AutoZone team donates nearly $7 million for new Memphis Art Museum

AutoZone alumni and associates continue to raise millions for the new Memphis Brooks Museum of Art — or, the Memphis Art Museum, as the cultural attraction will be known when it relocates from Overton Park to the Downtown riverfront in a couple of years.

Sunday, a group of 109 current and former AutoZone workers revealed they had collected close to $7 million to donate to the museum effort, museum officials said. The donation was revealed during a surprise rooftop event for AutoZone founder J.R. "Pitt Hyde" and Barbara Hyde, his wife, whose AutoZone Foundation already had contributed $40 million to the $180 million capital campaign to construct the ambitious new museum.

These contributions — the largest of any company, group or individual — gave the Hydes "naming rights" to the museum. The name "Memphis Art Museum" was chosen "to give the name back to the city of Memphis," said museum executive director Zoe Kahr.

"We have always considered ourselves Memphis' art museum, so we're really excited that this new name allows us to say who we are and what we are," she said.

Set to open in probably 2025, the 22,000-square-foot museum will stretch along Front Street from Union to Monroe, on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi.

Largely designed by Herzog & de Meuron, a Pritzker Prize-winning Swiss firm with an impressive résumé of major museum work, the Memphis Art Museum is expected to feature nearly 50% more gallery space than its predecessor, and intended to function as the city's riverside "front porch," boosters say, with a free rooftop garden and other public spaces.

Hyde had been told he was attending a media interview on the company's Downtown rooftop Sunday before he was surprised with the announcement of the donation, symbolized by an oversized prop check.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: AutoZone team donates nearly $7 million for new Memphis Art Museum