Las Vegas Approves Land Sale for Elaine Wynn-Backed Art Museum

Posted on: September 4, 2024, 03:23h. 

Last updated on: September 5, 2024, 10:06h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Las Vegas Myths.

By the end of 2028, viewing priceless art in Las Vegas may no longer require walking past banks of slot machines.

A preliminary rendering of the Las Vegas Museum of Art, on the left, looking south through Symphony Park with the Smith Center at right. (Image: Kéré Architecture)

On Wednesday, the Las Vegas City Council unanimously approved partnering with Elaine Wynn, and selling her 1.5 acres of land for “under market value,” to build the first world-class art museum Las Vegas has ever had outside the confines of a casino.

Construction is expected to start no later than February 2027.

The Las Vegas Museum of Art would occupy a new building in Symphony Park, the five-acre arts hub in downtown Las Vegas that currently houses the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the Discovery Children’s Museum.

Once it opens, Las Vegas will no longer be the largest city in the US without an independent museum for the fine arts.

Francis Kéré, architect of the proposed Las Vegas Museum of Art, in 2022 became the first African to receive the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. (Image: Wikipedia)

Wynn, the board chair and CEO of Wynn Resorts, and Roger Thomas, the company’s retired former executive VP of design, attended Wednesday’s City Council meeting to cheerlead the project and announce its architect.

Francis Kéré designed the Xylem Pavilion at Montana’s Tippet Rise Art Center, which opened in 2019.

According to Wynn, Kéré’s design for the new museum will take inspiration from the Guardian Angel Cathedral, the Catholic church located northeast of Wynn Resorts’ Encore just off the Las Vegas Strip.

The Art of Funding

The 90,000-square-foot project is expected to cost $200 million to build, most of which Wynn has said she will raise via grants, gifts, sponsors, and donations.

The museum has already received $5 million in seed funding from the Nevada state legislature.

Additionally, Wynn sits on the board of the L.A. County Museum of Art, which, she says, has promised to loan the museum pieces to display from its extensive/expensive collection.

Red Ridge Development will be the developers of the project.

According to the city, the museum is estimated to generate $191 million for Las Vegas, including $80 million in wages.

Lost Art

Las Vegas once had a public art museum that wasn’t located in the Bellagio or Wynn, but it wasn’t the kind that displayed Picassos, Warhols, or Rothkos.

The Las Vegas Art Museum 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 — consisting of 200 pieces of mostly contemporary art by painters who aren’t household names — into a new building it shared 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 2012, the collection was moved to the newly renovated Barrick Museum of Art at UNLV. Its former space now functions as an art gallery for the Sahara West branch of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library.

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