The new New Museum: now with twice the space – The Art Newspaper

After four years of construction, New York’s New Museum is unveils its ambitious $82m expansion on 21 March. The addition of a whole new 60,000 sq. ft building marks a significant milestone for the museum, doubling its footprint to 120,000 sq. ft and creating more space for galleries and artist studios.

The new building was conceived by Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with the executive architect Cooper Robertson. The space is envisioned as a seamless and complementary extension of the New Museum’s Sanaa-designed flagship building, completed in 2007. The addition’s design aims to emphasise openness, featuring a façade of glass and metal panels, a central atrium visible from the street and a public plaza at the entrance.

Several permanent art commissions anchor the new building’s public spaces, including a façade work by Tschabalala Self, a monumental sculpture by Klára Hosnedlová for the atrium stair and a site-specific installation by Sarah Lucas on the plaza.

The expansion has a spacious lobby, a large sky room on the seventh floor offering panoramic views of Manhattan, a shop with art 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 author of Salad for President: A Cookbook Inspired by Artists—includes a commission by Ian Cheng and furniture designed by Minjae Kim.

On the upper levels, there is a new artist-in-residence studio that allows the museum “to support an even more robust programme for artists in New York City and from around the world”, the museum’s director, Lisa Phillips, tells The Art Newspaper. The expansion also incorporates a permanent home for New Inc, the New Museum’s incubator for art and technology founded in 2014—hosting artists like Simone Leigh, Sable Elyse Smith and Jeffrey Gibson. Phillips adds that the initiative has grown enormously, with more than 730 alumni raising over $28.9m for their businesses and practices in the past decade, hence it “needed a fully dedicated space with top-of-the-line tools”.

The museum is also introducing a free monthly programme for teenagers called the Bowery Art Space, which will operate alongside its two-year intensive NewMu Teen Fellowship programme. In addition, the Bowery Art Space will work with four public high schools in the neighbourhood and continue relationships with local youth-serving partners like the Hetrick-Martin Institute.

The new building is named after the late curator and philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a museum trustee who made many contributions throughout the years, including donating $20m to kick off the museum’s $125m capital campaign in 2019. Phillips says that Lewis “championed emerging artists and was passionate about the museum. We were lucky and blessed to work so closely for years and are extremely gratified to honour her memory and legacy.”

The New Museum’s expansion was originally scheduled to open in autumn 2024. According to Phillips, some setbacks occurred as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, which began as the museum prepared to break ground and affected fundraising and construction, and the logistics of building on the Bowery—one of New York City’s oldest thoroughfares.

Still an arts incubator

Phillips will step down from her role next month, after leading the museum since 1999 and guiding it through several transformative chapters—including overseeing the move into its flagship building and introducing influential projects like the New Museum Triennial and the IdeasCity festival.

“The New Museum has continuously evolved since its founding in 1977, both in terms of physical expansion from a one-room gallery on Hudson Street to our building on the Bowery, and in terms of the many exhibitions and initiatives we’ve piloted over the decades,” Phillips says. “We began as a start-up, and though we have grown in size, we are still an incubator, a place where ideas and art take shape in real time in a way they do not in most other museums.”

The expansion allows the museum to produce more complex exhibitions and commissions, according to its artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni. “We have an opportunity to devote more resources and spaces to the production of new work,” he says. “Because we are unburdened by a collection, we put a lot of our energy into producing new works, working with artists to support them in creating works which remain with them and often find new homes after they’re shown with us.”

The new building adds around 10,000 sq. ft of exhibition space. It opens with the exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, which occupies the museum’s entire space (old and new) with an exploration of how shifts in technology and society have redefined the concept of humanity. The massive show contains works by more than 200 artists—among them the contemporary artists Tau Lewis, Wangechi Mutu and Precious Okoyomon alongside 20th-century greats like Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí and Hannah Höch.

Gioni says the exhibition aims to “establish a symmetry between today and the 1920s, as looking to the past can also reassure us that we have survived challenging times over and over again”. He adds that it endeavours to consider how new technologies “found an ideal ally in the rise of totalitarian regimes and the birth of fascism in ways that are not too dissimilar to what we are experiencing today”.

This thematic exhibition continues a longstanding format for the museum, Gioni says: “Perhaps precisely because we don’t have a collection, we believe our responsibility is to revisit the past from the perspective of the present. Through its 49 years of existence, the museum has shown us that art is a lens through which we can understand, interpret and transform the world outside the museum.”

The New Museum will provide free public entry during its opening weekend. Thereafter, it will offer pay-what-you-wish hours on Thursday evenings, while admission remains free for visitors under 18 years old.