Las Vegas is getting a new art museum
Las Vegas no longer wants to be the largest U.S. city without an independent art museum. That's why the city is moving forward with plans to open the Las Vegas Museum of Art. The museum will be housed in a new building in Symphony Park, a five-acre arts center in downtown Las Vegas that is also home to the Smith Center for the Performing Arts.
Construction on the $150 million, three-story, 60,000- to 90,000-square-foot building is not expected to begin until 2026, so a 2028 opening is planned at the earliest.
The project is primarily funded by Elaine Wynn, chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Wayne is a trustee of the Las Vegas Museum of Art and a board member of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which has committed to loaning Wayne works from its rich and expensive collection for exhibitions.
The new museum also received $5 million in seed funding from the Nevada Legislature.
Vital Vegas's own blogger Scott Roeben published some of the details of this story in November, and a few weeks later the Las Vegas City Council even voted to approve the 1.5-acre museum site.
The Lost Art
Las Vegas once had an art museum.kind of.
No, we’re not talking about the galleries at Wynn Las Vegas or those that sell art on the Strip and downtown.
There once was a real place called the Las Vegas Museum of Art. It opened in 1974 in the remains of the Las Vegas Arts Alliance, in a ranch house in Lorenz Park owned by the city of Las Vegas.
In the 1990s, the city converted the museum into a senior center and moved the collection to a new building, which it shared with one of its libraries until 2009. At the time, the Las Vegas Museum of Art closed permanently due to a lack of donations due to the recession.
In 2012, the Las Vegas Museum of Art's collection, consisting primarily of 200 works of contemporary art, was transferred to the newly renovated Barrick Museum at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The former space now serves as the art gallery for the Sahara West branch of the Clark County Library in Las Vegas.
In 2017, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno announced plans to open a branch in Las Vegas. But the $250 million project was canceled in 2020 due to a lack of funding.
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