This Incredible Art Museum Is Proving Why Nebraska Isn’t Just a ‘Flyover State’
When architect Craig Dykers and his team at Snøhetta were tapped to add a 42,000-square-foot wing to the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, they received an odd question from most everyone they talked to: Would it be pink?
The good citizens of Omaha had reason to be curious. The original museum—a stately 1931 Art Deco masterpiece designed by father-and-son duo John and Alan McDonald—is covered entirely in Etowah Fleuri, a swirling, blush-colored marble quarried in northern Georgia. Lord Norman Foster, in his first-ever U.S. commission, followed suit in 1994 with a handsome addition clad in the same sumptuous stone.
Snøhetta’s response? “We said no,” Dykers says.
Instead, the architects aimed to create a wing that would not only celebrate its illustrious neighbors but also serve as an ode to the Nebraska landscape. “I like to talk about the existential side of design—that is, how does it make you feel? What is the spirit of this place?” Dykers says.
Today, visitors will find out. After six years of design and construction, a reimagined Joslyn opens its doors to the public. Besides Snøhetta’s soaring Rhonda & Howard Hawks Pavilion—which includes pristine new galleries, a community space, and a shop—there are new sculpture gardens swaying with native plants; a reconfigured arrival and entry sequence, tucked beneath an impressive cantilevered canopy; and surgical updates to the earlier buildings, including new administrative spaces, classrooms, a café, and more.
Crucially, the expansion allows the Joslyn to rethink its impressive collection of 12,000 objects (which range from ancient Greek vases to works on paper by Omaha native Ed Ruscha) and to acquire new ones. “This project is an opportunity for us to go to storage, to make some strategic acquisitions, diversify the collection, and show more of the collection,” says Jack Becker, the museum’s CEO and executive director.
From the low-slung entry canopy, you are immediately pulled into a column-free, light-filled atrium, a classic “compression and release” design move pulled from Prairie School architecture. The two-level addition sweeps around and frames the existing structures, offering an architectural hug to its more muscular, rectilinear counterparts.
Dykers—who first visited Nebraska in the early ’80s to visit an ex-girlfriend—was particularly struck by the buoyant cumulonimbus clouds that rolled over the landscape. “The weather in Nebraska is quite special,” he says. “If you’re looking out across the fields, you know a storm is coming. [The clouds] can be really extreme things, and they just have an enormous sense of power and color. Not many people get to feel it. So if you look at the building and you walk around today, all these swoops and swirls and shapes are bringing people a sort of hint of what it’s like to be in the Nebraska landscape.”
For Becker and chief curator Taylor Acosta, the revitalized museum also provided an opportunity to reconceive the collections in a way that was unique to the region. In fact, for the first time in its 93-year-history, the collection in the original Art Deco building has been reinstalled with a renewed focus on the Great Plains region and the work of indigenous artists. “We didn’t want to be the Met ‘light,’” Acosta says.
There have also been more than 100 new acquisitions and commissions, including works by Simone Leigh, Hank Willis Thomas, Dyani White Hawk, and Eva LeWitt. The most significant addition is the 52 artworks comprising the Phillip Schrager Collection, displayed in the upper-level galleries of Snøhetta’s new Hawks Pavilion. The artworks on view range from Pop Art to Abstract Expressionism, from conceptual to contemporary, and—under diffused natural light—can be enjoyed by the public for free.
Still, amid all the new, there are nods to that original pink. If you look closely at the pre-cast panels that make up the facade, you can spy salmon-colored flecks in the aggregate—tiny particles of Etowah Fleuri marble. Back in the soaring lobby, Dykers jokes as he looks over the space, “I don’t feel that people are saying, ‘Ooh, they messed it up.’”
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