The galleries at the Longmont Museum have been closed since May 26, 2025. When they reopen on Saturday, October 17, the building will have room for two kinds of exhibits at once. It used to run one or the other. Before construction, the big-name art shows and the hands-on children's exhibits had to alternate in a single gallery. Museum Director Erik Mason described an audience with "a lot of hunger for both art exhibits from big names like Picasso, as well as hands-on, friendly exhibits."
The expansion fixes that, and the trade it took to get there shows up as soon as you walk in. The kids got the old history gallery. History now has to wait.
The grand reopening runs 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 400 Quail Rd. and is free all day. Mason opens it with a ribbon cutting at 9 a.m.
The Room Swap Behind the Expansion
The City calls the project a nearly $10 million expansion that adds 70% more public gallery space. In square feet, that comes to about 7,000 new on top of a roughly 30,000-square-foot building. Most of the change came from moving the existing rooms around.
| Space | Before the closure | After October 17 |
|---|---|---|
| 2,300-sq-ft history gallery | Permanent Longmont history exhibit, on view since 2007 | Lila's Children's Gallery, home of DreamLab |
| Rotating exhibit gallery | Shared by art shows and kids' exhibits, one at a time | Renovated as the new history gallery |
| New 4,000-sq-ft addition | Did not exist | Bill Stewart Feature Gallery |
| Lobby and entry | Original | Larger and universally accessible, with more restrooms |
Lila's Children's Gallery is named for Lila Stewart, who was a local business leader and a strong supporter of the museum with her husband, Bill. The swap also follows the windows. The children's gallery gets more of them. The few windows in the history gallery will be blocked to protect the objects. "It's great for a children's exhibit, not a history exhibit," Mason said about the extra light.
What Is Actually On View Opening Day
The new feature gallery opens with "Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Portrait," which runs October 17 through January 31. It brings together 98 photographs from Kahlo's private albums along with handwritten letters and notes. Some of the photographs were taken by her father, the professional photographer Guillermo Kahlo. The exhibit traces her marriage to Diego Rivera, her friendships and her lifelong pain, and it shows how she shaped her own famous image.
"Women Artists: Four Centuries of Creativity" opens the same day and runs through January 24.
Down the hall, DreamLab is a permanent hands-on exhibit with five play areas:
- Lilypad Landing
- Deep Sea Diner
- Dragon Sky Castle
- Mushroom Forest
- Crystal Cave
Entry is free on October 17. After that, the Frida exhibit costs $12 for adults and $8 for children, and members get in free. The feature gallery's lineup is already planned past the winter. Exhibits will change roughly every eight months, though the first ones will stay up longer, and contemporary art quilts are scheduled to follow Frida in February 2027.
History Is the Gallery That Waits
The new history gallery, which doesn't have a name yet, is the one part of the expansion that won't be ready on October 17. In April 2026, the Berthoud Weekly Surveyor reported the plan. An interim exhibit of about 100 objects from the museum's collection is scheduled for January 2027. The larger permanent exhibit that will replace the one on view since 2007 is targeted for 2029.
While the temporary exhibit is up, staff will research the area's 14,000 years of history and to work with local Indigenous groups and others to collect their stories. "We want to make sure we're not only telling the story as staff, but we're involving the community who went into creating this region as we develop that exhibit," Mason said. "It will be a more immersive exhibit."
Local history still has a place on opening day. Elizabeth Beaudoin gives a History of Longmont talk in the first and third activity blocks and a Women of Longmont History talk in the second.
How a Bigger Budget Became a Bigger Gallery
The 4,000-square-foot feature gallery is the size it is because the fundraising goal went up. The capital campaign started in September 2023 with an $8.1 million target. The goal later rose to $10.2 million, and the extra money paid for another 1,000 square feet of feature gallery.
The campaign also had a setback along the way. In April 2025, Mason said about $300,000 in expected federal grants had become unlikely after the agencies involved were disbanded or their funding was redirected. The museum asked the community to make up the difference.
By February 2026 the campaign had reached $10.2 million from more than 450 individuals, foundations and corporations. The Stewart Family Foundation gave more than $6 million of that. "Without their support, this campaign wouldn't have been possible," Mason said.
The schedule slipped as well. The City's 2024 campaign announcement expected the work to finish by early 2026. When construction began in July 2025, the target moved to fall 2026, and that's the date the museum is now hitting.
The museum sets a high bar for itself coming out of the closure. In 2024, its last full year open, it drew a record 62,000 visitors, probably helped by an exhibit of LEGO sets. "We are certainly hopeful to reach at least that number as we reopen and possibly even more," Mason said.
Frida Arrives in the Middle of Día de Muertos Season
The timing of the opening exhibit matters in Longmont. The City describes its Día de Muertos as the longest-running public Day of the Dead celebration in Colorado. It has run since 2001 and draws more than 6,000 people a year. The Kahlo exhibit opens a week after that season starts, and the museum's tie-in programs fall on the same weeks.
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Oct. 10 to Nov. 2 | "Remembering is Resistance" and "Catrinas on Parade," free, with an opening reception Oct. 10 | Firehouse Art Center |
| Oct. 17 | Grand reopening, free | Longmont Museum |
| Oct. 22, 4 to 8:30 p.m. | Art & Sip: Floral Crown | Longmont Museum |
| Oct. 22, 7 to 9 p.m. | ¡Viva la Vida! A Tribute to Frida Kahlo | Longmont Museum |
| Oct. 24, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. | Day of the Dead Family Celebration, free | 4th Avenue and Kimbark Street |
| Oct. 30, 7 p.m. | Noche de Museo, $23 or $20 for members | Stewart Auditorium |
| Nov. 5, 7 to 9 p.m. | "Like Water for Chocolate" screening | Longmont Museum |
| Nov. 12, 7 to 9 p.m. | The Body Politic: Women Artists After Frida | Longmont Museum |
This year's Family Celebration downtown includes traditional music and dance, sugar skull decorating, face painting, a kids' play zone, food trucks and a Gigantes Procession. Noche de Museo is curated by the band iZCALLi. The evening ranges from Aztec dance by Grupo Azteca Tlahuitzcalli to iZCALLi's own genre-bending rock. This season's art exhibits are at the Firehouse Art Center, and the museum is hosting the performances.
Outdoors, the Stewart Family Courtyard is already back in use. It reopened in summer 2025 with a new stage and twice as much event space. According to the Times-Call, it seats 700.
Opening Day, Block by Block
All galleries are open all day. The programs come in three blocks:
- 10:45 to 11:45 a.m. Discovery Days sampler activities for ages 2 to 6 with their caregivers, an art activity for adults and teens, Beaudoin's History of Longmont talk, continuous "Silly Symphonies" screenings, and guided tours with Mason and Senior Curator Jackie Hobbins.
- 1 to 2 p.m. Discovery Days, art activities and tours again, plus Beaudoin's Women of Longmont History talk.
- 3 to 4 p.m. The History of Longmont talk, the film screenings and guided tours.
The children's gallery closes for cleaning from 11 to 11:20 a.m. and again from 2 to 2:20 p.m. If you're bringing kids to DreamLab, plan around those breaks.
A building that gets more gallery space, a bigger lobby and an event courtyard twice its old size changes life on Quail Road, and here at Janet Leap we follow changes like this one closely. If you own a home near the museum and want to know how Longmont's newest additions might affect its value, request a free home valuation and we'll go through it with you.
