New Museum Plans Emerging Artist Triennial

The New Museum will stage an international triennial showcasing emerging artists, with the first exhibition scheduled for the spring of 2009, museum director Lisa Phillips said at a press breakfast Tuesday. The inaugural triennial, which will be called "Younger Than Jesus," promises to focus on innovative work by artists no older than 32.

The show will be assembled by a team of New Museum curators in conjunction with a large "information-pooling" group of 200 curators, writers, teachers, artists, critics, and bloggers. The triennial, presenting the work of artists who have come of age in the Internet era, will fill the entire museum, which opened last year. The Whitney Museum's biennial, the city's leading showcase of emerging artists, is staged in even years, which means the two exhibitions will go head-to-head for the first time in 2012.

In addition, the New Museum outlined its plans for a retrospective of Mary Heilmann's work in New York, featuring paintings, sculptures, and furniture. "Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone" will open October 22 and run through January 26, 2009.

At the same breakfast, the museum announced a new batch of commissions made in collaboration with Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, as part of their "3M" project. This second round of commissions will include works by video installation artist Mathias Poledna, filmmaker Daria Martin, multimedia artist Jeremy Deller, and the magazine collective Urban China.