Four years in the making, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art opens its doors this week.

It was only three years ago that Mariane Lenhardt opened her first art gallery, on Second Avenue in Seattle, called M.I.A. Gallery—and today, she's the co-curator of the big inaugural exhibition at the first African and African American art center at a major university anywhere in America.

"We are pleased to announce that the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery’s inaugural exhibition will comprise selections from the Jean Pigozzi Collection of Contemporary African Art (CAAC). David Adjaye, the renowned British-Ghanaian architect and the designer of the Cooper Gallery and the Hutchins Center façade, also serves as co-curator of this first exhibit, along with Mariane Ibrahim-Lenhardt.

A few weeks before the revamped Harvard Art Museums reopened here, a new university-affiliated art space, the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, made its debut in modest quarters, two former storefront offices off Harvard Square, filling a slot that other local institutions left all but empty. The raw spaces were unpromising, to say the least, but the architect David Adjaye has done miracles in linking them and carving out eight nichelike galleries for the first show, "Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy: From the Pigozzi Contemporary African Art Collection,” for which he... Read more about New York Times: 'A New Destination for African Art'

Read more about Huffington Post: 'Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy: African Art in a New Environment'

The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art opened in late October 2014 in Cambridge, Mass., its exterior walls serving as both real and metaphoric grounding for the Hutchins Center for African and American Research at Harvard University (of which The Root’s editor-in-chief, Henry Louis Gates Jr., is director).