The New Museum’s Long-Awaited Expansion Opens on the Bowery
A shard-like addition by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu doubles gallery space, introduces new public amenities, and debuts a sweeping inaugural exhibition about what it means to be human
When the New Museum opened its SANAA-designed building on a low-slung stretch of New York’s Bowery in 2007, the haphazard stack of rectangular volumes signaled a decisive turn for a corridor long defined by flophouses and restaurant supply shops. The museum soon established the street as a cultural destination, helping draw galleries, creative venues, and new audiences to a downtown enclave that had escaped institutional investment. Even with its purpose-built home, the nearly 50-year-old institution dedicated exclusively to contemporary art was quickly reaching its limits as exhibitions, education programs, and attendance expanded. In 2016, it turned to Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) partners Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu to conceive an addition that could support its growing ambitions.
After nearly a decade of planning, a two-year closure, and multiple delays, the seven-story expansion opens to the public this weekend. OMA conceived the shard-like structure as a direct extension of the existing building while asserting its own architectural identity. Where SANAA’s stacked volumes read as a loose vertical composition, the new building rises as a faceted mass clad in laminated glass with a metal mesh interlayer, appearing monolithic by day and luminous by night. Set along the terminus of Prince Street, it commands the approach with a sharply angled profile—and marks one of the rare instances in which two living Pritzker Prize–winning practices have contributed to a single institution.
Inside, however, the structure feels perfectly simpatico with its predecessor. Floors and ceiling heights register precisely from one structure to the next, allowing visitors to move seamlessly across both buildings. An atrium stair carves through the addition, opening sightlines from the lobby upward and providing a prominent stage for large-scale installations. Three levels of galleries extend laterally, joined by a permanent home for the in-house incubator New Inc, administrative offices, and flexible venues for education and public programs; punctuating these spaces are triangular outdoor terraces coated in soothing colors à la Luis Barragán. At the ground level, an expanded lobby now hosts a larger bookstore and a full-service restaurant operated by the Oberon Group and led by chef Julia Sherman, slated to open later this spring.
“The New Museum is an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production, and the expansion aims to embody that attitude of openness,” explains Shigematsu, a Galerie Creative Mind. “Imagined as a highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity, the new building will offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety.” Exhibitions can extend across the combined floor plates, giving curators the ability to stage large-scale installations that span both buildings or to organize more focused presentations within individual galleries.
The museum’s inaugural exhibition adopts a sweeping, ambitious scope that reflects a welcome return for an institution long known for championing artists early in their careers, including Jeff Koons and Ana Mendieta. Titled “New Humans,” the group show brings together a staggering 200 artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers to trace a diagonal history of the past century and examine evolving conceptions of what it means to be human amid rapid technological change. Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s artistic director, draws on the increased gallery capacity to orchestrate this expansive presentation as a series of encounters that shift in scale and tone from one floor to the next. Just beyond an elevator, a cluster of uncanny automatons jolt into motion. On the fourth floor, a gallery comes under the watch of Anicka Yi’s drifting jellyfish-like drones, their translucent bodies hovering as if suspended midair.
The museum is also continuing its longstanding facade sculpture program, a defining feature since the building opened in 2007 with commissions by artists Chris Burden, Glenn Ligon, and Ugo Rondinone. The latest is Art Lovers (2025), a relief by Tschabalala Self that depicts an embracing Black couple. Installed at what the museum calls the “kiss point” where the SANAA building meets the OMA expansion, the work reads as a vivid emblem of connection across the joined structures. At street level, meanwhile, a newly carved public plaza extends the museum’s footprint into the city and will soon host an installation by Sarah Lucas.
Each of these moments extends the museum’s impact beyond its galleries. “The building is further shaped to create an active public face—including an outdoor plaza at the ground, moments of transparency throughout the central atrium, and terraced openings at the top—that will openly engage the surrounding community and beyond,” explains Shigematsu. From the street, a four-story installation by Klára Hosnedlová becomes immediately visible as it descends through the atrium stair. The work wraps a spine-like metal armature in mounds of flax-based textiles, with a suspended sandstone and glass element glowing at its core that offers a tantalizing glimpse of the museum’s interiority before visitors even cross the threshold.
“Since our founding nearly 50 years ago, the New Museum has been a home for the most groundbreaking art of today and a haven for the artists who make it,” says Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum. “Our new 120,000-square-foot building on the Bowery signals our redoubled commitment to new art and new ideas, and to the museum as an ever-evolving site for risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation.”