Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Opens in Little Rock

Sited in the northwest corner of MacArthur Park in Downtown Little Rock, the AMFA dates back to 1914, with the inception of the Fine Arts Club, and to 1937, with the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts in this location. The institution was later renamed the Arkansas Arts Center, an expression of the various components that included the museum but also an art school, performing arts theater, lecture hall, and store. This mix of elements has been a defining characteristic of the place for many decades, as Bill Clinton, the former Arkansas governor and US president, told a roomful of journalists last year. 

Known as the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts since January 2021, AMFA maintains the diversity of its programming in a collection of buildings that span from its 1937 original to expansions in 2000 and a handful of additions in between. Studio Gang renovated the assemblage and added a curving central spine that, in their words, “[links] the museum's disparate programs and also serves as a focal point for extensive renovations that help AMFA meet its growing visitor needs.”

Studio Gang aimed to maintain as much of the existing structures as possible, and in the course of doing so they highlighted the museum's 1937 Art Deco building designed by H. Ray Burks. Visitors to the building from downtown on the north will walk beneath the sweeping Cultural Living Room and see the original facade before heading inside. On the south, Jeanne Gang worked with Scape, the landscape design firm of Kate Orff, to better connect the building to MacArthur Park, eleven acres of which were designed by Scape. The curved and pleated roof inserted by Gang into the heart of the complex of buildings is strongly visible on the north and south ends of the museum, giving it a “bold new architectural identity,” per a statement from AMFA.

At 133,000 square feet and with a collection of 14,000 works, AMFA is the largest cultural institution of its kinds in Arkansas. The institution raised more than $160 million, to date, as part of the “Reimagining the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts” campaign for its latest transformation. With the fundraising comes named galleries, though many of them recall important people from the museum's distant past, such as the Berta and John Baird Gallery, named for the husband and wife who helped endow the Museum of Fine Arts in 1937. One of the eight galleries, the Little Rock Gallery, is dedicated to “the residents of Little Rock [who] voted for a bond issue” in 2016 that helped fund the museum. People in Little Rock really love their AMFA, a museum where, as in the past, general admission is free.