The New Museum, Once a Scrappy Cultural Renegade, Matures Into an Artistic Elder Statesman

The New Museum’s transformation from scrappy experimental space to august contemporary institution reaches its apotheosis on Saturday March 21st when it opens its newly expanded wing to the public. Designed by “starchitects” Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas for the architectural firm OMA, the expansion effectively doubles the museum’s original space with an additional 60,000 square feet of exhibition and event space. Seen from the outside, it serves as an inscrutably smooth and multi-faceted prism, a companion piece offsetting the original building’s mesh-covered stack of boxes.The expanded space touts what it terms as “fluid circulation” of space. Clean right angles are in short supply. Instead, there are variety of angles and cantilevered surfaces, far more crystalline than cube. A slanted surface on the façade itself creates a natural triangular plaza between the two conjoined elements, which leads to an atrium inside. That interior is dominated by a dramatic ascending staircase which leads to the expanded upper floors, flanked by four rectangular cut away windows that provide both light and a view. It opens a tremendous vertical space the previous lobby lacked. The expanded New Museum at 235 Bowery. OMA/bloomimages.deCurrently this enables the hanging of Klara Hosnedlova’s massive woven sculpture “Shelter,” which hangs from the ceiling next to the stairs like the shaggy pelt of some great mythical beast. The expanded space is less a fortress of solitude and more open forum, however, using its doubled square footage to interact with the lively energy of the gritty Bowery. To this end it also houses several venues and multiple event rooms, including a 74-seat forum and an enlarged seventh floor “sky room” with massive skylights and outdoor balconies. There are also new studio spaces for artists in residence. The bid for a more casual neighborhood atmosphere has led the planners to smartly put the new all-day café and restaurant on the ground floor instead of the usual top floor, more patio hangout than discrete destination.The renovated and expanded space opens for free to the public with “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a chaotic but compelling museum survey, that addresses the question “What does is mean to be human?” It traces a “diagonal history” from the early 20th century to today, juxtaposing visions of the future (often involving robots, cyborgs, post-human forms, AI, and alien-like entities) with works that reflect anxieties around machinery, social unrest and fascism’s rise in the 1920s, drawing parallels to current AI and tech accelerations.Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, it features over two hundred artists, with 732 objects from 56 countries, spread out along the museum’s refurbished second, third, and fourth floors. There are installations by Pierre Huyghe (a standout from the last Venice Biennale), as well as Hito Steyerl and Wangechi Mutu among a dozen other living contemporary artists. These newer works are supplemented by art from earlier twentieth century masters such as Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, and H.R. Giger.The New Museum began as a dedicated space for entirely contemporary art in 1977. Founded by Marcia Tucker, a former curator at the Whitney, the cutting-edge space grew out of her frustration with what she saw as the program’s inflexibility and lack of curatorial vision. The new space, opened without a permanent collection or a fixed home, was intended as a truly dedicated “artists space” that was nimble, experimental, and focused on artists who had yet to gain recognition. In 1999, another former curator from the Whitney Museum, Lisa Phillips, took the helm with a bold, some would say mercenary and controversial, vision, and steered the institution to its flagship location at 235 Bowery.Her leadership resulted in new trustees and a $50 million, 58,700-square-foot, seven-story original building — designed by Tokyo-based SANAA (Pritzker Prize winners) with Gensler — which featured stacked, offset “boxes” for flexible galleries, emphasizing light, adaptability, and integration with the neighborhood. Built in a former parking lot, denizens of the Bowery either saw it as a welcome change or a pretentious eyesore.Since then, the museum has established a nimble and durable model for being a contemporary institution that supports lesser-known emerging work while continuing to exhibit contemporary household names. Before closing for renovations, the museum showcased a Triennial in 2021 dedicated to forty emerging artists. Its program dedicated to incubating new work in design, technology and culture, NEW INC., is ongoing.Now the once renegade and homeless space appears to have crystallized into a genuine august institution. In its present incarnation, the expanded museum signals not just a doubled physical footprint, but a renewed dedication to creative exploration that one hopes will allow for a broad range and diversity of outlooks and inputs. It leaves us with measured optimism that our current story, in all its febrile complexity, can continue to be engagingly and relevantly told through contemporary art.

The New Museum, Once a Scrappy Cultural Renegade, Matures Into an Artistic Elder Statesman

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