It became clear years ago that the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art had outgrown its longtime Oceanfront home, said interim director Alison Byrne.
Officials from Virginia MOCA and Virginia Wesleyan University broke ground Monday on a new facility tailor-made to the museum’s growing ambitions.
Byrne said the new building, which will become part of an arts hub at the liberal arts university, “will serve as one of the region’s largest art classrooms and creative hubs for K-12, university students and lifelong learners.”
The move was announced a year ago, bankrolled by some of the biggest names in Hampton Roads philanthropy.
Those who have led the charge say they hope the new facility will help locals view both the museum and the university — a pair of relatively young institutions that have grown beyond humble beginnings and onto the international stage — in a new light.
The frustration of “a hidden gem”
The 38,000-square-foot building that Virginia MOCA currently occupies was built decades ago as a community art center, not a museum.
That has limited what it can show and how. The museum is constantly rotating in new artwork and doesn’t have a collection of its own like other museums, such as the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk. Sometimes, that artwork doesn’t quite fit.
Byrne said she recalls one time when a piece was too large for the back doors, which allow people in and out just fine but can’t accommodate large structures, for which most modern museums would use a dedicated loading area.
As a result, Virginia MOCA had to knock out a wall to bring in a large diorama. They rebuilt the wall for the exhibition and then immediately knocked it down again to get the piece out. Then they rebuilt it again, spending time and resources on renovations just to get the wall back to where it started.
“We borrow precious works of art from people from all over the world, and they entrust us with those things. And so to have a new building that has really secure HVAC and all of the things that are needed to be able to say, ethically, ‘we can take care of these works in the right way’ is something that we really need to work towards,” Byrne said.
“As wonderful as this building is, and as wonderful as the city of Virginia Beach has been to help take care of it as an accredited museum, we're sort of ready for something shiny and new.”
There’s also the location. Virginia MOCA is tucked away in the woods right where Interstate 264 terminates a few blocks from the Oceanfront. Summer foliage makes the museum invisible to the many tourists driving by, save for a solitary black and white sign. The turn into the museum is half hidden behind a gas station and is easy to miss, leaving inattentive would-be visitors stuck on the highway headed away from the Oceanfront.
“We are often referred to as a hidden gem, which is lovely and very frustrating all at the same time,” Byrne said.
The city of Virginia Beach owns the current building and has leased it to the museum for decades for just $1 each year.
Bruce Berlin, chair of Virginia MOCA’s board of trustees, said the city has been a great partner. But when museum leadership started taking a good hard look after a rebranding campaign during the pandemic, they decided the current facility didn’t match the museum they wanted to be.
“We either need the city to spend a whole bunch of money on this building to bring it up to standards for a museum, or we need to look elsewhere,” Berlin said.
Officials also want to raise the museum’s profile. Byrne said that even as the museum has matured, gaining accreditations and international acclaim, the local perspective is still of a quaint little arts center that runs the Boardwalk Art Show every fall.
“We work with contemporary artists from all over the world and museum colleagues from all over the world, and our reputation is really good and very positive, and people see us as players in the contemporary art world. I think sometimes here in this area, we're not seen in that same way,” Byrne said. “We love being in Virginia Beach, but our name is bigger than that, and so how does our next step in the organization begin to reflect that.”
Berlin, the trustee, said they looked at locations such as the nearby VIBE arts district before the connection to Virginia Wesleyan University cropped up.
“If someone's going to give you a museum, you need to sit up and listen”
VWU and Virginia MOCA had collaborated before, university president Scott Miller said. Between student internships and working together on displays, he described a “great interactive relationship” between his faculty and museum staff.
Miller said he was talking with the museum’s director when he heard the issues with outgrowing the building and trying to figure out where it could land.
“The conversation evolved, and some of our trustees at Virginia Wesleyan took an interest in the project and were engaged in the planning,” Miller said.
A who’s who of Hampton Roads philanthropy joined forces to bring the two institutions together.
Susan and David Goode, Joan Brock and Jane Batten announced last year they would fund the construction of a new museum building at VWU with a combined gift of $25 million.
Susan Goode’s name is already on the university’s Fine and Performing Arts Center, which will stand next door as a companion to the new Virginia MOCA facility as part of an emerging arts hub at the university.
Berlin said the involvement of the three families, all of whom had previously supported both institutions, paved the way forward.
“If someone's going to give you a museum, you need to sit up and listen,” Berlin said.
The facility will become part of VWU’s own designs to remake the entry into campus, creating a direct route from the entrance to the new complex of arts buildings.
The new building will be a glass-fronted facility fully visible from the road outside of the campus, meaning visitors will be able to see the art on display before they even stop their cars.
Virginia MOCA’s new physical visibility is intended to similarly raise Virginia Wesleyan’s profile. Miller said when he took over in 2015, VWU was “a sleepy 1,400-student school.” Now, VWU’s Global Campus program has more than doubled the university’s enrollment and includes students from all over the world.
“What we're looking for is new, untapped markets to set us apart from other institutions in a congested market. And those blue waters include having a world class museum right here on campus,” Miller said in an interview.
The new location puts VMOCA in reach for many more potential visitors.
As Byrne, Miller and Berlin each pointed out: if you draw a circle within a 30-minute drive around VMOCA’s current location, half of it is in the ocean. But if you draw the same circle around VWU, it includes 1.8 million people — three times as many potential visitors within a comfortable drive.
Once completed, the new facility will include 20% more exhibition space and the kind of back-of-house that modern museums need to handle the logistics of moving pieces for exhibit.
Unlike museums at other campuses — the Barry Art Museum at Old Dominion University, for example — MOCA won’t become an arm of the university. Instead, it’ll maintain the same independent board and have the same deal with VWU as it had with the city, renting the brand-new $25 million museum for just $1 a year.
Byrne said the move won’t mean abandoning the Oceanfront. The museum will maintain a satellite gallery near its current location and will still run the popular Boardwalk Art Show.
Construction will start soon and last about a year and a half. Byrne plans to have the first exhibits in the new facility in early 2026.
NOTE: Virginia Wesleyan President Scott Miller is a member of WHRO’s governing board of directors. WHRO’s Vice President of Production, Jeff Fine, is also a member of VMOCA’s Board of Trustees.
Neither is involved in editorial decisions of the news department.
