The forthcoming Las Vegas Museum of Art (LVMA) has been granted a 1.5-acre parcel of land in downtown Las Vegas to kickstart the development of its campus. The estimated $150m museum is a partnership between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) and the philanthropist and art collector Elaine Wynn, who announced her support of the project in 2023.
The LVMA will be sited on Smith Avenue in Symphony Park, a budding cultural hub in downtown Las Vegas that houses the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the Discovery Children’s Museum. The museum holds a $50m endowment, and previously received $5m in seed funding from the state of Nevada. Wynn is subsidising the operations and states that she will fund the museum as much as needed.
The Burkinabé German architect Francis Kéré, founder of Kéré Architecture and recipient of the Pritzker Prize in 2022, has been tapped to design the 90,000 sq. ft museum, which includes two floors of exhibition space elevated above a plaza and an adjacent sculpture park.
The firm will aim to synthesise markings of Las Vegas and the surrounding desert, with the preliminary concept design making references to historic sites like the Guardian Angel Cathedral, a Modernist church designed by Paul R. Williams, the first Black architect licensed to work in the western United States, who designed several other famous sites in Las Vegas.
The idea for a standalone fine art museum in Las Vegas has been in the making for several decades, but previous schemes never fully materialised. Las Vegas has a population of more than 650,000 people and receives over 40 million visitors per year, but for years it has been the largest city in the US to lack an art museum accredited by the American Alliance of Museums (AAMD).
The museum’s director, Heather Harmon, was raised in Las Vegas and studied at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) under the art critic Dave Hickey and art historian Libby Lumpkin, who once spearheaded the Las Vegas Art Museum at the Sahara West Library branch, a space that opened in the late 1990s (although it was conceived in the late 1940s) and closed in 2009 due to lack of funding.
Lumpkin oversaw several major exhibitions there, including shows by California Light and Space artists like Robert Irwin and James Turrell and Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art in 2007, an exhibition curated by Hickey featuring artists who had studied under him like Tim Bavington and James Gobel. The museum’s collection was transferred to another UNLV institution, the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, when it closed.
Harmon later served on a young collectors council at the Guggenheim branch in Las Vegas, which was open from 2001 to 2008, and oversaw development at the New York-based nonprofit Artists Space before relocating to Las Vegas in 2019 to oversee the Las Vegas branch of the Reno-based Nevada Museum of Art (NMA)—a $250m project announced in 2018 and axed in 2020. The NMA branch was similarly spearheaded by Harmon and planned for Symphony Park in a campus spanning between as many as 150,000 sq. ft. Before then, the project was spearheaded by the Art Museum at Symphony Park, a non-profit that merged with the NMA in 2018 after several years of collaboration.
“It’s been a long-held dream that we would have a freestanding museum in Las Vegas,” Harmon tells The Art Newspaper. “All these previous efforts have truly been a labour of love. But I think the timing and the strength of our partnerships is a significant factor in our success.”
The LVMA will function as a kunsthalle, holding rotating exhibitions with works from Lacma’s permanent collection. Some critics have scrutinised the non-collecting structure of the museum, arguing in part that some cornerstones of Lacma’s collection that travel to Las Vegas could become inaccessible to museums in Southern California that benefit from a Lacma initiative to share its collection with regional museums.
“Part of Lacma’s mission is to share the collection and to have a regional presence,” Harmon says. “We will be a recipient of that innovative model.”
Michael Govan, an LVMA board member and the chief executive and director of Lacma, said in a statement that it is “intuitively natural for Lacma to help Las Vegas develop an art museum of its own”, both due to the proximity of Los Angeles and Las Vegas—the cities are around 270 miles apart, close neighbours by western US standards—and because the museum will expand the visibility of Lacma’s collections and public programmes.
The LVMA is scheduled to open in 2028.
