Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts

Positioned between Little Rock's walkable downtown and MacArthur Park, the museum had long been disconnected from both. Today, the landscape reaches out from two new welcoming entrances, drawing the community into an inclusive cultural space while bringing the textured character of the park into the museum. It is at once a space for arts engagement and a verdant neighborhood park vital to everyday life in Little Rock.

With 2,200 linear feet of added paths, the landscape introduces a matrix of over 250 new trees that will gradually merge with the existing canopy, blending outward into MacArthur Park, Little Rock's oldest municipal park. The result is a campus without hard edges: a cultural destination that grows, over time, indistinguishable from the city around it.

The largest petal opens onto a public event lawn, creating space for cultural programming and art festivals while dissolving into the broader park environment. Throughout, plantings of water-tolerant perennials, native trees, and a Bald Cypress grove filter stormwater while supporting insect and bird populations.

To the north, the Courtyard Entrance opens to the surrounding neighborhood through the redesigned Crescent Drive and Crescent Park, creating an accessible and iconic pedestrian arrival. Visitors pass through a stone plaza into an open-air courtyard where dynamic seatwalls weave through the space, inviting the public to rest, reflect, and engage with the original 1937 facade and a sculpture by Henry Moore.

The new design also incorporates opportunities for art appreciation across the grounds, including an expanded open-air sculpture collection, art production space, and flexible lawns for public events and performances.

To the south, a new Park Entrance opens the museum toward MacArthur Park, transforming a formerly walled and inward-facing facade into a generous public threshold. To the west, a generous parking grove shelters the approach beneath a canopy of Black Tupelo and Linden trees, shaping forested parking rooms that manage stormwater and reduce urban heat.

In every direction, the design celebrates Arkansas's renowned biodiversity: the low oak savannas to the northeast, the banded stone of the Ouachita Mountain foothills, and the wetlands of Bayou Bartholomew

At a broader scale, the lush, forested landscapes around the new museum encapsulate its mission writ large—to create a more open and welcoming cultural commons, seamlessly bridging together indoor and outdoor spaces to reflect, gather, and celebrate the region’s artistic and environmental richness.