New Art Museum in the Cards for Las Vegas

Las Vegas no longer wants to be the largest U.S. city without a standalone art museum. So the city is inching forward with plans to open the Las Vegas Museum of Art. The museum will be located in a new building at Symphony Park, a five-acre arts hub in downtown Las Vegas that also houses the Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

Construction on the $150M building, featuring 60K to 90K square feet over three floors, isn’t expected to begin until 2026, so its earliest projected opening is 2028.

The new museum has also received $5M in seed funding from the Nevada state legislature.

Casino.org’s own Vital Vegas blogger Scott Roeben broke some details of this story in November, weeks before the Las Vegas City Council even voted to approve a 1.5-acre plot for the museum.

Lost Art

Las Vegas had an art museum before. Kind of.

And no, we’re not referring to the gallery at Wynn Las Vegas or the ones that sell their art on the Strip and downtown.

There was once an actual place called the Las Vegas Art Museum. It opened in 1974 out of the ashes of the Las Vegas Art League, in a ranch house at Lorenzi Park that was owned by the city of Las Vegas.

In the 1990s, the city converted the museum into a senior center and moved its collection into a new building it would share with one of its libraries until 2009. That’s when the Las Vegas Art Museum finally closed, citing a recession-prompted lack of donations.

In 2017, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno announced plans to open a Las Vegas branch. But that $250M project was canceled in 2020 due to lack of funding.