RRight now on the Bowery, a busy thoroughfare in Manhattan, two oversized lovers embrace in a blue spring sky several stories away. Tucked away on the industrial mesh exterior of the New Museum, the pair are frozen in a state of plastic affection. Their smiles, almost kisses, heads pressed close and glowing torsos entwined. A A huge hand, safe as a catcher’s mitt, surrounds them both, straddling their waists as if to keep them from falling to the sidewalk.
The site-specific sculpture is titled Art Lovers, the work of Harlem-born artist Tshabalala Self, and marks the architectural “kissing point” between the new museum’s original building and the new expansion. Today, March 21, after being closed to the public for two years, the New Museum publicly debuts its detailed architectural anatomy. Designed by OMA founder Rem Koolhaas and partner Shohei Shigematsu, the $82 million project inserts a jagged, glass-like jewel into the original building, effectively doubling the footprint to 119,700 square feet. In a media preview this week, Shigematsu compared the alignment of two different buildings – one he called more “vertical and introverted”, the other “more horizontal and extroverted” – to the search for a romantic partner. He said, “You know how difficult it is to find a perfect match.” “Very difficult.”
The addition of seven floors introduces three levels of gallery space that connect directly to the existing floors. Not only does this create much-needed air flow, but it allows the museum to remain open during exhibition business. Where the buildings meet, the architects inserted a kind of public spine that includes an atrium staircase. Currently installed in its middle is a flax-based fabric that resembles the skin of a mammoth: the first museum project exhibited in the US by Czech artist Klara Hosnedlova. Soon, a sculpture commission by Sarah Lucas will open in the museum’s brand new outdoor plaza.
Lisa Phillips is the only director, following founder Marcia Tucker, who launched the museum from a small office downtown in 1977. Since taking over in 1999, Phillips has led the institute through every major phase of its development, taking it from a Soho loft to the Bowery, expanding its global audience, and now finalizing this two-building campus. Phillips will depart this spring after 27 years. Re-opening features huge exhibition New Humans: Memories of the FutureA 732-object survey, which spans art, artefacts and visual culture, and occupies the entire museum. The show includes new commissions from Camille Henrot, Wangechi Mutu, Ryan Gander and Alice Wang, among many others. There’s a lot of technical wizardry here, but some of the most impressive work is decidedly analog. Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson’s images of human embryos captured with his then-advanced endoscopic techniques are mesmerizing, and some of them date back to 1965.
“Few museums organize thematic shows of this magnitude,” Phillips said. “It requires deep curatorial vision and a lot of research. I think we’re on the threshold of a seriously new era. I think it’s more dramatic than the Industrial Revolution, and we’re just at the beginning of it. We’re not ready. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s coming and coming fast.”
Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director and curator, describes the show as a “capacity” gathering; It meanders back and forth through history, with references to the Renaissance era myth of the “homunculus” and AI. He says, except for a small selection of images compiled and annotated by Google’s Gemini, all the wall text is drawn by people: among them, images of Blade Runner, Ex Machina and The Terminator, and an image of the painting robot Ai-Da. “By selecting its own image,” Gemini writes a little nervously, “the AI suggests that the ‘valley’ is no longer a place of repulsion but an inhabitation – a place where the machine finally sees its creator, no longer a mirror, but a sovereign entity capable of defining beauty on its own terms.”
Anika Yee’s two aerobes – helium-filled translucent machines inspired by mushrooms and aquatic life – float lazily in the museum’s fourth-floor gallery. (Beneath them: a diverse, amazingly detailed landscape of “Extreme Maquettes” by the late Congolese artist Bodis Isac Kinglez.) Sometimes, an aerobe washes up to earth, where it is promptly recaptured by museum attendants. First shown in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, his New York staging is far more intimate. “You’re close to them,” Yee said of his arobes. “They’re closer to you, and the connection between the bodies is more obvious.” She adds: “You can tell just by looking at them how vulnerable they are, even though they may be impressive in size. That’s what draws people to them… We connect with them because of their fragility, not in spite of it.”
Other obvious connections can be accessed at 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 helmed by Oberon Group’s Henry Rich and helmed by executive chef Julia Sherman, who is also an artist and cookbook author. She said, “The menu continues the same way I’ve always cooked – an intuitive and enthusiastic response to new ingredients, market produce and travel… (It’s) only more closely in conversation with the art. The hope is that the art and the food experience are foils for each other: to inspire deeper questions, to excite your senses.”
