New Museum Reopens After Two-Year Closure With OMA Expansion and a 700-Work Group Show
New York’s New Museum is welcoming visitors again after nearly two years behind closed doors, returning with a significant architectural expansion overseen by OMA and a reopening exhibition scaled to match its renewed footprint. Ahead of the public opening on Saturday, the museum hosted a press preview this week, offering a first look at the updated building and its inaugural presentation, “New Humans: Memories of the Future.”
The reopening show, organized by the New Museum’s curatorial team under artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, is conceived as a panoramic group exhibition that stretches across more than a century of art. It includes more than 200 artists and is described as a 700-work undertaking, installed across the museum’s three main floors and extending into spaces that typically function as connective tissue: the lobby, elevators, and stairwells.
The building itself is central to the museum’s relaunch. OMA’s expansion adds 60,000 square feet, addressing long-standing complaints about circulation and the challenges of viewing art in the museum’s earlier configuration. The most visible intervention is a new spiral staircase that creates a coherent vertical route through the institution. Suspended through its center is a sculpture by Klára Hosnedlová, turning a practical piece of infrastructure into a sculptural focal point.
The renovation also rethinks the museum’s entry sequence. The lobby has been reconfigured to feel more open and to reduce congestion around visitor services, a change that becomes immediately apparent during peak traffic moments like coat check. The expansion further increases capacity for exhibitions and provides additional space for the museum’s New Inc incubator, aligning the building’s layout more closely with the institution’s programming ambitions.
“New Humans: Memories of the Future” is organized thematically, with sections that include “Auto Women,” “Prosthetic Gods,” “Dream Machines,” and “Mechanical Ballet.” The structure frames the exhibition as a set of recurring questions about bodies, technology, and the ways modernity reshapes the idea of the human — a premise that allows works from different eras to sit in productive tension.
Among the works highlighted during the preview is a 2024 sculpture by Canadian artist Tau Lewis (b. 1993), installed in a newly extended gallery, and a group of helium-filled, jellyfish-like sculptures by Korean American artist Anicka Yi (b. 1971) that float above visitors, shifting the atmosphere of the galleries as viewers move beneath them.
Not every change is purely additive. Some familiar ground-floor functions have been repurposed: the former project space is now a gift shop, and the museum’s cafe is no longer in its previous location. Still, the overall effect of the expansion is a building that reads as more navigable and better suited to sustained looking — a practical upgrade for an institution that has long positioned itself as one of the country’s few major museums devoted exclusively to contemporary art.
With the reopening, the New Museum returns to the Bowery with a larger physical presence and a show designed to test the possibilities of that new scale, signaling an institution intent on pairing architectural ambition with curatorial breadth.
