| Edification value |  |
|---|---|
| Entertainment value |  |
| Should you go? | |
| Time spent | 172 minutes |
| Best thing I saw or learned |
The New Museum’s re-opening exhibition featured a wall of art by a Barcelona-based Pakistani artist named Seher Shah. Drawings made of ink, pencil, and graphite dust, they are detailed, austere, formal, monochrome, serene. They remind me of blueprints, or musical notation, but twisted, aged, warped by time.  They are not the most on-theme pieces for the show, they’re definitely not the showiest, but after seeing them, I reached out to a Mumbai-based gallery that represents her, got a digital catalog of her work, and actually bought a piece, which is currently in transit from London to New York. |
This essay on the Newest of the New Museum’s incarnations replaces the original one I wrote in 2017. The last time I wrote about it, the New Museum had just turned 40. Back then I suggested that based on its curatorial politics a better name would be The Progressive Museum. Which I concede would make a terrible name for a museum these days. No sense painting a bullseye on one’s back.
The Old New Museum
Marcia Tucker, a curator at the Whitney in the 1970s, felt that new and emerging artists didn’t get a fair shake at established museums (this despite the Whitney Biennial). She therefore set out to create an institution specifically for, well, the new. And thus another art museum was born in New York City. To ensure things stayed new over time, the New Museum decided that it wouldn’t have a permanent collection. Shows come, shows go, but there aren’t any greatest hits to visit time and again.
Now almost 50 years old, the New Museum is in many respects even less accurately named than it was in 2017. For the moment, though, “new” rings true, as the museum reopened in March 2026 after being closed for two years to expand, adding a prismatic new next-door space to its existing stack of boxes on The Bowery.
I wasn’t a big fan of the Old New Museum. I liked it okay, respected what it did, but found the architecture unwelcoming, not so user-friendly, windowless and personality-free with absurdly high ceilings and utilitarian stairs. Back when I reviewed it the first time, it had already spilled over into an old building next door. Now that building is gone and something newly new (for now anyway) is in its place.
The New New Museum
Why expand? The museum decided it didn’t have enough space to put on the shows it wanted to. It’s now added 60,000 more square feet, so, hopefully space won’t be an issue again for a while. In addition to the lack of space, the quirky Old New Museum lacked many of the amenities that museums think they need to have these days:
- A cafe or restaurant (very fancy restaurant in this case);
- One of those bleacher/ stairway thingies that people can sit on and that can be used for lectures or events;
- Cool high-up indoor-outdoor space with a view, for throwing parties for rich patrons; and
- An iconic museum staircase for the Insta or TikTok or whatever.
Much like the new Studio Museum in Harlem, the New New Museum now checks those boxes. I remain skeptical of super-deluxe architect-driven expansions, but the New Museum’s does help make the building more visitor-friendly, without overly diluting the austere forms of the original.
The Future of Humanity
The New Museum has re-opened with an absolute banger of a show. But, funnily enough, I can never remember what it’s called. I keep telling people it’s “The future of humanity something something something.” In reality, the show is called “New Humans: Memories of the Future.”
The whole expanded building is jam-packed, overstuffed, even, with different artistic takes on man — sorry, ‘human’ — and machine, human and nature, cities… it’s almost too big of a theme to make for any kind of coherent exhibit, especially for a museum of contemporary art. It’s encyclopedic in ways that New Museum shows historically weren’t. It’s got pieces in it from the 1800s, for heaven’s sake — the polar opposite of “new.” With that vague “future anything” conceit, practically anything could be included. And given the vast space, practically everything was.
The curators leverage the museum’s old and new spaces well — I never felt lost, for all that I did feel like I was taking in a lot. I especially enjoyed a narrow, intensely cobalt blue, space that told a capsule history of the early days of computer art. Again, it surprised me the New Museum did it, that 80s-era stuff is resolutely memories of the past at this point, not the future. But I enjoyed it just the same.
The show mixed very cerebral and political takes on being human with crowd
pleasers (an HR Giger alien, an inexplicably skinned E.T.) It was jarring in an interesting way to see a monumentally important piece like Jacob Epstein’s “The Rock Drill” from 1913 just a couple of rooms away from Simon Denny’s jokey 2019 sculpture that realizes a sketch from an actual Amazon patent for a cage to keep human warehouse workers safe from their robotic co-workers (to be clear, the human goes in the cage, not the robots).
What’s the New New Museum For?
Despite its vast ambiguity, I really liked… I’ve already forgotten the name again. Future…Humans? It offered lots to think about, balancing visions of the future of humanity from the present with ones from the 1910s, 1960s and even the 1880s. It was comprehensive, reflective, and well curated. Was all of it perfectly on-theme? No, it sprawled too much for that. But if I were a New Museum curator I’d be reveling in having the space to sprawl, and I’d be itching to attempt something this big. It was super serious and academically impeccable.
It was the least contemporary show I’ve ever seen at the New Museum.
Indeed, my slightly snarky take after seeing it was that it felt like a MoMA show, not a New Museum show. Nobody goes to the New Museum for deep historical context. At least, they didn’t at the Old New Museum. To me, the New Museum is supposed to be gonzo and over-the-top and strident and its shows are supposed to make me a little angry. I hope future shows will get back to doing that. New York already has one MoMA, and one is enough. (And, yes, I’m counting the Guggenheim.)
So, here’s hoping that after this show the New New Museum goes back to being very contemporary, hip and edgy, off-the-wall.
Should you visit the New Museum?
I return to my opening notion that the New Museum needs to rebrand. But what would it more accurately call itself? The Newish Museum (rhymes nicely with the Jewish Museum)? The So-Called New Museum? When I have a better idea, I’ll email them.
The New Museum is good at its job. Anyone with an interest in art, and particularly contemporary art, should go, with a caveat. Given the lack of permanent collection, once Future Humans (or whatever) ends, your mileage will vary depending on what is filling all that space on The Bowery.
New York offers a surfeit of places to see contemporary art. If whatever the New Museum’s curators are doing doesn’t excite you, I’d recommend MoMA’s Queens outpost, PS1 over the New Museum. It’s a great old building for new art. Or the Whitney makes a good choice, and you get the High Line as a chaser. Or you could always spend an afternoon visiting galleries in Chelsea.
That said, if you’re just a tiny bit conservative and you like art that pushes your buttons, riles you up, even ticks you off, I can almost guarantee that whatever’s on at the New Museum will do that better than any other institution in New York. (Barring a Whitney Biennial.) If you’re super progressive and want to find a fortress of your people in embattled times, the New Museum is definitely that.
Fans of contemporary architecture should also visit. Although I didn’t love the original 2007 New Museum building from SANAA, I respected its defiant eccentricity. A stack of boxes that resolutely refused to check the boxes of required museum features. The new addition makes the whole New Museum more user friendly and easier to navigate, in addition to adding many square feet of space. It’s also an interesting example of a very contemporary intervention grafted onto an already very contemporary original building, something that doesn’t happen all that often.
The Twentieth Century
I can’t end without mentioning my runner-up “best thing I saw or learned” at the New Museum. Ironically (or maybe not), it was one of the oldest things in the exhibition.
Albert Robida was a French cartoonist who lived from 1848 until 1926. In 1883, he published a series of cartoons titled Le Vingtième siècle (The 20th Century). The New Museum show includes a series of these delightful science-fictional visions of life in the coming century. The most on-point image is “The Tramway at the Louvre Museum.” It’s absolutely a memory of the future. A sharp, witty comment on mass tourism, how people (mis)use museums, and how tech disrupts the way we interact with art. Look at the happy tourists, zipping from photo op to photo op and then on to the next landmark or monument. Sometimes the old and the new are actually the same thing.
For Reference:
| Address | 235 Bowery (near Prince Street), Manhattan |
|---|---|
| Website | newmuseum.org |
| Cost | General Admission: $25 (pay what you wish on Thursday evenings) |
The International Center of Photography is one of two photo-specialist institutions in New York (the other being the 
work. Abandoned as a school due to a fire in the pyromaniacal 1970s, the Clemente Soto Vélez Center was founded in 1993. It operates a number of endeavors in the building, including four theaters, artist studios, rehearsal spaces, two art galleries, and the aforementioned Escape the Room game.
The best thing was a juxtaposition of Jordan Nassar’s white-and-blue embroidered designs and Joseph Shetler’s complex abstractions of blue pencil. I liked each, and they proved great complements to one another.
The New Museum, devoted to cutting-edge contemporary art, turned forty years old this year. I know because one of the exhibits on currently celebrates its history, with a timeline and select ephemera from past shows.
