Robert A.M. Stern Architects (RAMSA) has shared design details of the new Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame ahead of the project’s first phase opening in South Bend later this fall.

The 70,000-square-foot facility is built to hold a growing collection of over 31,000 art objects, one of the largest for an American university or college, in addition to featuring a slate of exhibition strategies designed to “encourage ongoing dialogues with works of art” for Notre Dame’s student body. As the firm’s brief stated, 91% of the class of 2022 graduates reported having used the former Snite Museum for academic research at some point during their undergraduate careers. 

Inside the museum’s neoclassical building, the new facility delivers a multi-level atrium space that welcomes visitors at the ground floor level and directs into the first series of thematic galleries, which house the university’s collection of American, European, and African art. A suite devoted to Indigenous Art of the Americas follows, highlighted by a world-class Mesoamerican collection. Galleries continue on the second level with art from Europe and the Spanish colonial Americas.

A transitional space creates a “dialogue” between both cultures. The project’s rearrangement of gallery spaces concludes with the lower floor collection of modern and contemporary acquisitions. The third level is reserved for educational and research offerings, along with a makers space for artists. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates has been retained for the phase’s horticultural element in order to “ensure integrity and harmony” in the relationship of the Museum to the surrounding nine-acre Charles B. Hayes Family Sculpture Park, which the firm also recently designed. 

Notre Dame’s President John I. Jenkins says the project “brings to our campus and to our region a home for great works of art that will inspire, instruct, challenge and lead us to God.”

It will be joined later by another 62,000-square-foot complex, bringing the two-phase development’s total footprint to 132,000 square feet. New site-specific installations from Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, and more will be unveiled at the opening. Further recent acquisitions will be announced later in October as the date draws near.

“The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art makes an essential contribution to Notre Dame’s strategy as a global catholic research university for the 21st century,” Provost John T. McGreevy said finally. “The stunning exhibition spaces and the luminous works of art they contain will captivate us with their beauty, spark important conversations in the classroom and beyond and enable us to think in new ways about our past, present and future. Located at the entrance to our storied campus, the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art will attract new visitors from across the country while continuing to enrich the lives of our community members, our students and our faculty through the transformative power of art.”

The museum will open its doors to the public on November 30th.