The site itself shaped the building. VCU President Michael Rao announced the project in 2011, arguing that the corner of Belvidere and Broad - bordering the Arts District and sitting at the gateway to the Broad Street Corridor - was the right place for the city's signature contemporary art museum. The ICA was planned as a non-collecting institution, meaning it would mount changing exhibitions rather than build a permanent collection, freeing its program to respond to the moment. Holl designed the exterior as sculptural blocks of zinc and translucent glass, with two main entrances - one facing the city, one facing the campus - so the building would feel like a passage rather than a destination. The interior centers on what the design team called the Forum, a space defined by a lofty ceiling, a curved wall, a glass facade, and a sweeping grand staircase that connects the gallery levels.

Building a $41 million art museum is its own kind of art. Beverly Reynolds, who ran Richmond's Reynolds Gallery, became a major donor in her last years before her death in 2014. The Royall and Markel families led the fundraising; Steve Markel of Markel Corporation served as vice-chairman of the committee and lent his family name to the building. The Martin Agency contributed. So did an anonymous donor large enough to be announced at the groundbreaking. That groundbreaking, in June 2014, was itself a piece of theater - colorful paint splashed from forklifts onto the construction site, which gave the local press a perfect photograph. By 2017 the opening had to be pushed from October to spring 2018, with director Lisa Freiman explaining that the building was 'very environmentally sensitive' and engineering-complex, and they needed the climate control fully working before art could be installed. Steve Markel agreed it was frustrating but the right call. They opened in April 2018.

The first show was called Declaration. It ran from the building's opening on April 21, 2018 through September 9, 2018, gathering work by an international roster including Nidaa Badwan, Tania Bruguera, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Titus Kaphar, the Richmond shock-rock band GWAR, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Stephen Vitiello, and dozens more. The mix - working artists from Gaza and Cuba and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Richmond underground - announced the ICA's intentions clearly. Subsequent shows continued the work. Lee Mingwei's The Mending Project occupied the True Farr Luck Gallery. In October 2019 the ICA opened Great Force, an exhibition built around an idea from James Baldwin about the force of whiteness and the counter-force of Black resistance, featuring Radcliffe Bailey, Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, Claudia Rankine, Pope.L, and others. A non-collecting museum in a former tobacco-and-Confederate city was using its first two years to argue, repeatedly, that contemporary art could engage hard questions in public.

Running a brand-new institution is harder than designing one. Lisa Freiman, who had directed the ICA since planning, announced her resignation in January 2018, two months before the doors opened, to return to her scholarly research on Claes Oldenburg and her tenured faculty position at VCU School of the Arts. Joseph Seipel, the former dean of the school, served as interim director. In September 2018 the ICA named Dominic Willsdon as the new executive director - he came from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he had been curator of education and public programs since 2006, after several years at the Tate Modern in London. In 2019 the ICA laid off 20 percent of its full-time staff, a sobering reminder that the construction story and the operating story are different stories. The building itself - Holl's instrument, the zinc and translucent glass - continues to draw architecture pilgrims to the corner of Belvidere and Broad. The work inside continues to argue with the city around it.