The Vero Beach Museum of Art Has One Season Left in Its Current Rooms

On the Riverside Park campus, a wall is going up beside galleries that are still open. Its concrete mix includes Florida beach shells and locally mined sand. After the wall is cast, crews will sandblast the surface to bring out the shells and then seal it against the weather. According to Vero News, the elevated pad for the new extension is finished, contractors have begun pouring the first cast-in-place wall, and the cast walls will take about seven months to complete.

Inside, the Vero Beach Museum of Art is running its regular winter schedule of exhibitions, lectures, ballet and film. This season comes with a fixed end date, though, and it applies to most of the building. In mid-February 2027 the museum will vacate everything except the Collections Wing to make way for its new Riverside Park campus, which is planned to open in 2028. The collection stays. Most of the rooms people know do not.

Which Rooms Come Down

Vero News reported that the Education Wing, Administration Wing, Holmes Great Hall, Leonhardt Auditorium and every exhibition gallery will be demolished. The Collections Building is the only part being kept. About a dozen collections and facilities staff, plus half of the marketing and communications team, will keep working from that building during construction.

Some of the old campus is already gone. Earlier this year the foundry and two western art studios were demolished, and the ceramics kilns went into storage. Ceramics classes now use air-dried clay that students paint and finish by hand.

That turns this season's calendar into a schedule of last uses. Each lecture in the Great Hall, each screening in the Leonhardt and each exhibition in the current galleries will be the last of its kind in that room.

Two Exhibitions, One Closing Day

Hokusai, Hiroshige, Hasui: Japanese Landscapes in Print opens Saturday, Nov. 21, in the Holmes and Titelman Galleries and runs through Feb. 7, 2027. On its homepage, the museum says the exhibition makes its American debut in Vero Beach. The show pairs two 19th-century masters of the "Floating World," Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige, with modern prints by Kawase Hasui. Hasui was a leading figure in the shin hanga, or "new prints," movement and was named a Living National Treasure in 1956. Works illustrated on the exhibition page include Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa, widely known as the Great Wave, from the Nellie Parney Carter Collection, with the photograph courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Jill Nathanson: Chromatic Phrases is in the Schumann Gallery and also closes Feb. 7. Both current exhibitions end on that Sunday, roughly a week before the museum leaves the building.

A third exhibition closes earlier. Museum in the Garden: Envisioning the New VBMA, the Stark Gallery show about the campus that will replace these rooms, ends Jan. 3. The exhibition about the new building comes down five weeks before the last shows in the old one.

The Winter Calendar by Room

Many of the season's public programs are built around the Japanese prints, and most take place in rooms scheduled for demolition. The museum's events page requires pre-registration for most programs and notes that schedules can change.

The Dec. 12 festival is the easiest way in. Holidays at the Museum offers free admission to the whole museum, including the Hokusai exhibition, along with art-making, music and dance performances, and food trucks.

The tea ceremony and the bonsai talk bring in guests from Miami and Delray Beach. Akihiko Kaji is an Associate Professor of Urasenke, Kyoto, and president of Urasenke Ichimura-kai in Miami. Tom Kehoe is bonsai curator at Heathcote Botanical Gardens.

Ballet Vero Beach's Feb. 6 program, Floating Worlds in Motion, sets the landscapes of Hokusai, Hiroshige and Hasui to dance. It runs in the Leonhardt Auditorium the day before both exhibitions close.

The winter Museum Art School term runs Jan. 4 through early February, with courses in art history, movement, jewelry, clay, drawing, mixed media and painting. It is the last term held in the current Education Wing.

The Last Lecture Series in the Holmes Great Hall

The International Lecture Series, now in its 45th season, is built around the Japanese prints this year. On Nov. 30, Noriko Murai, a professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, traces water from Hokusai's Great Wave to Monet's Water Lilies and Homer's seascapes. On Jan. 11, Andreas Marks, director of the Clark Center for Japanese Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, covers the production of Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Travel writer Pico Iyer closes the series on Feb. 1, drawing on 39 years of living around Kyoto and Nara.

Next season the series moves out of the building. The museum's October 19 announcement says the 2028 International Lecture Series will be held at St. Edward's School so it can still seat hundreds of subscribers. The January 2027 gala is also the last one in the current facility, according to Vero News, and the 2028 gala will be held off-site.

Where the Museum Goes in March

On Oct. 1, the museum took possession of a 6,000-square-foot building at 1716 Highway A1A in Riomar, formerly the Bungalow Home Outdoor Living store. The building, which the museum calls the Hub, opens to the public March 1, 2027. Programs planned there include:

• Spring Term art classes and workshops
• Museum Studios family programming
• A mini Art Zone for children
• Classes for Veterans, A+ART and Summer Art Camp
• Staff offices

The Hub is smaller than the building it replaces. Vero News reported that spring classes there will be smaller because of space limits, that the eight-week summer art camp for ages 5 to 16 will take fewer children, and that the film studies program is on hiatus until the new campus opens.

Art in Bloom has already moved. The March 4, 2027 edition is an afternoon high tea at Celebration Grove, an event venue on 66th Avenue west of the city.

Some programs never relied on the building and will continue as before. The museum's partnerships with the Senior Resource Association and the Center for Memory and Movement continue, as does Museum Explorations on the Go, which sends art teachers into Indian River County classrooms. That program reached nearly 2,500 students this year, up from about 1,900 the year before.

What Replaces the Old Rooms in 2028

The new building is designed by Allied Works with Unknown Studio Landscape Architecture. The museum's current project page lists it at 103,000 square feet, including 22,000 square feet of gallery space. The design adds about an acre and a half of green space and terraces that connect the museum to Riverside Park.

Several of the rooms closing this winter come back larger. The new auditorium will seat 300 and is about 25 percent bigger than the Leonhardt. A 1,000-square-foot ceramics center with its own kiln room and glazing room will be the museum's largest studio, sponsored by the Indian River Community Foundation.

As of Oct. 16, 2026, the museum had raised $119 million of its $126 million campaign goal. Executive Director Brady Roberts told Vero News that preliminary construction was "going gangbusters." Workers found older mechanical, electrical and plumbing structures during foundation work that were not on any plans, which caused a short delay, and Roberts said the project is back on schedule. TCPalm reported that the work began with a groundbreaking in November 2025 and that the campus is expected to open in fall 2028.

Vero News also reported Roberts' description of seeing the new building take shape on site:

"It's one thing to look at renderings, which are beautiful, but when you're standing in the space and see that first 30-foot wall going up, you see the vertical expanse and the scale of the building. It's really impressive."

The Hokusai exhibition opens Nov. 21 and closes Feb. 7. The museum can be reached at 772.231.0707 for registration.

Riverside Park will look different by 2028, and so will the value of the homes closest to it. To see where your home stands as Vero Beach's cultural center is rebuilt, contact Vero Premier Properties and get your instant home valuation.