We Went Inside the Renovated New Museum, Which Reopens This Weekend Following a Massive Expansion

After years in the making, the New Museum has officially reopened on the Bowery with a major expansion that about more than added space. The new iteration of the institution rethinks what a museum is, how it functions and who it’s for.

The new OMA-designed building, which will open to the public on Saturday, March 21, adds nearly 62,000 square feet to the institution and effectively doubles its exhibition capacity, bringing the total footprint to roughly 120,000 square feet. 

The result is a magical transformation and reconfiguration: two buildings, side by side, designed to operate as one.

“We thought less about designing a single object and more about designing a pair,” explained architect Shohei Shigematsu during today’s press conference.

That idea of duality, dialogue and connection runs through nearly every aspect of the project. The original SANAA-designed tower is still vertical and introspective, while the new building leans outward, with horizontal galleries, open circulation and a more porous relationship to the city. Bridges, shared galleries and a central atrium stitch the two together, making it easy to move fluidly between them.

The glass-and-metal façade that shifts from opaque to transparent depending on the light—it glows at night, revealing the activity inside. And soon, there will be a new public plaza at the corner of Bowery and Prince Street, carved out rather than filled in. The effect makes the museum feel less fortress, more invitation.

“Museums are no longer just spaces for art,” Shigematsu said. “They are spaces for people. They are among the last truly public spaces in the city.”

The museum’s expansion didn’t just add galleries, it also has added significant infrastructure for making things. There are artist studios, a permanent home for the New Museum’s incubator NEW INC, education spaces and multi-use areas designed for workshops, talks and events. At the top of the building, these programs converge in what Shigematsu described as the “brain,” essentially a zone for production, discussion and experimentation.

It’s a physical manifestation of what the institution has been inching toward for years. Since it was founded in 1977 as a one-room office on Hudson Street, the New Museum has positioned itself as a place for emerging voices and new ideas, often showing artists before they’re widely recognized. Over time, that mission has expanded beyond exhibitions into something closer to a cultural lab.

The inaugural exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” leans directly into that idea. Spanning both buildings, it brings together more than 200 artists, writers, scientists and filmmakers from over 50 countries to explore how technology has shaped (and continues to reshape) what it means to be human.

It’s deliberately expansive, moving between the 1920s and today to trace recurring anxieties and aspirations around machines, bodies and identity. Early avant-garde visions of the “New Man” and “New Woman” are beside contemporary explorations of AI, bioengineering and post-human futures.

Massimiliano Gioni, the Edlis Neeson artistic director for the museum, described the show as “a big transhistorical and interdisciplinary” project that mixes contemporary and historical work to create what he called a “symmetry between the 1920s and today.” (Essentially, the future has always been weird and we’ve been here before.)

The exhibition includes more than 15 new commissions and hundreds of works, from scientific diagrams to speculative installations. Gioni joked that there are 65,000 words of extended labels in the house throughout the exhibition, adding, “all of them written by humans—except one on the fourth floor.”

Outside, the building itself becomes part of the program. A new façade sculpture by Tschabalala Self, Art Lovers, depicts an embracing couple positioned at the “kiss point” where the two buildings meet, creating a literal and symbolic marker of the project’s central idea. Inside, additional commissions animate the atrium and public spaces, reinforcing something the New Museum has long pushed toward: not just exhibiting art, but actively producing it.

“We are a place of discovery and a site of production. That’s who we are,” Phillips said. “And who we will always be: a place where history is made.”