New Museum Unveils Commissions By Tschabalala Self And Klára Hosnedlová During Soft Opening. Artsy

(MENAFN- USA Art News) New Museum's 60,000-Square-Foot OMA Expansion Debuts Ahead of March 21 Public Opening

After two years behind closed doors, the New Museum is stepping back into view with a soft opening of its 60,000-square-foot expansion - a project that has unfolded over 10 years from architect selection to completion. The addition, designed by OMA under Shohei Shigematsu with Rem Koolhaas and realized with Cooper Robertson as executive architect, doubles the museum's gallery space on the Bowery, extending the institution's SANAA-designed flagship building, which it has occupied since 2007.

The museum will officially reopen to the public on March 21, but the first glimpse of the expanded campus arrives with new commissions that treat the building itself as a site for art.

A pair of commissions marks the threshold between old and new

Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová (b. 1990) has installed“Shelter” (2026), a monumental multimedia work that fills the atrium stairwell, turning a transitional space into an immersive environment. On the exterior, American artist Tschabalala Self (b. 1990) has placed“Art Lovers” (2025), a cast aluminum sculpture of an intertwined couple, on the facade at the seam where the OMA expansion meets the existing SANAA structure.

The museum also confirmed that a new installation by British artist Sarah Lucas (b. 1962) is forthcoming.

An“encyclopedic” opening exhibition spanning 56 countries

The reopening is anchored by the inaugural exhibition“New Humans: Memories of the Future,” which spreads across the second, third, and fourth floors. The show brings together 732 objects by artists from 56 countries, moving from early-20th-century photographs to paintings by Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972) made earlier this year.

Artistic director Massimiliano Gioni framed the exhibition as a trans-historical, interdisciplinary proposition -“encyclopedic” in scope - that considers how artists have imagined the future and redefined the human. The exhibition takes as a point of departure a line by Czech playwright Karel Čapek, who introduced the word“robot” in 1920:“Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.”

Speaking during the preview, Gioni described the show as establishing a symmetry between the 1920s and the present, tracing how discoveries and technologies have shaped human life while also registering the darker political histories that have accompanied technological change. He also emphasized the exhibition's insistence on possibility: that earlier eras of radical transformation can offer a framework for resilience and reinvention.

A seven-floor building designed for production, not just display

For Shigematsu, the expansion was conceived as more than an architectural upgrade. During the preview, he said the team approached it as a continuation of the museum's institutional trajectory - forward-looking, but attentive to its context - and suggested the new footprint will allow the New Museum to operate“more like a cultural laboratory.”

The seven-floor design includes event space, studio space for artists-in-residence, and a dedicated home for NEW INC, the museum's incubator for cross-disciplinary art and design with a technology focus. At street level, the lobby will also introduce a restaurant from the Oberon Group, with Julia Sherman serving as executive chef.

Museum director Lisa Phillips characterized the new spaces as intentionally unpolished in spirit.“The aesthetic is playful and fun, beautiful, rough, not precious,” she said at the preview, aligning the expansion with the New Museum's long-standing identity as a place for discovery and production.

With its reopening, the New Museum is not only increasing square footage; it is sharpening its claim on what a contemporary museum can be - a platform where architecture, exhibition-making, and experimentation are meant to meet in public.

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