The New Museum Will Reopen on March 21 With Massimiliano Gioni’s “New Humans”

We expected it to open last fall. Then came months of silence. Now, at last, the delayed reopening of the New Museum has an official date: March 21. The 60,000-square-foot expansion—designed by OMA (Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas) in collaboration with executive architect Cooper Robertson—will integrate seamlessly with the existing SANAA-designed flagship on the Bowery at Prince Street. The project doubles the museum’s exhibition space and dramatically enhances accessibility and circulation through three new elevators, a sweeping Atrium Stair and a redesigned entrance plaza—first revealed by the museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, in an earlier interview with Observer. The expansion also adds major new public spaces, including an enlarged seventh-floor Sky Room and a 74-seat Forum for talks and events. On the ground floor, visitors will enter through an expanded lobby with a larger bookstore and a full-service restaurant operated by the Oberon Group.

When we spoke to Gioni, he shared plans for the reopening exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” which brings together more than 150 artists, writers, scientists, architects and filmmakers in an ambitious, cross-disciplinary, cross-generational, encyclopedic presentation—very much in Gioni’s signature style, but also strikingly timely in its exploration of what it means to be human amid accelerating technological change. “The show will question how artists have envisioned the future, often predicting or dealing with shifting technological transformations while investigating how those transformations have ultimately changed our perception and representation of the self. It looks into the shifting definitions of humans in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” he said.

The list of participating artists spans from 20th-century historical figures such as Francis Bacon, Salvador Dalí, Ibrahim El-Salahi, H.R. Giger, Hannah Höch, Tatsuo Ikeda, Gyula Kosice, El Lissitzky, and Eduardo Paolozzi to recent works by artists who have emerged in recent decades, including Anicka Yi, Lucy Beech, Meriem Bennani, Cyprien Gaillard, Pierre Huyghe, Tau Lewis, Daria Martin, Wangechi Mutu, Precious Okoyomon, Berenice Olmedo, Philippe Parreno, Hito Steyerl, Jamian Juliano-Villani and Andro Wekua.

Described by Gioni as a “diagonal history,” one of the exhibition’s starting points is Karel Čapek’s 1920 science-fiction play Rossum’s Universal Robots—the first work to introduce the concept of the robot. Today, as artificial intelligence, robotics and digital technologies dominate public discourse, the exhibition feels uncannily prescient. “I think we live in a world that is overstimulated with information and images that can deal with vast amounts of information and images. Then, we have a nostalgic idea that a museum is a space of peace and calm. This show is, instead, very dense. We want to see what happens when the experience of looking at art is concentrated, as when we absorb images in our cellphones in our everyday lives.”

According to Gioni, the New Museum will be the first New York institution to mount exhibitions that directly confront the most urgent issues of our time. Despite the several-month delay—and the fact that related themes have since appeared elsewhere (most notably Lu Yang’s premiere at Amant Foundation)—the New Museum’s reopening exhibition still promises to be the most comprehensive survey of these questions, bringing a transgenerational and cross-disciplinary perspective to artistic, architectural, cinematic and photographic works spanning the past century and the present. “We have always been at the forefront of artistic trends and cultural issues. This show continues with this idea of exhibition as a tool to understand the world outside the museum,” Gioni said, describing this transhistorical approach as essential in a moment when a dangerously spreading historical amnesia threatens our ability to understand the present and imagine the future.

The new building allows the museum to expand on its production-driven mission. The upper floors now include a dedicated studio for artists-in-residence and a purpose-built home for the museum’s cultural incubator, NEW INC. “As a noncollecting institution, we can put a lot of our energy into truly supporting artists by working with them, producing works and finding the resources to make it possible,” he said. As part of this effort, the museum will debut a new commission, VENUS VICTORIA, by British artist Sarah Lucas in the entrance plaza. Lucas is the first recipient of the Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture Award, a newly established biannual juried prize supporting the production and presentation of new work by women artists on the museum’s public plaza. Additional long-term commissions include a work by Tschabalala Self for the museum’s façade and a monumental sculpture by Klára Hosnedlová for the new Atrium Stair.

To celebrate the expansion, the museum will offer free admission on opening weekend. Beginning afterward, the New Museum will raise ticket prices: adult admission will increase from $22 to $25, tickets for seniors and visitors with disabilities will rise from $19 to $22 and student tickets will go from $16 to $19. Admission will remain free for visitors aged 18 and under, as well as SNAP/EBT benefits recipients.

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