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Our Story
Memphis's art museum since 1916
It begins with a single act of generosity: in 1913, Bessie Vance Brooks donated $100,000 to the City of Memphis for the construction of a museum in honor of her late husband, Samuel Hamilton Brooks. The Brooks Memorial Art Gallery opened to the public in 1916 — a Beaux Arts building designed by James Gamble Rogers, inspired by the Morgan Library in New York City and constructed of Georgian marble.
Memphis Art Museum has served the Mid-South area for more than a century.
What opened as a 8,200-square-foot building housing 19 paintings has grown, over more than a century, into a collection of nearly 10,000 works spanning 5,000 years of global human history.
The building grew with the collection.
In 1955, the museum expanded to secure a landmark gift of 32 objects from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation — a collection of Old Master paintings that remains one of the permanent collection's greatest strengths. A further expansion followed in 1973. In 1983 the institution was renamed the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. In 1989 the museum separated from the city and became fully private, and a final award-winning addition opened that same year, bringing the building to 86,000 square feet across 29 galleries.
Through every expansion, the mission Bessie Vance Brooks articulated at the museum's founding has remained constant: a place that serves as a "repository, conservatory, and museum of art for the enjoyment, inspiration, and instruction of our people." Today, our mission statement still reflects that sentiment: “To create joy through the power of art.”
In December 2026, Memphis Art Museum opens a new campus on the Mississippi River Bluff in downtown Memphis — the most significant expansion in the museum's history, and the beginning of its next century of service to this city.
