Groundbreaking has commenced for a new art gallery on the campus of Wesleyan University, adding new cultural facilities to the Connecticut liberal arts institution for the first time since the mid-70s in an expansion of the university’s existing Art Center designed by Pritzker Prize laureate Kevin Roche.

Peterson Rich Office (PRO) is behind plans for the expanded Davison Arts Center, which will add 5,500 square feet of arts space for an expanded collection that has been housed in the university’s main library for the past two years.

The new building features an elongated program fronted by a glass-wall lobby on one end and filled with multidisciplinary art spaces in an Indiana limestone that helps the structure blend with the adjacent library and public affairs office.

“The new gallery presents an opportunity to expand the visual arts from the iconic Kevin Roche-designed Center for the Arts to the very heart of the campus,” PRO co-founders Nathan Rich and Miriam Peterson said in a statement. “The building is deliberately designed for interdisciplinary learning and to expose a range of students to this renowned collection.”

Though the expansion will represent the firm’s first-ever purpose-built arts exhibition project, PRO is no stranger to art spaces, having previously completed the conversion of two historic buildings in Detroit and New York in addition to a new upstate studio for the muralist Nina Chanel Abney. PRO worked with New Haven-based Newman Architects for the design of the expansion.

The museum is set for completion in the summer of 2023 and will open to the public the following spring. The duo referred to the project in an October 2019 interview with Archinect, saying that it “offers enormous potential.” The full conversation can be viewed here.