New Museum

The New Museum is where you go to see what art historians haven’t figured out yet – what’s emerging, what’s messy, what might matter in the future. Because it has no permanent collection, it feels like a new museum every visit.

Since 1977, it has made space for artists who didn’t fit the mold — back when it was radical to champion artists who weren’t just painters or sculptors, and who weren’t always white, male, or straight. From its beginning, it staked itself to the present, while it is still taking shape.

The museum spans two buildings. The original, by Tokyo-based architects SANAA, is a stack of slightly off-kilter, ghostlike boxes. The OMA-designed annex, opened in March 2026, is a cooler, sharper, and more reflective counterpoint.

Inside, you’ll find much-discussed, often controversial exhibitions organized by curators setting the terms of contemporary art. Shows alternate between focused monographic presentations and wide-angle group shows.

Two recurring programs are worth tracking. The Triennial, a global survey of emerging artists, has launched more than a few careers (or at least helped anoint them). And Seven on Seven, an annual collaboration between artists and technologists, continues to test what happens when those worlds collide.

Nearly 50 years in, the premise still holds: this is a museum less about preserving history than about engaging with ideas artists are actually thinking about now.

The New Museum was founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker after she was dismissed from the Whitney Museum for organizing a show its board considered too minor to matter. It began as a Kunsthalle in a Tribeca loft, then moved to The New School and later to SoHo before landing on the Bowery in 2007.

The original building, by the Tokyo-based firm SANAA, looks like an Isamu Noguchi lantern translated into anodized aluminum mesh. Pressed up against it, the 2026 OMA annex by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu cuts a sharper, crystalline profile, and includes studios for artists-in-residence and space for NEW INC, the museum’s in-house incubator for creative entrepreneurs.