After 4 years of development, New York’s New Museum is unveils its formidable $82m enlargement on 21 March. The addition of an entire new 60,000 sq. ft constructing marks a major milestone for the museum, doubling its footprint to 120,000 sq. ft and creating more room for galleries and artist studios.
The brand new constructing was conceived by Pritzker Prize-winning structure agency OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the manager architect Cooper Robertson. The area is envisioned as a seamless and complementary extension of the New Museum’s Sanaa-designed flagship constructing, accomplished in 2007. The addition’s design goals to stress openness, that includes a façade of glass and steel panels, a central atrium seen from the road and a public plaza on the entrance.
A number of everlasting artwork commissions anchor the brand new constructing’s public areas, together with a façade work by Tschabalala Self, a monumental sculpture by Klára Hosnedlová for the atrium stair and a site-specific set up by Sarah Lucas on the plaza.
Photograph: Jason O’Rear, courtesy New Museum
The enlargement has a spacious foyer, a big sky room on the seventh flooring providing panoramic views of Manhattan, a store with artwork books and limited-edition objects and a 74-seat theatre for lectures, performances and screenings. A restaurant serving a menu by the chef Julia Sherman—the creator of Salad for President: A Cookbook Impressed by Artists—features a fee by Ian Cheng and furnishings designed by Minjae Kim.
On the higher ranges, there’s a new artist-in-residence studio that enables the museum “to help an much more sturdy programme for artists in New York Metropolis and from around the globe”, the museum’s director, Lisa Phillips, tells The Artwork Newspaper. The enlargement additionally incorporates a everlasting house for New Inc, the New Museum’s incubator for artwork and expertise based in 2014—internet hosting artists like Simone Leigh, Sable Elyse Smith and Jeffrey Gibson. Phillips provides that the initiative has grown enormously, with greater than 730 alumni elevating over $28.9m for his or her companies and practices prior to now decade, therefore it “wanted a completely devoted area with top-of-the-line instruments”.
The museum can also be introducing a free month-to-month programme for youngsters referred to as the Bowery Artwork Area, which is able to function alongside its two-year intensive NewMu Teen Fellowship programme. As well as, the Bowery Artwork Area will work with 4 public excessive faculties within the neighbourhood and proceed relationships with native youth-serving companions just like the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
A view of Klára Hosnedlová’s Shelter (2026) arising the steps Photograph: Jason Eager, courtesy New Museum
The brand new constructing is called after the late curator and philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a museum trustee who made many contributions all through the years, together with donating $20m to kick off the museum’s $125m capital marketing campaign in 2019. Phillips says that Lewis “championed rising artists and was passionate in regards to the museum. We had been fortunate and blessed to work so intently for years and are extraordinarily gratified to honour her reminiscence and legacy.”
The New Museum’s enlargement was initially scheduled to open in autumn 2024. In accordance with Phillips, some setbacks occurred because of the Covid-19 pandemic, which started because the museum ready to interrupt floor and affected fundraising and development, and the logistics of constructing on the Bowery—considered one of New York Metropolis’s oldest thoroughfares.
Nonetheless an arts incubator
Phillips will step down from her function subsequent month, after main the museum since 1999 and guiding it by way of a number of transformative chapters—together with overseeing the transfer into its flagship constructing and introducing influential initiatives just like the New Museum Triennial and the IdeasCity pageant.
Element of Klára Hosnedlová’s Shelter (2026) Photograph: Dario Lasagni, courtesy New Museum
“The New Museum has constantly advanced since its founding in 1977, each when it comes to bodily enlargement from a one-room gallery on Hudson Avenue to our constructing on the Bowery, and when it comes to the numerous exhibitions and initiatives we’ve piloted over the many years,” Phillips says. “We started as a start-up, and although we have now grown in measurement, we’re nonetheless an incubator, a spot the place concepts and artwork take form in actual time in a approach they don’t in most different museums.”
The enlargement permits the museum to provide extra complicated exhibitions and commissions, in response to its creative director, Massimiliano Gioni. “Now we have a chance to commit extra sources and areas to the manufacturing of latest work,” he says. “As a result of we’re unburdened by a set, we put numerous our vitality into producing new works, working with artists to help them in creating works which stay with them and infrequently discover new properties after they’re proven with us.”
The brand new constructing provides round 10,000 sq. ft of exhibition area. It opens with the exhibition New People: Reminiscences of the Future, which occupies the museum’s whole area (outdated and new) with an exploration of how shifts in expertise and society have redefined the idea of humanity. The large present accommodates works by greater than 200 artists—amongst them the modern artists Tau Lewis, Wangechi Mutu and Valuable Okoyomon alongside Twentieth-century greats like Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí and Hannah Höch.
Set up view of New People: Reminiscences of the Future (2026) Photograph: Jason Eager, courtesy New Museum
Gioni says the exhibition goals to “set up a symmetry between immediately and the Twenties, as trying to the previous may reassure us that we have now survived difficult instances time and again”. He provides that it endeavours to think about how new applied sciences “discovered an excellent ally within the rise of totalitarian regimes and the start of fascism in methods that aren’t too dissimilar to what we’re experiencing immediately”.
This thematic exhibition continues a longstanding format for the museum, Gioni says: “Maybe exactly as a result of we don’t have a set, we imagine our duty is to revisit the previous from the angle of the current. By its 49 years of existence, the museum has proven us that artwork is a lens by way of which we are able to perceive, interpret and rework the world outdoors the museum.”
The New Museum will present free public entry throughout its opening weekend. Thereafter, it’s going to provide pay-what-you-wish hours on Thursday evenings, whereas admission stays free for guests beneath 18 years outdated.
