Isn’t it time that Africa took its rightful place on Museum Mile?” Museum for African Art president Elsie McCabe Thompson asked at a press conference on Tuesday morning. Since her institution’s founding in 1984, it has moved twice, first from an Upper East Side townhouse to a SoHo building, then to its current home in Long Island City. If all goes according to plan, it will move again by next April to a new building designed by Robert A. M. Stern at the northeast corner of Central Park — becoming the latest entrant to that famed stretch of New York culture known as Museum Mile.

The 75,000-square-foot space, now under construction, will fill four floors of a 19-story residential building. A team of designers has been contracted to design the 116 condominiums, though Stern, who is the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, has been given complete control of both the museum and the building’s façade, which is lined with a pattern of trapezoidal forms. “It’s a very sophisticated building,” Stern said, “but the jewel in the crown is the museum.” The project’s total estimated cost: $95 million, with about $64 million of that covering construction.

The museum has earmarked 15,000 square feet for exhibitions, divided between three second-floor gallery spaces, which will allow staff to keep one show running while installation is performed on a second. Among the first scheduled shows are a retrospective of the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, whose delicate metal tapestries were placed throughout the architectural renderings (and who was interviewed by ARTINFO earlier this year), as well as a survey show on the history of African and American basket making.

Future shows include an exhibition by South African artist Jane Alexander — which will involve “1,000 machetes and 1,000 rubber gloves,” according to chief curator Enid Schildkrout, who added that Alexander has promised to provide her own cutlery — and “Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria,” an examination of the art of Yoruba people that first opened last June at the Fundación Marcelino Botín, in Santander, Spain, in partnership with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monument. “There are efforts being made to protect African heritage by African governments,” Schildkrout said.

This being a 21st-century museum, staff has also planned an array of other entertainment options, including a 245-seat theater, a third-floor event space with a rooftop terrace (allowing aerial views of the park “without having to buy a $300 martini in some hotel,” Stern said), and a café, which Thompson said would be run by “two world-class restaurateurs.” A soaring lobby will provide unobstructed views of Central Park, across Fifth Avenue. “Other museums don’t have an intimate relationship with the park,” Stern said.

According to Stern and the museum officials, construction on the new museum has been proceeding on schedule, and the the precast concrete trapezoids of the façade — which real-estate developer Robert Tishman dubbed “dancing mullions” — are sliding into place. The long-anticipated project will be the first new museum to join Fifth Avenue since the Neue Galerie opened on 86th Street in 2001. It helps that there is fire behind the project. According to Thompson, who described herself as a “repentant bankruptcy lawyer”: “We are populated by zealots and true believers.”