Latest news with #NewMuseum
Tatler Asia
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Tatler Asia
The first Art Basel Awards recognise 5 Asian artists
Five Asians are recognised this year: Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova in the Emerging Artist category for reviving the spiritual memory of Central Asia through women's stories; Berlin-based Chinese artist Pan Daijing in the Emerging Artist category for blending sound, performance and installation to explore narrative and perception; Chinese film pioneer Cao Fei in the Established Artist category for capturing the surreal contradictions of modern life in China; Singaporean filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen in the Established Artist category for his immersive multimedia installations; London-based Indian curator and Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican Shanay Jhaveri in the Curator category; and Korean American curator Eungie Joo, who has headed a number of major arts institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New Museum in New York, in the Curator category. The winners will have access to Art Basel's global network, tailored mentorship, partnership opportunities and bespoke support designed to amplify their work on an international scale. For the gold medallists, who will be awarded in Miami in December, the Art Basel Awards will offer further art showcases, commissions and mentorship opportunities.
New York Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Challenges of Opening Gleaming New Museums in a Fraught Art Landscape
This fall, two New York City museums that have helped shape contemporary culture are finally reopening to the public. One is the New Museum, the pioneering non-collecting institution on Bowery, which closed last year to build an expansion, designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, that will nearly double its exhibition space. The other is the Studio Museum in Harlem, the influential center for work by Black and African diaspora artists, which is opening a long-awaited new home on 125th Street, designed by Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, after closing its old building for demolition in 2018. While both museums have stayed active through off-site and virtual programs, the opening of their new spaces will return New York's museum landscape to its welcome density. The Studio Museum, founded in 1968, and the New Museum, born in 1977, have expanded the scope and audiences for contemporary art for decades, in the process evolving from alternative roots that challenged the hierarchy to power players in their own right. For Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum since 1999, and Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum since 2005, the connections are personal too. The two are good friends — they talk several times a week — and have shared experiences as female leaders whose influence in the museum field is felt not only in exhibitions and programs, but also through the many curators and other professionals who came through their institutions early in their careers. Tempering the excitement, however, is the current fraught atmosphere for cultural organizations. This new reality has brought — so far — deep cuts in staffing and grantmaking by the National Endowment for the Humanities, efforts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and ultimatums by President Trump to end diversity programs and remove what he describes as 'corrosive' and 'anti-American' ideology from the Smithsonian Institution. Recently, the incoming director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, described the overall climate around museums under the Trump administration as 'volatile.' When we met in early March in downtown Manhattan, Phillips and Golden were guarded in addressing the current atmosphere, but they said they were drawing on historical lessons to reinforce their sense of mission. This conversation, reflecting a joint interview and follow-up questions by telephone, has been edited for length and clarity. How do you plan to reintroduce your museums to New Yorkers and visitors? LISA PHILLIPS With the doubling of our space, we have an opportunity to do broader outreach than we've ever done. We're mobilizing our whole staff to go into the neighborhood and have personal interactions with both our partners and beyond. There are so many organizations around us. Shopkeepers, residents in NYCHA housing, we have an opportunity to go out and to invite people in. And there is going to be so much to experience in the architecture, in addition to the art program. THELMA GOLDEN I know that both the designs of our institutions took in a thoughtful approach to create deeper experiences, not just for artists but for audiences. We'll be welcoming people who had never come to the Studio Museum, to have this be the occasion to invite them to the museum and to Harlem. Thelma, in these seven years, a huge amount has happened that connects to the museum's core mission of presenting the work of artists of African descent — from the Black Lives Matter upsurge in 2020 to the surging market and its impact on artists. Was it frustrating to not be open during that time? GOLDEN Absolutely. Frustrating because we were made for this moment, our history in some ways ushered in this moment. But there was something profound in being able to witness it as we were working to build this next life for this institution. The energy around artists of African descent lives as proof of concept to what our founders imagined when they took a little loft on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue. They were imagining a future for Black artists in the world that at that time did not exist, but they knew that they could see it and they could work to make it happen. PHILLIPS There was also a tremendous acknowledgment in the field of the history and legacy of the Studio Museum and its impact on all of us during this time. So in a way, it was constantly alive. Are there lessons from the last few years that you each carry into programs as you reopen? PHILLIPS It's been a period of profound disruptions — not just the last year and a half, but the last decade. The pandemic made us think about our programs differently, because we had to be remote, find ways to engage our audience outside of the norm. We realized that virtual platforms are as important as bricks and mortar. I know we believe similarly in that. GOLDEN This building project has meant rooting deeply in legacy — to project into the next idea of what we will be as a museum. For our founders the canon could not be complete without the voices and visions of Black artists, so they were going to reimagine and open that canon. They were trying to think of a museum as studio, this museum in Harlem as a new type. That's what we can be doing in this moment — imagining a new form of museum as we make a future. How does this opportunity change the Studio Museum's approach to collecting? Can you collect more works in a wide variety of mediums and forms? GOLDEN Yes, it means we can collect more. How we collect, why we collect, is an ongoing question. I am not a big fan of trying to predict too far into the future on these questions. I think some of this is responsive to real time. Each successive generation can make decisions that make sense for the institution in that time. All the forms are on the table in a way that represents the breadth and depth of art being made by artists of African descent today. While our acquisitions budget is expected to increase, our primary source of new works will continue to be gifts and bequests to the museum. Lisa, the New Museum is non-collecting. How do you challenge and grow the canon? PHILLIPS [The first director] Marcia Tucker said, 'I had to found a museum in order to work in one,' because her interests were so outside of the norm that it was impossible to work in a traditional institution. Our name is paradoxical: New Museum. We always have this tension. We always have to push ourselves to go beyond the canon. There are always going to be artists who are underrecognized and not part of the mainstream dialogue. We don't collect, as you noted. We see ourselves as producers, working collaboratively with artists, helping artists realize their visions. How will you balance admission fees with growing the audience? The emerging norm in U.S. museums is pushing $30. PHILLIPS We won't be $30. We get a significant amount of our income from admissions, but we understand that it's a barrier to access. Our pay-what-you-wish Thursday evenings are very popular; we always have discounts for seniors and students, and entry is free to those under 18. We are also exploring the possibility of a community membership for those in our ZIP code. Our hope is that, with our encouragement, funders will underwrite expanded free access. GOLDEN We need a cultural shift that values what it means to make the experiences in museums accessible, so that underwriting wouldn't seem such a hard thing to make happen universally. The reason I work in museums is because I grew up in the city in a moment when almost all the museums had free admission for high school students — which they do again now. But for our institutions to live, admission becomes a form of income that we need. You said a cultural shift. Where would that come from? GOLDEN It would come from the idea that these museum experiences would exist like libraries, parks, and should be open to all. PHILLIPS When we were open during the pandemic, we saw the great value that the public put on museums right away. It was one of the safest places for people to convene. We had public officials calling us, begging us to reopen. According to city data for 2024, New York attracts nearly 65 million visitors per year. Do enough of them go to museums? culturPHILLIPS Tourism is important. Fifty percent of our audience are people visiting the city. We have an international program so we are attracting audiences from all over the world, which is great. But we also have a very strong local audience too, from the ZIP codes around the museum, and Brooklyn. GOLDEN For us it's probably 30 percent tourists. Quite often visitors come to Harlem to have cultural and art experiences, and we are able to program in response to that. Providing many different kinds of experiences, of not just our mission but of the neighborhood's culture and history. You've each announced your reopening exhibitions — a museum-wide exhibition 'New Humans: Memories of the Future' at the New Museum, and an exhibition of Tom Lloyd, an artist and activist who had the very first show at the Studio Museum's original loft space in 1968. What else is coming up? PHILLIPS One way to stay new is to look at the new and the old. That's not something that's expected of our institution. 'New Humans' will look at over a century of art that deals with the relationship between humans and technology. The subtitle, 'Memories of the Future,' suggests that progress is never a straight line. I'm also doing an exhibition on 400 years of Bowery history, coming up. And supporting artists who are creating new works. You're going to see a lot more new pieces made on site. We will have a dedicated studio residency program. And we'll have our 100 New Inc members on site again. GOLDEN We will continue a program that thinks deeply about artists of African descent, and ideas, including thematic group shows. We will continue creating exhibitions that look at artists early in their career. Our artist residency program has been in existence since our founding. And we'll continue survey exhibitions of individual artists. But we are also thinking about how the building itself creates new opportunities to commission site-specific works, to work on our roof, the building facade. We expect to announce new exhibitions and programs closer to reopening. Lisa, there was turbulence on the labor front in 2019 when employees at the New Museum unionized. How would you characterize relations with labor now? How are you hoping to take care of your people in the years ahead, with a lot of economic uncertainty? PHILLIPS I think we have a good relationship with the union now. That process, as painful as it was, also made us — and me — realize some things that we maybe hadn't understood. The immense need for a director of human resources, for instance. We didn't have a long enough family leave. We extended that. We've kept all our full-time and part-time staff employed through our closure. Which was a heavy lift, but worth it to give everyone that security. The pressure on the arts now affects federal agencies and institutions first, like the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian or the N.E.H., but it trickles through the system. As museum directors, how do you see the landscape? Is there a state of emergency? PHILLIPS It hasn't changed our mission or our values. And it's made it even more important to do the work that we do. We're paying attention. We have a strong network of colleagues, and we need to be in constant conversation. We also need to learn how to be platforms for conversation that may involve ideas that are at odds with our personal beliefs. This is a skill set that leaders have to have in every institution. GOLDEN I've been trying to learn a lot from history. The Studio Museum was born in a moment like this. So I have been trying to lead with the wisdom that comes from those who have had to create a sense of a future in an awful time before. This is also a moment which continues to create real clarity about our missions. We need to be the space that allows for artists in this moment to make their work, present their work, be in conversation with each other and audiences. And it makes it clear that we want spaces that allow for conversations about truth and democracy, that are invested in complex narratives and give form to our ability to narrate how we all see the world through our eyes: Individual stories, collective stories, our ability to recognize what is the humanity in each other. All of that can come through our experience in encountering art. So it feels like a moment where what we do is incredibly necessary. PHILLIPS Progress isn't a straight line. We're in new territory. But that is also our challenge. By exposing people to new experiences and forms of art making, we're opening minds. And that really fosters tolerance for difference, for change. What share of your budget comes from federal sources? Are you analyzing your exposure to changes in federal funding? PHILLIPS Less than 1 percent of our annual budget comes from federal grants. But all contributions are significant for a nonprofit institution; we've learned that building as many different income streams as possible is essential to weathering disruptions that have become the norm in our world. During the pandemic we lost all of our earned income, for instance. It's important to make sure that you're not overly dependent on any one source because there can be disruptions in any number of directions. It's also an evolutionary moment. We have to keep imagining what the future could be. GOLDEN Likewise, less than 1 percent of our funding is covered by federal grants. All our income sources play a critical role in ensuring the Studio Museum remains accessible to all audiences. Among changes in the field, there are many more women leaders in museums, for instance, where each of you was in some sense a pioneer. GOLDEN But we still exist within a field that is not equitable, in many ways. PHILLIPS A number of us have supported each other. We were lucky to have mentors who … GOLDEN … who were pioneers in this field. Not only those who founded and ran our institutions but across this field there were women who really created a path. PHILLIPS We feel deeply the importance of doing that for others. Incubating talent and the next generation of leadership is our most important job.
Bloomberg
02-03-2025
- General
- Bloomberg
The Push To Save Black Modernist Architecture Is Working
Hello and welcome to Bloomberg's weekly design digest. I'm Kriston Capps, staff writer for Bloomberg CityLab and your guide to the world of architecture and the people who build things. This week the New Museum announced that its second wing, designed by OMA, will open this fall. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A New New Museum, for Humans and Robots and Everyone in Between
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.
