New Museum

museum in New York City dedicated to exhibiting work by contemporary and living artists. The museum was founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Early locations and exhibitions

Tucker conceived of the museum as an alternative artist space that did not require a permanent home in order to make an impact. Thus, the museum’s first years, while active with exhibitions and programming, were unsettled. The museum first opened in 1977 in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in C Space, a nonprofit art gallery. That same year the museum relocated to a space at the New School for Social Research (now the New School).

Over the next six years, the New Museum organized controversial and groundbreaking exhibitions such as “ ‘Bad’ Painting” (1978) and “Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art” (1982). The museum also established what became its signature window installation series (1979–2002), which used the ground-level street-facing windows as exhibition space often for individual artists, including Jeff Koons (1980), then an up-and-coming artist.

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SoHo period

In 1983 the museum moved to a permanent space in the Astor Building at 583 Broadway in the SoHo neighborhood. It expanded further into that building in 1996–97. Beginning in the late 1990s, the museum presented solo exhibitions on several important international artists who later became well known in the United States, such as Mona Hatoum (1998), Doris Salcedo (1998), Cildo Meireles (2000), William Kentridge (2001), and Marlene Dumas (2002). Presenting international artists remained an important part of the museum’s mission. In 1999 Lisa Phillips (also previously at the Whitney Museum of American Art) succeeded Tucker as the museum’s director. Under her leadership, the museum became a pioneer in the presentation of new media.

Move to the Bowery and expansion

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In 2002 the New Museum sold its location in SoHo and the following year announced that Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA were chosen to design a new permanent home for the institution. The building, located at 235 Bowery, opened in 2007 and resembles a tower of stacked boxes of various sizes. In 2022 the New Museum broke ground on an expansion by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu of the Rotterdam-based architecture firm OMA. The new space opened in 2026 with double the capacity for exhibitions and new sites for artist residencies and public programs.

Ongoing programs

The New Museum runs a number of different programs that serve as incubators for new ideas on art, architecture, design, and technology. In 2009 it organized the first iteration of the New Museum Triennial, an exhibition of early-career artists from around the world. The museum is also known for extending its mission through many collaborations with national and international museums and art and design institutions. Initiatives such as the Three M (Three Museum) Project, a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, bring together the resources of three institutions to “jointly commission, exhibit, and acquire contemporary art by artists whose work has not yet received significant recognition in the United States.”