The New Museum: Back to the Future

Following a two-year closure to make way for an $83 million expansion, the New Museum reopened on the Bowery in Lower Manhattan in mid-March, welcoming visitors back into a building that now has double the exhibition space, thanks to its new twin extension.

Designed by Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the seven-storey ‘counterpart’ nestles alongside the original ‘stacked box’ designed by SANAA, with spaces opened up between the two. “It’s very difficult to create matching pairs,” quips Shohei Shigematsu, OMA’s New York director.

The new structure introduces a lofty atrium and central staircase, while exhibition spaces now flow seamlessly across three floors. Distinct among its New York peers, the New Museum operates as a Kunsthalle, with no permanent collection. This gives artistic director Massimiliano Gioni and his team unusual latitude to rethink what a museum can be in 2026. 

“To do a new building today is very different,” Gioni tells The Art Journal. “Notions such as growth and expansion have shifted post 2020. We need to interrogate what it means to be new – what it means to express a vote of confidence in the future today.”

New Museum, New York, 2026. Photo: Jason O'Rear. © New Museum, New York

“It’s a criticism of the idea of art as luxury.” – Massimiliano Gioni

His inaugural exhibition, which expands across the whole building, explores ‘the myth of the new human across the twentieth century and today’, bringing together more than 150 artists and nearly 800 objects from the 1920s to the present. New Humans: Memories of the Future arrives at a fraught moment, marked by war, resource crises and anxieties around automation and censorship. Its juxtapositions are deliberately jarring: Simon Denny’s dystopian Amazon worker cage sits alongside Weimar-era prosthetics for First World War veterans; Camille Henrot’s In the Veins (2026), a meditation on climate and motherhood, is placed in dialogue with Rebecca Allen’s early digital works (Swimmer, 1981; STEPS, 1982), as well as Frank Gilbreth’s cyclegraphs tracing industrial labour made at the beginning of twentieth century.

Gioni is known for his expansive approach to curating. His curation of the 2013 Venice Biennale, titled ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’, encompassed everyone from Robert Crumb to Japanese outsider art to the newly minted genre of post-internet art. New Humans develops this method, presenting artists, photographers, scientists, architects and writers in 14 chapters. They range from Futurist visions of the machine to postapocalyptic bodies and speculative cities. 

New Humans is insistently humanist, in contrast to many previous exhibitions on the subject of the Anthropocene, which tend to focus on the harmful impact of man on the planet, or emphasise non-human forms of intelligence. Rather than rehearsing dystopian or techno-utopian narratives, it focuses on thought experiments and play, thinking through how artists respond to technology as both a tool and condition. 

And whereas many exhibitions have tended to segregate digital practices from painting, sculpture and suchlike, New Humans confronts one of the central questions of the Anthropocene – how technology reshapes the human – bringing disparate practices into a shared plane. 

“I want the museum to feel like a day on your phone, but better.” – Massimiliano Gioni

New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026 (installation view, New Museum, New York). Photo: Dario Lasagni. © New Museum

Gioni’s sprawling exhibition also doubles as a curatorial proposition: a model for what a museum should do in this age. “Because of the complexity of the times, the show needs to be a capacious tool to rethink our relationship to images,” he says. Scientific images, paintings, digital artworks and robot forms sit side-by-side. No medium is foregrounded. The result is less a survey than an act of editing; curating as a montage.

The dominance of installation and video in large exhibitions is tempered here, and digital art is neither ghettoised nor treated as a novelty. Newly commissioned paintings by Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, for instance, serve to translate texts by Donna Haraway, author of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), into visual form. Elsewhere, Toyin Ojih Odutola's paintings of a fictive Nigerian matriarchy are brought into dialogue with Alexandra Exter’s 1924 film, Aelita, Queen of Mars, fostering a conversation that not just spans a century, but also mediums.

“My shows are not about establishing hierarchies,” he notes. “You put everything on an equal level and get rid of the ‘stupor’ of the masterpiece. I am trying to free myself from accepted hierarchies of taste: things become more plural, more strange, more diverse. It’s a criticism of the idea of art as luxury. This expanded notion of art allows me to build a more interesting argument. I can make shows of visual culture,” Gioni notes. “I want the museum to feel like a day on your phone, but better.” 

In a time when we are saturated with images, what is the role of the museum? “We live in an image society,” says Gioni. “We’re exposed to tremendous quantities of images. A museum is a place where we can develop a critical relationship to them, where we can learn to read images differently.” 

Framed this way, New Humans becomes less a thematic exhibition than a diagnostic one. Its focus on the ‘new human’ reflects contemporary anxieties around synthetic thought, artificial images and automated labour. Yet Gioni resists framing these as unprecedented: “The avant-gardes of the 1920s were confronting the machine as the crucial agent of the century. By looking back you are reassured that we’ve been there before.”

Unlike some previous exhibitions, which either highlighted human knowledge as being on a par with other systems of thinking, or those which foregrounded ‘machine creativity’, here the emphasis is on exposing the human in the machine. Artists are not just digital artists, but thinkers on technology. Hito Steyerl’s film Digital Kurds (2025), a co-commission with the Jeu de Paume in Paris, exposes the manual labour behind tagging images for use in large language image generation models. “Every artistic proposition is an ethical proposition,” Gioni says. “And today, don’t [tech titans] dream of engineering human souls?”

For him, curating remains an active, generative practice, “a form of action criticism – you are helping something come into being, rather than judging it”.