New Museum’s OMA-Designed Expansion Opens in New York With “New Humans: Memories of the Future”
New York’s New Museum is set to unveil a major new chapter in its downtown presence on March 21, when it opens an extension designed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas of OMA. The building’s debut is paired with an inaugural exhibition, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” co-curated by the museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni.
The opening anchors the latest episode of The Art Newspaper’s podcast The Week in Art, released on March 20, 2026. Hosted by Ben Luke and produced by David. Clack and Alexander Morrison, the episode moves between architecture, collecting, and museum storytelling, tracing how institutions and audiences are recalibrating their expectations of contemporary art.
At the center is the New Museum’s expansion, a project that arrives as museums across the US face a familiar set of pressures: the need for more flexible gallery space, improved visitor circulation, and the technical demands of contemporary installation. OMA’s involvement, led by Shigematsu and Koolhaas, places the New Museum’s growth within a lineage of high-profile cultural commissions that treat the museum not only as a container for art, but as an argument about how art should be encountered.
Gioni joins Luke to discuss the thinking behind “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the first exhibition to occupy the new building. While details of the show’s contents are not outlined in the episode description, its title signals a curatorial interest in how ideas of the human are shaped by technology, memory, and speculation, themes that have become increasingly central to contemporary practice and to museum programming.
The episode then turns to the market, with a conversation with Georgina Adam, one of The Art Newspaper’s editors-at-large, on the publication of her new book, NextGen Collectors and the Art Market (Lund Humphries). Priced at £19.99, the book focuses on the habits and motivations of emerging collectors, a cohort whose influence is often felt first in the primary market and in the shifting social dynamics around fairs, online platforms, and patronage.
Rounding out the program is the podcast’s “Work of the Week,” which spotlights a Wardian Case, the glass-lidded wooden container developed by the physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in the early 1830s. The object appears in “In Bloom: How Plants Changed Our World,” on view at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from March 19 through August 16. Luke speaks with Shailendra Bhandare, co-curator of the exhibition, about the Wardian Case’s role in the history of plant transport and display — a reminder that museum objects can map global systems as clearly as any painting or sculpture.
Taken together, the episode’s three segments sketch a portrait of the art world’s current preoccupations: new buildings that promise new ways of seeing, collectors redefining how value circulates, and exhibitions that connect material culture to the long arc of scientific and imperial history.
