The Vero Beach Museum of Art calls "Hokusai, Hiroshige, Hasui: Japanese Landscapes in Print" its final touring exhibition. The show opens November 21 and runs through February 7, 2027. The Indian River Guardian's season preview says guests at the January 29 gala will be "among some of the final visitors to spend time in the current galleries before the museum goes dark."
That gives the building at 3001 Riverside Park Drive one more winter. Its last season is built around landscape: a naturalist's field studies, a century and a half of Japanese views of real and imagined places, and an exhibition about the building going up next door. That new building is designed as terraces and walled gardens, and its walls are made partly of the Florida coast.
A wall made of Florida, standing beside the galleries
The Museum in the Garden project broke ground in November 2025. At the ceremony, the museum announced it had raised $100 million toward a $126 million capital campaign, with support from more than 112 donor households. The design is by Allied Works with Unknown Studio Landscape Architecture & Urban Design.
In August, a 30-foot-tall, L-shaped mock-up wall went up on the construction site to show the architectural concrete developed for the new building. The mix is made at the Maschmeyer Concrete plant in Indian River County, and its components, natural sand included, all come from within Florida. Reinforced Structures Inc. adds Florida beach shells and oyster shells on site, pours the mix and sandblasts the surface by hand. According to the museum's September construction update, getting the first mix right took about a year, followed by almost seven months of test pours.
Executive Director Brady Roberts explained where the idea started:
"We started with the idea of coral stone; it's not uniform and looks organic. The trick was refinement of the surface, to strike the right balance and get exposure of the shells."
Architect Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works has described the building as "deeply rooted in its setting," with "walls embedded with local sand and shells." The design is a series of earthen terraces and walled gardens raised above the Indian River Lagoon. The finished walls will also carry metalwork and custom tile.
The museum has kept operating in its current building throughout construction, as it said it would at the groundbreaking. The 2026 calendar has leaned toward that subject. "Construction: from Abstraction to Architecture" ran through July 12. Wayne Wood lectured on Frank Lloyd Wright and Florida architecture on September 12. And "The Museum in the Garden: Envisioning the New VBMA" is still open in the Stark Gallery. That show follows the design from conceptual sketches in 2022 to the renderings now being built, and it closes January 3, 2027.
Two weeks left with Prosek
"James Prosek: At Work" fills the Holmes Gallery through October 25. It brings more than 70 works from 30 years of painting, watercolor and sculpture: botanical portraits, fish, and wildlife he found on his travels. The Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, organized the show, and the Vero Beach Museum of Art wrote new interpretive texts for this stop.
"Jill Nathanson: Chromatic Phrases" also changes on October 25. Until then it fills the Schumann and Titelman Galleries. After that it moves into the Schumann Gallery alone, where it stays through February 7, 2027, so the Titelman can make room for the Japanese prints. The show presents more than 20 recent abstract paintings shaped by the Color Field painting of the 1960s and 1970s. Chief Curator Caitlin Swindell organized it in-house.
The print show that closes the building
The Hokusai exhibition arrives from MFA Boston, and Vero Beach is its first United States venue. It brings more than 100 color woodblock prints across the Holmes and Titelman Galleries. The museum lays out the three artists as a single line of descent. Katsushika Hokusai is the innovator, Utagawa Hiroshige the developer, and Kawase Hasui, of the 20th-century shin hanga movement, the artist who reinvented the form in modern terms. Japan named Hasui a "living national treasure" in 1956.
The 45th season of the International Lecture Series is built around the show. It has three dates: November 30, 2026, then January 11 and February 1, 2027. The speakers:
- Noriko Murai, professor of art history at Sophia University in Tokyo
- Andreas Marks, director of the Clark Center for Japanese Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art
- Pico Iyer, travel writer, essayist and novelist
The theme carries through to the 2027 gala, "Cherry Blossoms at Night," on January 29. The museum is closed to the public January 28 and 29 for it.
The free days that fall during the Hokusai run
General admission is $12 for adults, $11 for seniors 65 and older, and $5 for students with ID. It is free for members, children 17 and under, and veterans and active-duty military with valid ID. The museum also has two recurring free-admission programs. Every second Saturday is free all day, with Museum Studios for families from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. And Bank of America cardholders get in free on the first full weekend of each month through Museums on US.
Here is how those rules land on the Hokusai calendar:
- December 5–6: Bank of America weekend.
- December 12: Second Saturday. It is also Holidays at the Museum, a free day of family tours, art-making, and music and dance by local youth and community groups.
- January 2–3: Bank of America weekend. January 3 is also the last day for "The Museum in the Garden" exhibition.
- January 9: Second Saturday.
- February 6–7: Bank of America weekend, and the closing weekend for both Hokusai and Nathanson.
February's Second Saturday falls on the 13th, after both shows close. Today, October 10, is itself a Second Saturday, and the next one is November 14. That date comes a week before Hokusai opens and is also the day Ballet Vero Beach performs at the museum.
The calendar between now and February 7
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| October 25 | Prosek closes; Nathanson moves into the Schumann Gallery alone |
| November 6 and 20 | Museum closes at 4 p.m. |
| November 14 | Ballet Vero Beach; Second Saturday |
| November 21 | Hokusai, Hiroshige, Hasui opens |
| November 26–27 | Closed for Thanksgiving and the day after |
| November 30 | International Lecture Series begins |
| December 12 | Holidays at the Museum, free |
| December 24–25, 31, January 1 | Closed |
| January 3 | "The Museum in the Garden" exhibition closes |
| January 11 | Second lecture |
| January 22–23 | Asbury Short Film Concert |
| January 28–29 | Closed; gala on the 29th |
| February 1 | Final lecture |
| February 7 | Hokusai and Nathanson close |
Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, with last admission at 4:15, and 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday. February 7 is a Sunday, so the closing day offers three hours. To get there, take State Road 60 east over the Merrill Barber Bridge and turn right at the first traffic light into Riverside Park. Parking is free.
What the museum has not yet announced
Construction is already taking parts of the campus. The visit page lists the VBMA Sculpture Parks and café as closed indefinitely while the campus is improved. The Museum Art School's fall term runs October 5 through December 12. Its winter term runs January 4 through February 6, 2027, ending a day before the final exhibitions. The published materials do not yet give a final gallery date or say what happens to classes, Second Saturdays or the lecture series during the closure.
The reopening estimate has also shifted. At the groundbreaking in November 2025, the museum said early 2028. Its September 2026 update says only 2028. On October 6, TCPalm reported that museum officials expect the transformed campus to open to the public in fall 2028. Until then, the drawings of the building hang in the Stark Gallery through January 3.
At Luke Webb & Associates, we follow the institutions that shape life along Riverside Park and the island. If you would like a private consultation on how the museum's rebuild fits into your own plans for Vero Beach, we would be glad to talk.
