The New Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side will reopen to the public on 21 March, just over two years after it closed for the construction of an $82m expansion that will double its exhibition spaces. The expansion—designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the executive architect Cooper Robertson—was previously expected to open last autumn, though when the project was first announced in 2019 it was projected to open in 2022, a timeline that was set back by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The museum’s expansion, which has risen directly to the south of its 2007 building designed by the architecture firm Sanaa, adds 61,930 sq. ft—including 9,600 sq. ft of gallery space, plus education facilities, artists’ studios, event spaces and dedicated rooms for the institution’s incubator New Inc. It brings the institution’s total footprint to 119,600 sq. ft and will significantly improve the flow of visitors through Sanaa’s bottleneck-prone building with three new elevators, an atrium stairwell and an entry plaza.
The museum’s expanded footprint “signals our redoubled commitment to new art and new ideas, and to the museum as an ever-evolving site for risk-taking, collaboration and experimentation”, Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s director, said in a statement. Phillips will retire in April after more than 26 years leading the institution.
Rendering of the expanded New Museum Courtesy OMA/bloomimages.de
The new building will be named in honour of the late philanthropist, collector and curator Toby Devan Lewis, “in recognition of her decades of service to the New Museum, carrying forward her legacy of championing art and artists”, James-Keith Brown, the president of the museum’s board of trustees, said in a statement.
The expanded museum will launch with several large site-specific commissions, including a work by Tschabalala Self on its façade, a Sarah Lucas piece in its entrance plaza and a large-scale sculpture in its atrium by Klára Hosnedlová. It will also boast a new restaurant, designed by Shigematsu and helmed by executive chef Julia Sherman, with entrances via the museum’s lobby and the hip brunch destination Freeman Alley. The restaurant will include a special commission by the new-media artist Ian Cheng and furniture by the designer Minjae Kim.
The museum will reopen with a building-wide thematic exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future, bringing together works by more than 200 modern and contemporary artists. The exhibition will boast works in which artists imagined the future, specifically seeking to envision how social and technological forces might change human experience and even how we define humanness. The exhibition will include works by leading artists of today like Tau Lewis, Wangechi Mutu, Precious Okoyomon, Anicka Yi, Pierre Guyghe and Meriem Bennani, as well as works by canonical figures like El Lissitzky, Ibrahim El-Salahi, H.R. Giger, Salvador Dalí, Kiki Kogelnik, Hannah Höch and Francis Bacon.
During the New Museum’s reopening weekend (21-22 March), admission will be free, with tickets becoming available next month.
