New Humans: Memories of the Future

This show is, in a word, massive. 150 contemporary and historic artists across four floors and 60,000 square feet of the New Museum’s freshly expanded building. Start at the top or the bottom. It works either way. Chronology isn’t the point. That technology, indifferent and radiant, has made the definition of "human" anything but stable is.

The exhibition unfolds like a labyrinth, winding you through themes like Animacies, Future Cities, Maps of Humans, Prosthetic Gods, and Reproductive Futures. The categories overlap, collide, and mutate into a collage of scientific imagery, archival material, and art spanning the late 19th century to now.

Surrealism and Art Brut paintings sit alongside sci-fi and horror videos, robotic creatures next to Afrofuturist suits. The human becomes mechanical; the mechanical becomes human. Bodies are replicated, reimagined, surveyed, and rebuilt. It’s chaotic, messy, and eye candy for the eye and the brain.

There is a pattern here: the future has historically been carried through the female body. She’s a cyborg, a mannequin, a replicant, the reproductive system rendered as machine. The male appears as a ghost, mostly as the artist making the work rather than the subject inside it. That imbalance isn’t incidental. It’s structural. A persistent reminder of who gets to imagine the future, and who gets cast inside it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We become what we make. What we make remakes us. New Humans walks you through a century of that loop. Looking back might be the only way we get any say in what comes next.

New Humans is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director of the New Museum, together with curators Gary Carrion-Murayari, Vivian Crockett, and Madeline Weisburg, with the support of curatorial assistant Calvin Wang and fellows Lexington Davis, Laura Hakel, Clara von Turkovich, and Ian Wallace.