The New Brooks

The past, present, and future of Memphis’ oldest and largest art museum.

by

In 1913, Bessie Vance Brooks hired an architect to create an art museum for the city in her husband’s name. She had written a check for $100,000 (just under $3 million today, and no fundraising required) to make it happen and the building, situated in Overton Park and measuring only 90 by 100 feet, was dedicated in 1916.

For the next hundred years, Brooks Memorial Art Gallery — now called Memphis Brooks Museum of Art — has been “the jewel box in the park.” Over that time, it took on three major expansions. In 2017, the museum announced plans for another expansion. What surprised many was the notion that the oldest and largest art museum in Tennessee might move out of Overton Park.

In fairly short order, Brooks officials said that an agreement with the city would make possible moving the museum Downtown. A public-private partnership would raise more than $100 million to build a new facility on the river bluff, at Front and Union, which is now expected to open in 2025.

We spoke with three people in the Brooks’ orbit about the past, present, and future of the museum. Carl Person, president of the museum’s board of directors, has been closely involved for years with the Brooks. Kaywin Feldman was the museum’s director from 1999 to 2008 and did much to shape programming at the Brooks. And Phil Schmerbeck is an architect and project manager for Herzog & de Meuron, the international designers of what the museum is calling the New Brooks.

Carl Person

Person has long had business interests in the city, particularly Downtown. He’s involved with the ambitious mixed-use project The Walk on Union Avenue as well as the Tom Lee Park redevelopment. He’s on the board of the Center City Development Corporation, was board chair of the Downtown Memphis Commission, and is on the board of the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association. He held management positions at UPS and FedEx before becoming CEO of Customized Solutions, a business consulting firm he founded in 2001.

In the early 2000s, Person was introduced to then-Brooks director Feldman. She suggested that with his business background, he should consider joining the museum board. He protested that he knew nothing about art, but she told him, “I don’t really need someone to understand all of the curation about art. I need someone with a business background and a passion for changing lives.”

“This is a perfect seat for me at the perfect time. Not only is the museum transforming, I see Memphis as a whole transforming.” — Carl Person

He was hooked. In truth, he knew plenty about visual arts. His best friend was an artist and Person had seen how people reacted to his work. And the prospect of changing lives was irresistible.

Now in his second term on the board (he was named president in 2021), Person finds “that this is a perfect seat for me at the perfect time. Not only is the museum transforming, I see Memphis as a whole transforming. It is transforming around arts, culture, diversity, sports, development, our school system — some of the key pillars of the city are all rising up now to be very positive and good. And the museum is perfectly a part of that movement, development, and momentum.”

His vision of the future of the Brooks is as ambitious as the proposed new facility. In 10 years, he’d like the museum to be such a draw that visitors would have to make appointments to attend exhibitions. Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland told the Memphis Flyer in 2019 that the Brooks sees about 80,000 people a year, but with the new facility, “We will easily get hundreds of thousands of people a year coming into this great museum.” He says, “The Brooks Museum is a good museum; this is going to make it a really great museum. We need a new building, and building it here on the river bluff and building it here Downtown is going to be incredible.”

Person also expects to see an expansion of the museum beyond the building to schools and various communities in the region, including using technology to establish partnerships with other museums around the country.

His tenure on the board made him fully cognizant of the issues the museum was facing, both within the institution and in the context of the community. “We were at a crossroads with all of this momentum and growth in Overton Park, with the Levitt Shell and the expansion of the zoo, and then our aging building,” he says. “We had to make a decision if this was the right location for us to expand for the next 100 years. We’re here in the center of the park knowing that the Shell and the zoo were still growing and knowing what the age of the building was and the mismatch of the buildings. Would we invest $100 million in our current location, or was there an opportunity to relocate the Brooks?”

In September 2017, then-executive director of the museum, Emily Ballew Neff, and then-board president, Deborah Craddock, announced that the board was adding “the option of relocation, outside Overton Park, to our current list of building options for expansion.” That notion caught a lot of people by surprise. The museum had just celebrated its centennial as one of the major attractions in Overton Park. The announcement said there were concerns that it stay as a “safe, secure, and worthy place.”

Person says the Overton Park building had (and still has) issues. “There was going to be an enormous amount of expense just to bring it back up. The HVAC system is aging. Humidifiers go out. We always had problems with maintaining the temperature control in the building — a prohibitor for us to bring very high-end exhibits to the museum, because if you’re not 100 percent sure that it’s temperature-controlled at all times, you are not going to get stuff that would go to the Met. It was just too cost-prohibitive for us to start over.”

It didn’t take long for Downtown to emerge as the top candidate for relocation.

“Think about being located on the front porch of the city, on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River,” Person says. “You can inhale and exhale on that one alone, right? Think about the Brooks being the beacon of light for the front porch. The National Civil Rights Museum, St. Jude, FedExForum, Beale Street — walking distance to all these locations. It was perfect to me. It made sense.” Then the City of Memphis got behind the idea, so “it became a no-brainer for us as the board to make the decision that Downtown is probably the best location for us to move.”

“I think the museum relocating is in the right place at the right time. And there’s all of the momentum Downtown. If we had tried to do this 10 years ago, I don’t think it would’ve worked.” — Carl Person

Person says the board was cognizant of the enormity of such a move and was well aware of the fuss made when it was announced that the Mid-South Coliseum would hand off its action to The Pyramid that was built on the river in 1991. “You have to be sensitive to those types of beloved entities and relationships that we’ve had in them, and make sure that we bring that constituency and those lovers of the Brooks Museum along with us.”

He says that the challenge is persuading people that it’s not just a move Downtown, but that there will be an expansion of the collections, the catalog, and public space. “I told Mark Resnick, the interim director of the museum, that I want us to focus on the new building as just a building that happens to have art in it,” he says. “We want to attract people to the building, then they experience the art, and then they walk away saying, ‘Wow, what an amazing experience!’ Right?”

Person adds, “I think the museum relocating is in the right place at the right time. And there’s all of the momentum Downtown. If we had tried to do this 10 years ago, I don’t think it would’ve worked.”

Kaywin Feldman

The Brooks of today owes much to the leadership of Feldman, who was the museum’s director from 1999 to 2008. She moved from the Brooks to become director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and in 2018 was named the fifth director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Her fondness for the Brooks remains strong. “I’m watching from afar,” she says, “but with great love and interest.” She is pleased to see the work done in recent years on projects in the plaza in front of the museum as well as Downtown to engage with the community. “There’s been a progression, and the Brooks just gets better and better at doing so.”

She recalls that from her earliest conversations in Memphis, community leaders impressed on her the need for outreach. “When I came in for my very first interview, the trustee driving me in from the airport said the number-one issue for the Brooks was to think about the African-American community and how we become a more inclusive institution,” she says.

“A lot of the collection doesn’t live comfortably in the current facility or allow for the best viewing. And it’s not terribly logical for a visitor who hasn’t been there before to figure out the paths, where to go, and how to maneuver.” — Kaywin Feldman

The process of bringing about changes started with the museum’s collection. “We had a couple of Jacob Lawrence prints and a couple of Romare Bearden prints and that was pretty much the extent of work by African-American artists in the collection,” she says. “That was the initial focus, and I think we did a lot of good work there, and then it quickly spread to exhibitions. I still remember when I first arrived, people would say, ‘Oh, but we did an African gold show 10 years ago and the African-American community didn’t come, so — done that, didn’t work.’ But, one of the lessons I learned in the process is having constant and profound commitment to diversifying the exhibition program. It sometimes meant making difficult choices and raising money in new ways to be able to do that.”

The sustained commitment to the program that she championed was crucial. The museum built partnerships around the community, working with different organizations “to cross-pollinate our institutions to bring new and different audiences, both to the Brooks and to the partner organization. The final level we were working at when I left was the board and the donor base. And I think that has continued since.”

But even as she made inroads in bringing the Brooks closer to the community, the building itself was a vexing problem. “My nine years there were nine years of fighting the facility,” she says. “The challenges were the multiple buildings that had been added to the best of their abilities [at the time], but that didn’t really talk to each other.”

Feldman noted that some of those buildings weren’t able to accommodate the collections that the Brooks owned. “A lot of the collection doesn’t live comfortably in the current facility or allow for the best viewing. And it’s not terribly logical for a visitor who hasn’t been there before to figure out the paths, where to go, and how to maneuver. And then all of the deferred maintenance and issues just with the physical structure as well.”

Nearly 40 years after it opened, Brooks determined that the jewel needed more space. The first expansion, built in 1955, was designed by Everett Woods. The second was a modern addition of two floors of new galleries, designed by Francis Mah in 1973. Then in 1989 an addition designed by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, along with the Memphis firm Askew, Nixon, Ferguson and Wolfe, created a new main entrance and added 32,000 square feet to the building.

“I have to highlight the challenges of the Francis Mah addition,” Feldman says, “which I think is a beautiful aesthetic. If we could afford the space to rip out all of the additions that were done to make it usable and keep it as this clean, pure space as Francis Mah originally designed it, that would’ve been ideal. But there wasn’t enough space to show art in that construction. So, as much as I admire the building, it just became impossible to work with.”

By the time Feldman left for Minneapolis, a number of master plan studies looked at a variety of possibilities to further expand in the park. While she hasn’t seen enough of the current plan to comment specifically, she believes the move is the right thing to do. “Expanding in the park is really almost impossible,” she says. “There are too many constituents, and all cities need more green space, not less green space. It makes me a bit sad that the history of the institution is there, but that’s merely nostalgia. I think it’s right to associate with Downtown.”

She notes the blossoming of Downtown makes the relocation an appealing move. “It’s in an area that could both attract tourists, neighborhoods around Downtown, and office workers. It gives an opportunity for the museum to have a new locus of participation that will be very different from being a Midtown institution. Just watching how Downtown has added these gems, I think that the new Brooks will be another jewel for Downtown Memphis.”

Feldman says that the ongoing challenge for the Brooks is its identity. “How is the institution both very much of the place while also attracting exhibitions and projects and collections that bring the world to the Brooks?” she asks. “But the United States is filled with so many terrific regional art museums and there’s a similarity about so many of them. That question of how the Brooks distinguishes itself from other mid-sized museums is one I don’t feel like we ever quite answered while I was there. It’s something out there still, perhaps for the Brooks to really put the finger on how it’s both in the pool of terrific American regional institutions and how it separates itself.”

Since she has served as president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and as chair of the American Alliance of Museums, Feldman knows how the Brooks shares issues faced by museums today. “I like to say that the twentieth century for American museums was the century of growth,” Feldman says. “Everything about museums was more: more art, more staff, more gallery space, more attendance. The only metric for museums was growth, and directors and trustees were all held accountable to growth. So, institutions have grown but we are profoundly undercapitalized in American museums. We have not yet figured out the balance of size and funding models. So, American museums hang on this thread and all it takes is something like a pandemic to just devastate them.

“And I don’t just mean small and mid-size museums,” she continues. “You’d be shocked by some of the museums in New York, for example, and how often they run deficits and how often their budgets are down to the wire. I worry that we still have a narrative of growth and yet haven’t figured out the funding model for museums. I also worry about sustainability for American museums — environmental sustainability, financial, and then audience and this need to keep diversifying and developing new audiences, so that there’s always a relevance and an audience for the future.”

Philip Schmerbeck

The work of today’s visionaries at the Brooks is cut out for them: Relocate the museum while keeping it relevant, solvent, and sustainable.

Herzog & de Meuron of Basel, Switzerland, and New York City, is the architecture firm heading up the design of what the museum nicknamed “Brooks on the Bluff” for a while. Now it’s simply the New Brooks. The firm has a formidable reputation, having won the Pritzker Architecture Prize for its renovation of London’s Tate Modern in 2000. It also did the striking Bird’s Nest Stadium at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and several other notable projects.

It has a global standing, but the company is connected locally, collaborating with Memphis-based archimania, the architect of record. Additionally, two of Herzog & de Meuron’s architects working on the project have Memphis connections — Schmerbeck, who attended Germantown High School, and Jack Brough, who went to Ridgeway High School.

“Accessibility is a larger holistic idea about making a building more inviting and accessible to everyone psychologically and physically. It starts with marrying the sidewalk elevation with the interior finish floor, which we can do across the entire site.” — Philip Schmerbeck

The charge to the design team was to reimagine the museum on the bluff and determine how to make the New Brooks more accessible, more porous, more inviting to the public, and better able to handle collections and exhibitions.

The proposed site is bordered by South Front Street, Union Avenue, Riverside Drive, and Monroe Avenue. Schmerbeck says, “We have a large enough footprint that we can fit the majority of the Brooks’ programming on one level and still have some space,” for the publicly accessible courtyard and areas for non-ticketed experiences. “We felt it was important to create and make a connection back to the level of the street.”

In assessing the site, the design team looked at where the advantages were and how it could support a compelling facility. “It’s a publicly owned waterfront,” Schmerbeck says. “Not every city can brag about that. We feel Front Street could be much more activated on the pedestrian side, like Main Street. The Brooks is going to be well-positioned there between Front Street and reconnecting what is missing in the Riverbluff Walkway, which pretty much dies basically at the Cossitt [Library] next to the Riverfront Parking Garage.”

The idea of accessibility involves far more than merely complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act regulations. “Accessibility is a larger holistic idea about making a building more inviting and accessible to everyone psychologically and physically,” Schmerbeck says. “It starts with marrying the sidewalk elevation with the interior finish floor, which we can do across the entire site — all of the art galleries, all of the educational programming, and all the non-ticketed experiences. A generous café will operate off of the storefront. The temporary exhibition space, which is a ticketed experience, also is directly adjacent to the Front Street storefront, and then a glass lobby with a porch — the urban living room as some people have dubbed it — as this very inviting first experience at sidewalk elevation.”

Upon first entering, visitors will see transparent glass — a preview to the rest of the space — rather than an opaque wall. “You see where you’re going before you open the door — you can see the courtyard before you’ve entered the museum,” he says. “And from that one spot, you can see all of the offerings of the museum, both ticketed and non-ticketed. Providing a visual connection to everything before you’ve walked in the door was the key to making it accessible on the sidewalk level, where the buses are going to drop off school kids or where pedestrians are going to be walking or as a part of the experience along the Riverbluff Walkway, or as a visitor traveling by car — to have as much of that experience on one level. It’s practical and the best way we could lower the threshold between the inside and the outside where they pull the public in.”

Schmerbeck says the museum aims to be familiar but not necessarily conventional: “Institutions have come to be perceived as very formal, uninviting structures, whether it’s because they don’t have enough windows, or maybe it’s the scale. We’re trying to create something that, at the scale of the sidewalk, feels appropriately institutional without being overpowering. We want something that can’t be positioned anywhere else in any other city.”

He says that many urban art institutions are stacked, usually because cities have hemmed-in sites and the designers have to go vertical to fit everything in. But the bluff-situated Brooks would have a predominantly one-story structure with a substantial footprint, which, Schmerbeck points out, means its elevation won’t obscure the river view from the city. “And when you see the waterfront from the river or Riverside Drive, the museum then is low-slung to preserve the iconic presentation of the city without blocking the skyline.”

Even with all the planning, the process has variables. The project will have to deal with the Canadian National Railway Company because of the tracks along Riverside Drive. “You have to work within the railroad’s easement requirements, Schmerbeck says. “Fortunately, it’s not the most active rail corridor, but it is an important one.” That’s the rail line also used by Amtrak’s City of New Orleans train linking Chicago to New Orleans.

Another requirement will be seismic testing. “You don’t know what’s in the ground until you start digging,” Person says. “With the cost of building this museum, we’ve also got contingency plans to scale back a little bit in case we run into what we call unknowns.” Schmerbeck notes that seismic issues are mitigated to an extent by the structural design. “There is an efficiency about having a lower-slung building,” he says. “Lower to the ground helps us for sure.”

And then there’s the bluff itself, which has about a 30-foot grade change from Front to Riverside. “That’s an interesting design challenge,” Schmerbeck says, “but an opportunity because we have to have a very functional and convenient, safe, and secure load-in configuration. We can actually back a full 85-foot truck completely into the building off the street. Many urban art institutions don’t have that luxury.”

When Brooks officials announced the intention to move in 2017, a 2024 opening of the Downtown facility was planned. Covid-19 changed that and the hope now is that doors will open in 2025.

Schmerbeck was drawn to the idea that “the Brooks could reactivate the front door to the city and transform what a conventional art institution has meant in the U.S. to something that was more turned inside out — something that can activate exchange between the full spectrum of Memphis inhabitants.”

“There are still supply chain issues that persist in the construction industry,” Schmerbeck says. “Some of those are improving. It’s unclear how much the pricing is going to come back to normal. We lost somewhere between 9 and 12 months just because of the pause, but we’re right back at it. The hope is to get started on some early groundwork by the end of 2022 for a roughly two-year construction period.”

Schmerbeck’s ties to Memphis have played a role in his design. He grew up outside Washington, D.C., and his family moved to the Memphis area “just after getting my driver’s license.” It was a prime time for him. “I’ve always looked back at it as one of those Renaissance moments because it definitely expanded my understanding of so many things that many of us think of as American that have been influenced by this place. Music, art, literature — so much history has emanated from Memphis.”

“My mother is an art educator and I grew up around the Smithsonian Institution,” he says, “but with the conventional understanding of what an art institution is. It’s usually a big house and it’s got no windows in it because art is in it.”

Schmerbeck says that “Memphis has always been a place that I’ve referred back to because — as someone who’s always had an urban life — it’s a place where I first understood the problems and the possibilities of what cities are great for. It’s about diversity. It’s about communication. It’s about coming together and experiencing the benefits of living around so many different kinds of folks.”

He graduated from Mississippi State University in 1999 with a bachelor of architecture degree. “I eventually made it to New York and then to Switzerland and then back to New York,” he says. “But the projects I worked on have been across North America, east of the Mississippi River. Coming back to Memphis and working on a piece of urban architecture that can do it all is basically a dream project.”

Schmerbeck was drawn to the idea that “the Brooks could reactivate the front door to the city and transform what a conventional art institution has meant in the U.S. to something that was more turned inside out — something that can activate exchange between the full spectrum of Memphis inhabitants. At the same time, give a kind of living room to Downtown, like a stepping stone to many of the other great amenities there.”

He continues: “It’s going to have a lot more public space and ticketed space, so there’s more possibility for community exchange. We’ve created more physical and visual porosity to the heart of the project. And the center of the project is essentially a public plaza. All the art experience is really at Front Street elevation. That’s the ideal scenario for a public, accessible facility. You walk in and you don’t have to go up or down the stairs. There are other floors, but in terms of all the art gallery space, the vast majority of the public space is at the block level.”

From his vantage point on the museum’s board and as a dedicated Memphian, Person says it’s going to be for everybody and compares it to the community’s love of the Grizzlies. “There are people that may sit beside you that are unemployed, or there may be billionaires, but you’re all cheering for the same team,” he says. “We want everybody to come.”