The New Museum, Manhattan’s only museum dedicated exclusively to contemporary art, announced that its 60,000 sq ft building expansion designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Cooper Robertson will open in fall 2025.
Founded in 1977 in a temporary space on Hudson Street, the New Museum has experimented and evolved since its founding as a hub for new art and new ideas, expanding its footprint at key moments in its history to better serve artists and the public. Its OMA-designed expansion will complement the New Museum’s existing SANAA-designed flagship building on the Bowery at Prince Street while doubling the Museum’s gallery space; improving visitor flow through the addition of three elevators, an atrium stair, and an entrance plaza; creating new venues for artist residencies and public programs; and establishing a purpose-built home for the Museum’s cultural incubator NEW INC, among many other new and expanded features, marking a transformative moment for the Museum and the city.
“The New Museum has always been a future-facing museum—not a place for preserving and recording history, but a place where history is made,” said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum. “We are thrilled to be working with Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas on OMA’s first public building in New York City, ushering in a new era of possibilities for the New Museum as a vital civic resource for New Yorkers and the global arts community.”
“The New Museum is an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production, and the expansion aims to embody that attitude of openness,” said Shohei Shigematsu, OMA Partner.
The OMA building will be named in honor of the late visionary philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a long-serving New Museum Trustee whose $30 million contribution to the Capital Campaign is the largest gift in the Museum’s history. To date, the New Museum has raised $118 million towards its Capital Campaign goal of $125 million, with $82 million in construction costs.
Continuing the New Museum’s long history of presenting provocative and timely thematic exhibitions, New Humans: Memories of the Future will inaugurate the expanded building with an exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes. Spanning the entire Museum, New Humans will trace a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and societal changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures.
