The New Museum in New York is opening its 60,000-square-foot expansion designed by architecture firm OMA in fall 2025.
The institution, Manhattan’s only museum dedicated exclusively to contemporary art, closed for the project in March 2024.
When it reopens later this year, the exhibition space will almost double to more than 20,000 square feet with the addition of a new building designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas.
The new building is “a highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity”, said Shigematsu.
It will provide “horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange, and creation”, he said.
The seven-storey expansion was created to complement the New Museum‘s existing Sanaa-designed flagship building.
New 60,000-square-foot building
It will also improve visitor flow through the addition of three elevators, an atrium stair and an entrance plaza.
The museum’s inaugural exhibition is titled New Humans: Memories of the Future. Spanning the entire institution, it will explore the relationship between humanity and sweeping technological changes.
Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum, said the venue “has always been a future-facing museum – not a place for preserving and recording history, but a place where history is made”.
Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the New Museum, said the New Humans exhibition “continues the museum’s engagement with the most pressing issues of today”.
“As the New Museum enters an expansive new chapter in its own history, New Humans highlights the role artists play in interpreting and confronting the critical issues that will shape our collective fate,” he said.
The OMA building will be named in honour of the late philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, whose $30 million contribution to the expansion’s capital campaign is the largest gift in the museum’s history.
So far, the New Museum has raised $118m of its $125m goal.
Images courtesy of OMA and the New Museum
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