Ribbon cut on the expanded spaces, doubled in size through an intervention worth more than 80 million dollars. The inaugural exhibition, curated by Italy’s Massimiliano Gioni, is dedicated to “New Humans”
The New Museum in New York officially reopened on 21 March, brought back to life by OMA/Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, in collaboration with executive architect Cooper Robertson. The expansion project, worth more than 80 million dollars according to the New York Times — although the figure has not been officially disclosed — has doubled the museum’s spaces, from 5,600 square metres to more than 11,100, in seamless dialogue with the original building designed by SANAA and completed in 2007.
The New Museum is the only museum in Manhattan dedicated exclusively to contemporary art and has long been a reference point for some of the most innovative artists on the international scene. The expansion, completed exactly two years after the museum closed in March 2024, has doubled the exhibition space as well as the areas dedicated to events, with a Sky Room on the seventh floor and a 74-seat Forum. A permanent studio for artists has also been created.
New Humans: Memories of the Future is the title of the inaugural exhibition: a retrospective spanning the last 100 years through the work of more than 200 artists, writers, scientists, architects and filmmakers from 50 countries, with a focus on key moments in technological evolution.
“Continuing the New Museum’s long tradition of presenting provocative and timely group exhibitions, New Humans: Memories of the Future will explore artists’ ongoing concern with what it means to be human in the face of radical technological change,” reads the exhibition presentation. The show is curated by Italian curator Massimiliano Gioni, one of the most influential art critics and curators on the international scene.
The exhibition includes 15 newly commissioned works by some of the most interesting and acclaimed contemporary artists working today, including Ryan Gander, Camille Henrot, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Wangechi Mutu, Hito Steyerl, Alice Wang and Santiago Yahuarcani. Also on display are twentieth-century works by Constantin Brâncuși, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and August Sander.
“New Humans locates the roots of the contemporary within the layers of the past. In particular, the exhibition highlights the recurrence of collective fears and aspirations surrounding new technologies, with their immense potential to shape — or even dominate — human life,” the presentation continues, underlining how the exhibition establishes a symmetry between the 1920s and the present day.
“The first decades of the twentieth century saw the appearance of the term ‘robot’ and the rise of automated factory labour, alongside the emergence of mechanised warfare and the explosion of new media. All these phenomena find an echo in today’s disruptive spread of artificial intelligence, the brutal efficiency of contemporary warfare and the myriad disinformation apparatuses that define communication in the digital age.”
The exhibition route also unfolds through a series of important documents and scientific discoveries: from Lennart Nilsson’s photographs of human embryos to Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s diagrams of the brain’s internal structures and pathways, from Franz Tschakert’s Glass Man to Wilder Graves Penfield’s model of the sensory homunculus. These are shown alongside works by artists such as Yuri Ancarani, Lucy Beech and Angela, who explore the fields of surgical technology, bioengineering and medical illustration with surreal effects.
“The characters that populate the exhibition range from elegant automatons to figures fractured by the war machine, and human-animal hybrids in states of transformation and evolution. Through this archive of evolving human forms, the exhibition highlights how machines have profoundly altered human understandings of labour, gender, collectivity, intelligence and creativity.”
Cover image: © Anicka Yi
