After nearly 80 years of piecemeal growth encompassing eight additions and a multitude of styles, the Arkansas Arts Center had become an architectural jigsaw puzzle that was hard for visitors to navigate and disconnected from its setting in Little Rock’s MacArthur Park. So in 2016, it began a process of reimagining itself for the 21st century, hiring Studio Gang to expand its building once again, and taking a new name—the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA). The challenge for Jeanne Gang and the team at her eponymous Chicago firm was to add yet another piece to this beloved institution while making sense of it all and reaching out to its leafy surroundings and the city beyond. Eventually, Gang decided that the right approach was to crack open the structure and graft a sinuous, light-filled atrium onto it.

The organically shaped insertion, which Gang calls the Blossom, provides a dramatic counterpoint to the existing museum’s orthogonal architecture. It runs from the front on the north, ripples through the torso of the building, and then fans out like a giant gingko leaf as it emerges on the south to face MacArthur Park. A curving concrete structure topped by a pleated roof, the Blossom negotiates the sloping terrain, stepping down six feet from north to south. To reconnect the museum to the city and Crescent Drive on the north, the design team—including Little Rock–based Polk Stanley Wilcox Architects—removed a set of additions built in the 1980s and early 2000s, revealing the 1937 Art Deco front facade and returning it to its role as the main entrance.