This morning, the New Museum hosted a soft opening for its 60,000-square-foot expansion, debuting major commissions by Tschabalala Self and Klára Hosnedlová. The museum expansion was designed by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, with executive architect Cooper Robertson. The project has taken 10 years, from architect selection to completion, and has required the museum to close for the past two years. It doubles the gallery space for the New Museum, which opened in 1975 and has operated out of its SANAA-designed flagship building on the Bowery since 2007. The museum officially opens to the public on March 21st.
Hosnedlová’s Shelter (2026), a monumental multi-media installation, fills the atrium stairwell, while Art Lovers (2025), a cast aluminum sculpture by Tschabalala Self of an intertwined couple, adorns the museum’s facade where the OMA and SANAA buildings meet. A new installation by Sarah Lucas is forthcoming.
Meanwhile, the opening exhibition, New Humans: Memories of the Future, includes 732 objects by artists from 56 countries, spread across the second, third, and fourth floors. The artworks range from early-20th-century photographs to Wangechi Mutu’s paintings made earlier this year. Artistic director Massimiliano Gioni called the show an “encyclopedic,” “big trans-historical and interdisciplinary” presentation that examines “visions of the future and new conceptions of humanity.” It takes as its starting point a quote by Karel Čapek, the Czech playwright who coined the term “robot” in 1920: “Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.”
“It’s a show that establishes symmetry between the 1920s and today,” Gioni said during the preview. “We examine discoveries and technologies that have shaped and transformed humans… we suggest… a warning for what technology has brought upon us in decades of totalitarian regimes and scary ideas about re-engineering our bodies and our souls. At the same time, we find reason for hope. If we have confronted such radical transformations before, we know we will, again, appreciate and reinvent ourselves to shape the future.”
At the preview, Shigematsu shared that the architects approached the project “not just as a building, but as a continuation of an institutional trajectory, inherently forward-looking, yet deeply aware of its context.” He noted that the museum has grown in both size and scope; the expansion will help the institution operate “more like a cultural laboratory.”
The seven-floor design also features event space, studio space for artists-in-residence, and a home for NEW INC, the museum’s incubator for tech-savvy, cross-disciplinary art and design. The lobby level will feature a restaurant from the Oberon Group, with Julia Sherman as executive chef.
“The aesthetic is playful and fun, beautiful, rough, not precious,” museum director Lisa Phillips said during the preview. “That’s very much in keeping with the New Museum because we are a place of discovery and a site of production. That’s who we are. And we’ll always be a place where history is made.”
