After a decade of planning, lofty fund-raising goals and more than three years of construction, the New Museum is reopening to visitors on March 21 with an expansion that doubles its gallery space and provides a new home for artist residencies and community programming.
Officials announced on Tuesday morning that the contemporary art museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan would offer free admission that weekend to visitors to explore the 60,000-square-foot expansion designed by a group of architects including OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas.
“There is no winding down at this moment; we are really winding up,” Lisa Phillips, the New Museum’s longtime director, said in a recent interview including an update on the last stages of construction. The total cost will be $82 million once all is finished.
Her tenure at the museum will culminate with the expansion; Phillips plans on retiring in April, after nearly 27 years in charge. No successor has been named, and the board, with the search firm Isaacson, Miller, is still researching candidates.
“At this stage, the greatest focus is on interior finishes, making sure that the details we have specified across the galleries, circulation spaces and public areas are executed at the highest quality,” Shigematsu said. The expansion will bring more light into the museum’s pre-existing building and provide new views of the surrounding neighborhood. There is also space for a full-service restaurant, which will be helmed by the chef Julia Sherman.
When the museum reopens, its galleries will host a single exhibition, called “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a survey of historical and contemporary artworks that examine the power of technological change on humanity. The museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, described the show as a clearinghouse for visions of the future.
“The show is incredibly dense,” Gioni said. “For a long time, we thought of museums as the tentpole of sparse, meaningful works. I think today is a moment in which we go through life viewing hundreds of images every day — if not thousands — and there is an experience of density that museums can participate in without being complicit in the system.”
In pursuit of the “nebulous notion of the new,” Gioni and his team of curators have assembled 20th-century masters like Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon with new and recent works by artists including Precious Okoyomon and Pierre Huyghe, alongside examples of artifacts from popular culture. For example, the museum will display prototypes of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. and the monster from the “Alien” movies. There will also be speculative works, like the flying machines inspired by nature from the artist Anicka Yi, which will buzz around the building’s large fourth-floor gallery.
The exhibition was supported by the financial technology firm Circle, as well as a patchwork of institutional collaborations and donors who raised funds for 16 new commissions, including a series of paintings by Wangechi Mutu based on “Bloodchild,” a short story by the science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Other artists making new work include the German filmmaker Hito Steyerl; the French sculptor Camille Henrot; and the abstractionist Jacqueline Humphries and Jamian Juliano-Villani, both in New York.
“It feels inevitable to start with a show that looks at the future, and the futures that never arrived,” Gioni said.
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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