A new venue for durational art, Canyon, will open its doors on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2026. The 40,000 sq. ft hub for video, sound, performance art and more, was founded by the philanthropist Robert Rosenkranz and is being overseen by Joe Thompson, the founding director of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass Moca).
The project is an adaptive re-use of unoccupied commercial space and will live at the intersection of a museum and performance venue. The space is being designed by the architectural firm New Affiliates and will include 18,000 sq. ft of galleries designed for video and audio presentations, plus a 60ft-tall plaza to serve as a central gathering space. There will also be a performance hall with a capacity to host 300 people for a for a range of screenings, lectures, podcast recordings and other front-facing programming. Canyon will also be equipped with bars, a cafe and a restaurant.
“We hope to create a new kind of cultural and social space—one designed to support the complexity and ambition of art rich with moving imagery, music and sound, while also rethinking how audiences engage with it,” Thompson said in a statement. “Canyon will focus on technical excellence and thoughtful presentation of important art, but it will also emphasise hospitality and atmosphere, which means comfortable, sociable viewing spaces that feel more akin to a living room than white cube.”
Rendering of Canyon featuring works by (left to right) Theo Triantafyllidis, Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) and Jakob Kudsk Steensen Courtesy of the artists and CANYON; © New Affiliates
Founded as a form of “venture philanthropy” by the Rosenkranz Foundation, Canyon is a non-profit organisation with “traditional sources of funding”, according to press materials for the project. Its opening coincides with a spate of high-profile gifts from the Rosenkranz Foundation, including its largest to date, a donation to Stanford University to support the development of health-improving innovation through professorships in the Stem (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) fields.
Cass Fino-Radin, a conservator and new media expert, will join Canyon’s team as director of art and technology, alongside curator-at-large Sam Ozer, the curator, producer and writer who founded Tono, a time-based nonprofit arts organisation. Canyon will also foster long-term institutional partnerships with Electronic Arts Intermix, Rhizome (the new media New Museum affiliate and platform) and the Archive of Contemporary Music.
“Canyon reflects my belief that cultural institutions must evolve to meet the intellectual and sensory lives of contemporary audiences,” Rosenkranz said in a statement. “The artists working in time-based media today are grappling with everything from artificial intelligence and facial recognition to climate anxiety and cultural memory. This is not just a genre but a frontline of cultural expression.”
The organisation is planning to host three major seasonal exhibition cycles annually—in spring, summer and autumn—that will run the gamut from experiments to retrospectives. Currently, a major retrospective of the Japanese composer and artist Ryoji Ikeda is on the books, set to take over the entire space. A group exhibition of 35 international artists curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Worldbuilding, is also in development. The performing arts program at Canyon is expected to engage artists like William Kentridge, Trooko and Laurie Anderson.
