Sugar Hill Museum Brings Art to New York’s Youngest (and Poorest)

NEW YORK — How can a museum ensure that it serves families who may not be able to afford school lunches or new winter coats, much less crosstown trips to an arts institution? Broadway Housing Communities, a Manhattan nonprofit, met this challenge with a daring resolution: Instead of creating programs to bring underprivileged children to an art museum, it would bring an art museum to underprivileged children.

The result is the 17,000-square-foot Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, which opened in 2015 at St. Nicholas Avenue and 155th Street, in a neighborhood where, the museum notes, more than 70 percent of children are born into poverty. But Sugar Hill is not just the only New York children’s museum north of the Upper West Side; it is also the only one that anchors a low-income housing development and that has an affiliated, tuition-free preschool.

“We were interested in creating a true art museum for children — not necessarily the indoor play spaces that sometimes define children’s museums,” said Ellen Baxter, Broadway Housing Communities’ executive director and the museum’s board president. “In particular, we wanted to focus on nurturing the creative intelligence of young children.”

To fund the museum, Baxter relied heavily on the New Markets Tax Credit Program, which awards federal income tax credits to investors putting capital into impoverished communities. By also using housing tax credits, she said, her organization could “form a more comprehensive oasis in a neighborhood of need”: the $84 million Sugar Hill Project, which comprises the museum, the preschool and the residences.

Broadway Housing selected David Adjaye, the lead architect for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, to create a single structure for the project, which is named for its neighborhood. His 13-story building, with a subtle rose pattern on its corrugated concrete surface, has the museum and school at its base and 124 apartments above. From a distance, its playful elegance evokes children’s blocks wrapped in gray corduroy.

“In the beginning, people thought it was a luxury new high-rise coming in to really usher in the challenges of gentrification,” said Lauren Kelley, the museum’s director and chief curator and an artist herself. “And it’s far from that.” Full-price admission to Sugar Hill, which is free to visitors 8 and younger and offers a free Sunday each month, is only $7.

“We’re also a space that honors people of color,” Kelley said. “Artists of color, artists of the Harlem Renaissance, thinkers of the Harlem Renaissance.”

But while the museum has welcomed more than 56,000 visitors so far, it has had growing pains. At its start, the venerable artist it most wanted to celebrate was Faith Ringgold, a Harlem native for whom the museum was to be named. But in 2011, Ringgold, frustrated by the plans’ pace and concerned that they would not include a true art museum, withdrew her name and support. She has since come around — so much so that the museum recently opened “Sugar Hill Songbook: Select Work by Faith Ringgold,” a show of her quilts, soft sculpture, illustrations and works on paper.

“I think all children love art, but not all get the opportunity to do it,” Ringgold said in a telephone interview. “This is a place where they can see the art, do it, be inspired by it.”

But while little visitors may recognize pieces by Ringgold, also a renowned children’s book author, they regularly encounter Sugar Hill exhibitions that are abstract or conceptual. An intriguing paradox is that the museum focuses on both a very young population — children 3 to 8 — and very sophisticated work.

“If it didn’t say ‘children’s museum,’ it could be a museum for anyone,” said Jennifer Ifil-Ryan, Sugar Hill’s deputy director and director of creative engagement. In fact, it has just opened two other shows that would fit in easily downtown at the New Museum: “Justin Favela: Recuérdame,” an enormous commissioned mural about Mexico in one of Favela’s favorite materials, piñata paper, and “Yuken Teruya: Cutting Trees,” featuring tree dioramas made from cut and folded paper bags.

Sugar Hill makes its artwork accessible with dual wall labels, one set written in language geared toward adults, and the other offering information and questions for children. It also approaches fine art through storytelling — the museum offers an interactive story program every day it is open — and by encouraging exploration of artists’ materials in its Studio Lab, a well-stocked space for visitors. But following the principles of Reggio Emilia, a progressive educational approach founded in Italy, it never dictates what projects to make.

“It’s really exciting to see how kids approach a table full of interesting and provocative materials,” said Anthony González, who directs the museum’s school programs and special projects. “When we create the presentation on the table, it has to look like dessert — so when the kids are 10 feet away, they look at our table and go, ‘Aah!'”

Sugar Hill also has an 11-month residency program, which gives an artist a studio on the premises. Culminating in an exhibition, the residency includes monthly open-studio sessions with museum visitors. Semifinalists in the application process have to devise a workshop for tough judges: the Sugar Hill preschool students, with whom the chosen artist will work once a week.

In a telephone interview, Damien Davis, who recently began his Sugar Hill residency, described his latest work as “all about exploring racial discrimination in the United States health care system.” It is somber and difficult subject matter, but Davis, whose installations have been at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, approaches it through a playful iconography: bold, colorful solid cutouts. He intends to collaborate with children in developing work that they can handle and to which they can attach meaning.

“If this is a museum about storytelling, it has to cut both ways,” he said. “I have to let the children tell their own stories. My job is to amplify those stories and give those stories more of a voice — a platform.”

Davis’ work also connects to one of Sugar Hill’s founding principles: social justice. The museum tries to teach civic engagement through everything from the books in its reading nook to the content of its public programs. As Kelley put it, “We want to grow a new generation of socially responsible individuals,” which, she said, also means “building a new generation of really conscious thinkers.”