A New New Museum, for Humans and Robots and Everyone in Between

New York Times

27-02-2025

When the New Museum reopens this fall on New York's Lower East Side, after a major expansion that shuttered it in March 2024, it will almost double its exhibition space to more than 20,000 square feet, thanks to a new, free-standing building designed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of the architecture firm OMA. It is the first public building in New York City by OMA, and will be interwoven with the museum's Sanaa-designed building from 2007.
From the outside, the addition will look distinct from the flagship at 237 Bowery, at Prince Street. Against the irregularly stacked, opaque cubes of the original building, Shigematsu and Koolhaas's design is angular. It emphasizes transparency and upward movement, with escalators and elevator shaft visible from the street leading up to terraces on its upper stories. The interior of the two buildings will be seamlessly connected.
The artistic director of the museum, Massimiliano Gioni, said in a recent interview that in the face of all this newness, it seemed fitting for the museum to tackle 'ideas of the future, rebirth and new starts.' Gioni's opening exhibition, titled 'New Humans: Memories of the Future,' will unpack the question of what it means to be human in the face of sweeping, even paradigm-shifting, technological change.
The gestation of the show and the building happened during, and in the wake of, the Covid-19 pandemic, 'when the question of whether there was even such a thing as a world to come was debatable,' the curator added. 'So we decided to look at how artists imagined such possibilities in different times in history.'
The show will fill the entire museum, with 150 artists from more than 50 countries. Perhaps surprisingly for an institution so historically focused on the contemporary, it will stretch back to the early decades of the 20th century.
'As a noncollecting institution, we thought it was an interesting challenge,' Gioni said. 'How can a museum engage with history if it doesn't have a permanent collection?'
Works by Pierre Huyghe, Tau Lewis, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, Hito Steyerl and Anicka Yi will be in conversation with works by 20th-century artists and cultural figures such as Francis Bacon, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Hannah Höch and El Lissitzky.
The Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu, subject of a 2023 retrospective at the New Museum, will make a new series of drawings based on Octavia E. Butler's masterwork of short fiction, 'Bloodchild.' The series will appear alongside surrealist work by Salvador Dalí, and the dada artists Francis Picabia and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (known as the Baroness Elsa). Another gallery will look at artists interested in prosthetics and mechanical extensions of the body, including the Beijing-based artist Cao Fei.
'The show is suggesting a kind of symmetry between the 1920s and 1930s and today,' Gioni said, both in their explosions of technology and concurrent fears of the same. The word 'robot,' he explained, was coined in 1920 in a play by the Czech writer Karel Capek, and is 'loaded with fears of replacement, of emancipation from work, of machines taking over.'
'Those ideas are still very urgent' in light of conversations around A.I., he added.
While technology is front and center, Gioni said, 'It's not just a parade of mannequins and robots,' pointing to the emergence of expressionist painting in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust and the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But make no mistake, there will be robots — including the special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi's animatronic for Steven Spielberg's 1982 blockbuster 'E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,' and the prototype for the xenomorph in Ridley Scott's 1979 film 'Alien,' which was based on a design by the Swiss Surrealist H.R. Giger.
For the curator, the questions the exhibition will raise are not only aesthetic, but ethical and even existential. 'There are plenty of creatures generated digitally or from other machines,' Gioni said. 'But we've always tried to bring it back to the ways in which those creatures have shaped understanding of the self.'
Gioni said that curating a show of this scale — the biggest the museum has mounted in gallery space and number of artists — was especially challenging because it was largely done before he had seen the new galleries.
The new building has dedicated studio space for artists-in-residence and facilities for New Inc., the museum's cultural incubator for creative entrepreneurs. It will also include an entrance plaza for public artwork. The first occupant: the English artist Sarah Lucas, recipient of the museum's first Hostetler/Wrigley Sculpture award, established to support large-scale work by female artists.