New York City’s New Museum has picked two curators to organise the next edition of its closely-watched triennial, selecting both internally and, for the first time, internationally: New Museum curator Vivian Crockett and Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) curator Isabella Rjeille. They will benefit from more space than their predecessors as theirs will be the first edition of the recurring exhibition following the completion of the institution’s $89m, Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas-designed expansion. It will be the sixth edition of the museum’s triennial, opening five years after its most recent iteration, in 2026.
“Isabella is the first international curator to be part of the Triennial and brings a wealth of experience from MASP, one of the most exciting institutions for modern and contemporary art,” Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s artistic director and co-curator of its inaugural triennial, said in a statement. “Vivian has just co-curated the New Museum’s critically acclaimed Wangechi Mutu survey and is part of a new generation of curators shaping the conversation about art and culture at large.”
Crockett joined the New Museum in 2022 following stints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and SFMOMA. Rjeille has held various curatorial positions at MASP since 2016 and previously worked at the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, during which time she served as a curatorial assistant on the 2016 Bienal de São Paulo.
The New Museum on the Bowery in New York with a rendering of its planned addition to the right OMA/Bloomimages.de
The New Museum triennial launched in 2009, one year after the institution opened in its new building on the Bowery, quickly becoming one of the three most closely-watched recurring exhibitions at New York museums, along with the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1’s quinquennial Greater New York shows.
The triennial’s inaugural edition, provocatively titled Younger Than Jesus and exclusively featuring artists under age 33, was co-curated by Gioni, Laura Hoptman and Lauren Cornell. The 2012 edition, The Ungovernables, was curated by Eungie Joo, who at the time was the director and curator of education and public programmes at the museum and is now the contemporary art curator at SFMOMA. Cornell returned to co-curate the triennial’s third edition, Surround Audience, with artist Ryan Trecartin. The 2018 edition, Songs for Sabotage, was co-curated by New Museum curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. In 2021, New Museum curator Margot Norton and Jamillah James of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles co-curated the triennial’s fifth edition, Soft Water Hard Stone.
The New Museum’s forthcoming expansion, which will rise adjacent to its Sanaa-designed building on the Bowery, was originally expected to open in 2022. Due to pandemic-related delays, it is now on track for completion by 2026.
