The Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum closed on March 15 for seven months of renovations.

Ted Eytan / Flickr

The Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum will unlock its doors on Sunday after being closed for the better part of the year.

The museum closed in March to undergo a $3.5 million renovation. The project included an accessibility upgrade, a reimagining of its parking lot and outdoor space, and improvements to its lighting, heating, and cooling systems. Its new exterior space now features a plaza and community garden.

The free museum is the city’s only Smithsonian institution east of the Anacostia river. Its exhibitions and programming document urban communities and the lives of local residents, with a particular focus on social justice and community building.

It first opened in 1967 and moved to its current location in Fort Stanton in 1987.

The museum will celebrate its reopening with a party on Sunday starting at 10 a.m., featuring food, live music, and a meet-and-greet with its newly appointed director, Melanie Adams.

Adams moved into the role in early August from the Minnesota Historical Society, where she managed 26 state historic sites and museums. The appointment is somewhat of a homecoming for Adams—she received her bachelor’s degree in English and African American studies from the University of Virginia.

The museum’s closure came as a bit of a surprise to some—the museum gave the public only three weeks’ notice. At the time, a spokesperson attributed the short timeframe to last winter’s partial federal government shutdown, which threw a wrench into the museum’s planning capabilities. All Smithsonian museums were closed for most of January due to the shutdown.

While the museum was closed for renovations, curators reenvisioned its main exhibition, “A Right to the City,” as pop-up satellite exhibits and placed them in D.C. Public Library branches across the city.

The exhibition explores the push-and-pull between gentrifying forces and community activism in six D.C. neighborhoods: Adams Morgan, Anacostia, Brookland, Chinatown, Shaw, and Southwest. It reopens along with the museum on Sunday and will stay on view through April 2020. The satellite exhibitions will also remain open through the spring.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.

Filed Under: civil rights, dc, education, exhibits, gentrification, history, race, wamu,