museum's institutional collection, on display throughout six floors, is a monumental survey of the Studio Museum's history of collecting Black and Afrodiasporic art, if a bit haphazard in its arrangement. On the other hand, there's just so much of it.

I met Connie Choi, a curator of the museum's permanent collection, in the entrance hall. Above us, we could see granite-colored staircases leading up to exhibition and residency spaces, and below us was "The Stoop," a kind of giant and elongated wooden staircase Choi said was meant to emulate the famed stoops of New York City brownstones. "This area is totally unticketed," Choi explained. "So it very much is intended for the public to just come in and hang out here. If you want to have a meeting here with someone, get a coffee. It is meant to be a communal space."