New Museum Reopens on the Bowery With OMA Expansion and AI-Focused Flagship Show

A new tower beside a familiar stack

On a chilly Saturday morning in late March, crowds lined the Bowery, craning their necks between two very different visions of the future.

On one side rose the familiar stack of frosted white boxes that has housed the New Museum since 2007. On the other, a new faceted glass tower caught the light like a cut crystal, its mesh-clad façade revealing stairways and galleries inside. Between them, under a new public plaza punctuated by a sculpture from British artist Sarah Lucas, visitors streamed in for a free opening weekend.

The New Museum reopened to the public March 21 after a multi-year closure, unveiling a seven-story expansion designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) that roughly doubles the institution’s size and exhibition space. The $125 million project adds about 60,000 square feet to the museum’s home at 235 Bowery, linking a new building at 231 Bowery directly to the existing structure.

“New Humans” anchors the reopening

The comeback is anchored by “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a museum-wide exhibition on technology, artificial intelligence and shifting ideas of what it means to be human. Spread across both buildings, the show brings together more than 150 artists, writers, scientists, architects and filmmakers.

“Since our founding nearly 50 years ago, the New Museum has been a home for the most groundbreaking art of today and a haven for the artists who make it,” Director Lisa Phillips said in a statement announcing the reopening. “Our building on the Bowery signals our redoubled commitment to new art and new ideas, and to the museum as an ever-evolving site for risk-taking, collaboration and experimentation.”

Founded in 1977 by curator Marcia Tucker, the New Museum built its reputation as a non-collecting institution focused on living artists and new work. It moved into its first purpose-built home in 2007, when Tokyo-based firm SANAA completed the now-iconic stack of offset boxes at 235 Bowery—a project widely seen as a turning point in the street’s transformation from skid row to cultural destination.

The expansion: OMA’s first NYC public cultural building

Plans to expand surfaced around 2017, when the museum acquired the adjacent building at 231 Bowery and began seeking public and private funds. State economic development documents describe the project as a nearly $70 million capital build to connect the two lots, add galleries and flexible event space, and create a permanent home for the museum’s art-and-technology incubator, NEW INC. Subsequent reporting put the overall project budget at about $125 million, including $82 million in construction costs.

The new structure, named for philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis after what the museum has called the largest gift in its history—$30 million—is OMA’s first public cultural building in New York City. It was designed by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, with New York firm Cooper Robertson as executive architect.

Visually, the building stands in deliberate contrast to SANAA’s milky stack. OMA’s addition rises as a prismatic volume clad in laminated glass with metal mesh, its planes subtly shifting as it climbs. At street level, larger expanses of glazing and a recessed entrance create a more transparent edge to the Bowery, opening views into the lobby, a new museum store and a full-service restaurant operated by the Oberon Group with chef Julia Sherman.

“It’s not simply an extension, but a complement, a counterpart,” Koolhaas said in an interview about the project, emphasizing that the goal was to pair two distinct architectures rather than hide the expansion behind a seamless façade.

A connected interior, plus plaza, commissions, and NEW INC

Inside, the two buildings function as one. Floor heights and structural grids have been aligned so that galleries in the new tower connect directly to those in the SANAA building. The bulk of the addition consists of three primary gallery levels with open, flexible floor plates that can be subdivided or left expansive—a change from the more constrained stacked volumes next door.

A tall atrium stair slices up through the new building, doubling as circulation and seating for talks or performances. Higher up, a forum space of roughly 70 seats connects to the museum’s existing Sky Room, creating a continuous run of public areas with views over Manhattan. Additional floors house artist-in-residence studios, back-of-house support spaces and NEW INC’s new headquarters.

The museum store has been doubled in size and reorganized so it can operate independently from ticketed areas, while the outdoor plaza at the corner of Bowery and Prince Street is intended as a site for sculpture, gatherings and performances. Permanent commissions by Tschabalala Self on the façade and Klára Hosnedlová in the atrium embed new artworks into the architecture itself.

Phillips has described the expansion as an “insurance policy for the future,” underscoring the museum’s need for adaptable spaces in an era when contemporary art increasingly spans immersive installations, digital media and large-scale commissions.

A museum-wide survey of the “new human”

Curated by Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni with Gary Carrion-Murayari, Vivian Crockett, Madeline Weisburg and Calvin Wang, “New Humans: Memories of the Future” occupies all the galleries across the combined 120,000-square-foot complex.

The show brings together historical and contemporary works that examine how technological and social change has reshaped the human body, identity and consciousness. Early 20th century experiments sit alongside postwar sculpture and recent works engaging directly with AI, virtual reality and bioengineering.

“‘New Humans’ is an encyclopedic, interdisciplinary exhibition that continues the museum’s engagement with today’s most pressing issues,” Gioni said. “Our most terrifying contemporary concerns are, in fact, as old as humanity itself.”

Among the works highlighted by participating cultural institutes are Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Livingston Schamberg’s industrial readymade God; Salvador Dalí’s Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, with its fragile figure emerging from a cracking globe; and Alina Szapocznikow’s resin cast Kaprys – Monstre, a fragmented body evoking trauma and mutation.

More recent pieces include digital avatars and game-like environments by Chinese artist Lu Yang, whose work often questions human exceptionalism, and hybrid sculptural forms by Wangechi Mutu that merge human, animal and mechanical elements. Video, VR environments and installations built with machine-learning tools appear alongside painting, sculpture and archival material.

The exhibition extends the New Museum’s history of large-scale thematic shows and triennials that examine emerging practices, but its explicit focus on AI and automation places it in the middle of current public debate about the future of work, surveillance and creativity.

Cultural infrastructure—and neighborhood questions

The expansion also formalizes the role of NEW INC, which the museum launched in 2014 and has called the first museum-led incubator for practitioners working at the intersection of art, design and technology. Previously housed in a nearby 19th-century building, NEW INC now occupies dedicated, purpose-built facilities within the new tower, integrating its workshops and workspaces more tightly with the museum’s exhibitions and public programs.

City and state officials have framed the project as an investment in cultural infrastructure and economic development. New York State’s regional economic council materials describe the New Museum as a “cultural anchor” for the Lower East Side, citing job creation, tourism and expanded educational programming as expected benefits of the expansion.

The reopening comes amid a broader wave of museum building and renovation in New York, including the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Center, the new home of the Studio Museum in Harlem and recent expansions at the Museum of Modern Art. Together, these projects have been cast as part of a post-pandemic renewal of the city’s cultural sector.

On the Bowery, however, the New Museum’s larger footprint is likely to sharpen existing questions about gentrification and the role of cultural institutions in neighborhood change. Since the SANAA building opened in 2007, the corridor has seen a steady influx of galleries, boutique hotels and upscale nightlife, even as legacy businesses and lower-income residents have faced increasing pressure.

Inside the new crystal-like tower, those questions about who shapes the future—and who is included in it—are echoed in the art on view. As visitors move from early modernist machines-as-gods to AI-generated imagery and speculative bodies, the expanded museum presents a dense argument that the figure of the “new human” has always been under construction.

Stepping back onto the Bowery, flanked by two different architectural visions of tomorrow, the scale of the New Museum’s bet is immediately visible. In an era when algorithms, automation and economic volatility are reshaping the city, the institution has chosen to answer with more space, more transparency and a building designed to contain futures that have not yet arrived.