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Right now on the Bowery, a busy Manhattan thoroughfare, two supersized lovers embrace several stories up into the blue spring sky. Strapped against the New Museum’s industrial mesh exterior, the pair are frozen in a state of plasticized affection. Their grinning, almost smooching, heads pressed close and glossy torsos entwined. A massive hand, safe as a catcher’s mitt, encases them both, splaying wide across their waists as though to stop them crashing to the sidewalk.
The site-specific sculpture is titled Art Lovers, a work by Harlem-born artist Tschabalala Self, and marks the architectural “kiss point” between the New Museum’s original building and a new expansion. Today, 21 March, the New Museum publicly debuts its enlarged architectural anatomy after two years of being closed to the public. Designed by Rem Koolhaas, the OMA founder, and partner Shohei Shigematsu, the $82m project affixes a jagged, glassy jewel to the original building, effectively doubling the footprint to 119,700 sq ft. At a media preview this week, Shigematsu likened the alignment of the two distinct buildings – one he called more “vertical and introverted”, the other “more horizontal and extroverted” – to the search for a romantic partner. “You know how difficult it is to find a perfect pair,” he said. “Very difficult.”
The seven story addition introduces three levels of gallery space that plug directly into existing floors. Not only does this create much needed airflow, it allows the museum to remain open during exhibition turnover. Where the buildings meet, the architects inserted a kind of public spine that includes an atrium staircase. Currently installed in the middle of it is a flax-based textile that resembles a hulking animal pelt: the first museum project exhibited in the US by Klára Hosnedlová, a Czech artist. Soon, a sculpture commission by Sarah Lucas will open in the museum’s brand new outdoor plaza.
Lisa Phillips is the only director to follow founder Marcia Tucker, who launched the museum in 1977 from a small downtown office. Since taking over in 1999, Phillips has shepherded the institution through every major stage of its growth, moving it from a Soho loft to the Bowery, expanding its global audience, and now finalizing this two-building campus. Phillips departs this spring after 27 years. The reopening features the sprawling exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, a 732-object survey, spanning art, artifacts and visual culture, and occupying the entire museum. The show features new commissions from Camille Henrot, Wangechi Mutu, Ryan Gander and Alice Wang, among many others. There’s plenty of technological wizardry here, but some of the most impactful works are decisively analog. Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson’s images of human fetuses captured with then innovative endoscopic techniques are mesmerizing, and some of them date back to 1965.
“Few museums take on thematic shows of this magnitude,” Phillips said. “It takes a keen curatorial vision and a lot of research. I think we’re on the threshold of a seriously new age. I think it’s more dramatic than the Industrial Revolution was, and we’re just at the dawn of it. We’re unprepared. We don’t know what’s coming, but it’s coming and fast.”
Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director and curator, describes the show as a “capacious” gathering; it loops back and forth through history, with references to the Renaissance-era myth of the “homunculus” and AI. All wall text, he says, has been generated by people, with the exception of a small selection of images compiled and annotated by Google’s Gemini: among them, stills from Blade Runner, Ex Machina and The Terminator, and an image of Ai-da, the painting robot. “By selecting its own image,” Gemini writes, a little unnervingly, “the AI suggests that the ‘valley’ is no longer a place of repulsion but a residency – a site where the machine finally gazes back at its creator, no longer a mirror, but a sovereign entity capable of defining beauty on its own terms.”
Two of Anicka Yi’s aerobes – helium-filled translucent machines inspired by mushrooms and aquatic life – float languidly through the museum’s fourth floor gallery. (Below them: a variegated, marvelously detailed landscape of “extreme maquettes” by the late Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez.) Occasionally, one aerobe drifts down to earth, where it is promptly refilled by museum attendants. First shown at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, their New York staging is much more intimate. “You’re closer to them,” said Yi of her aerobes. “They’re closer to you, and the relationship between bodies is more palpable.” She continues: “You can tell just by looking at them how vulnerable they are, even though they’re imposing in size. That’s what draws people in … We connect with them because of that fragility, not in spite of it.”
Other palpable connections may be accessed on street level, where the museum’s first full-service restaurant is located. Also designed by OMA, and with a second public entrance, the space is operated by Henry Rich of the Oberon Group and helmed by executive chef Julia Sherman, also an artist and cookbook author. The menu, she said, “is a continuation of the way I have always cooked – an intuitive and giddy response to new ingredients, market produce, and travel … [It’s] in conversation with art simply by sheer proximity. The hope is that the art and the dining experience are foils for one another: prompts to enliven your senses, to encourage deep questions.”
