The New Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which has been closed to the public since early March 2024, will reopen on an unspecified date this autumn following the completion of an $82m new building. The new seven-storey building, designed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of OMA with Cooper Robertson, has risen on the Bowery immediately adjacent to the institution’s 2009 building designed by SANAA. When it opens, the new building will double the institution’s galleries, improve visitor circulation and add education, artist studio and event spaces.
The expansion project is part of a $125m capital campaign, of which $118m has been raised to date. That tally includes $30m donated by the museum’s late trustee Toby Devan Lewis, the largest gift in the institution’s 48-year-history; in tribute to that support, the new building will be named in Lewis’s honour.
Rendering of the galleries in the expanded New Museum Courtesy OMA/bloomimages.de
The expansion will bring the entire museum’s campus to 119,700 sq. ft, of which a total of 20,240 sq. ft will be gallery space. The expansion project will also improve visitor flow with the addition of three new elevators and an atrium staircase. It will also provide a purpose-built space for the museum’s incubator programme, New Inc.
“Imagined as a highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity, the new building will offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange and creation,” Shigematsu said in a statement. “The building is further shaped to create an active public face—including an outdoor plaza at the ground, moments of transparency throughout the central atrium and terraced openings at the top—that will openly engage the surrounding community and beyond.”
Rendering of the atrium staircase in the expanded New Museum Courtesy OMA/bloomimages.de
Regarding the new outdoor plaza, the museum also revealed on Thursday that the British artist Sarah Lucas is the inaugural recipient of a public art commission for that space. The so-called Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award will be given to a woman artist every other year, and comes with a $400,000 grant to support the production of a new work for the public plaza. Lucas, who was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the New Museum in 2018-19 and whose new work VENUS VICTORIA (2025) will be unveiled when the museum reopens, was selected for the inaugural commission by an all-star, all-artist jury of Teresita Fernández, Joan Jonas, Julie Mehretu, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith.
Inside, the museum will relaunch its exhibition programme with a campus-filling show featuring works by more than 150 artists, New Humans: Memories of the Future, looking at how technological and social changes are reshaping the ways we define humanity. It will include works by many renowned 20th-century and contemporary artists, among them Salvador Dalí, H.R. Giger, Francis Bacon, Hannah Höch, Meriem Bennani, Hito Steyerl, Pierre Huyghe and Anicka Yi.
Rendering of the a new event space in the expanded New Museum Courtesy OMA/bloomimages.de
“As the New Museum enters an expansive new chapter in its own history, New Humans highlights the role artists play in interpreting and confronting the critical issues that will shape our collective fate,” Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s artistic director, said in a statement.
The New Museum’s expansion is one of several important museum capital projects in New York City and the surrounding region coming to completion this year. The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, will reopen on 29 March following an extensive renovation. On 17 April, the Frick Collection will reopen after a decade-in-the-making renovation and expansion. This autumn, the Princeton Art Museum in New Jersey and the Studio Museum in Harlem are due to open wholly new buildings, both designed by Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson serving as executive architects.
