An expansion of the New Museum (right) designed by OMA contrasts the original building in more ways than one.
Photographer: Jason Keen/New MuseumThe Old-Guard Thinking Behind the New Museum’s Expansion
An $82 million expansion designed by OMA finds New York’s first contemporary art space caught between growing megadealers and establishment museums.
The New Museum has always had its finger on the pulse. Since its founding in 1977 in New York, the museum has chased the bleeding edge in contemporary art, looking to showcase what’s happening before it happens. It’s the gallery where hot artists surface first, before they find the limelight in Basel or Miami or Venice, or at establishment museums uptown. Even its location today on the Lower East Side signals something important about the New Museum’s mission as an upstart space that delivers downtown cool.
Future visitors may never know it. For over 20 years, under visionary founder Marcia Tucker, the New Museum operated from various lofts and storefronts across SoHo and other Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, giving such celebrated artists as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ana Mendieta and Carolee Schneemann their first New York exhibitions. After a major expansion, however, the double-wide New Museum resembles the old-guard institutions that it strives to beat to the punch.