New Museum
235 Bowery | Lower East Side | built 2006
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1977
Marcia Tucker founds the New Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator Marcia Tucker founds the New Museum of Contemporary Art to introduce new art and ideas from artists who have not yet won wide recognition. It opens first at the New School's Graduate Center on Fifth Avenue, then moves to 583 Broadway in SoHo in 1983, decades before it settles into its own building on the Bowery.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2007
The New Museum opens its SANAA-designed building on the Bowery
The New Museum, founded by Marcia Tucker in 1977 to show new art by artists who had not yet received wide exposure, opened this building at 235 Bowery on December 1, 2007. The 58,700-square-foot museum was designed by the Tokyo firm Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA with the New York firm Gensler. An expansion designed by OMA opened in March 2026.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2007
SANAA's misaligned boxes and metal-mesh skin echo the Bowery's tenement rooflines
A 2019 New York magazine review read the building as an echo of its surroundings. Its separate boxes seem casually stacked and out of line, like tenement rooflines, and the steel mesh wrapped around the museum looks both defiant and defensive. In a neighborhood of four-story walk-ups, the galleries are arranged around a tight central stair.
Source: nymag.com
- 2007
Ugo Rondinone's neon sign Hell, Yes! is mounted on the museum's new facade
When the building opened in 2007, its front carried a message: Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone's neon sculpture Hell, Yes!, a work dated 2001. It stayed on the facade through 2010. Rondinone has also made a series of rainbow-colored rooftop arches painted with slogans, and one of them, reading Hell NO!, is at the New Museum.
Source: Wikipedia
- 2011
Carsten Höller threads a slide through the museum's upper floors for his show Experience
For Experience, shown in 2011 and 2012, Carsten Höller installed a working slide inside the museum. It spiraled straight through the third and fourth floors and let riders out on the second. Höller worked as a research entomologist until 1994 and has been making corkscrewing metal slides since 1998.
“…a slide was installed inside, spiraling straight through the third and fourth floors of the museum, ejecting the sliders on the second floor.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 2013
Chris Burden's Twin Quasi-Legal Skyscrapers rise 36 feet above the museum's roof
Extreme Measures, in 2013, was the first New York survey of Chris Burden's work and his first major U.S. exhibition in more than twenty-five years. For it he built two 36-foot towers, Twin Quasi-Legal Skyscrapers, which stood on the museum's roof. After Burden died, the museum left the towers up for several months as a tribute.
“…the New Museum decided to have Twin Quasi-Legal Skyscrapers (2013), two 36-foot-tall towers created for the museum's retrospective on Burden, remain on the institution's roof for several months in tribute.”
Source: Wikipedia
- 2015
The third Triennial, Surround Audience, features work by 51 artists from 25 countries
The museum's third Triennial, Surround Audience, ran through May 24, 2015. It examined social media's effect on an image-saturated, closely watched world and took on gender politics, racial inequity, the environment and terrorism. Visitors stepping off the second-floor elevator met Frank Benson's life-size reclining nude sculpture Juliana, a likeness of the transgender artist and performer Juliana Huxtable.
Source: observer.com
- 2019
Museum staff go public with a union drive after the museum hires an anti-union consultant
In January 2019 New Museum employees filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to join UAW Local 2110, citing a 1990 text by founding director Marcia Tucker that called for a collaborative, self-critical, transparent institution. Organizers said the museum had hired a consulting firm and mounted a harsh anti-union campaign, which pushed them to publicize the effort. The museum replied that it held its employees in the highest regard.
Source: artforum.com
- 2024
The museum announces it will close its Bowery building to speed up the OMA expansion
In March 2024 the museum said it would temporarily close its original building through early 2025 so the expansion next door could be finished faster. The addition, designed by OMA, was to add seven stories and 60,000 square feet and a home for the NEW INC incubator, artist studios and program space. The second, third and fourth floors of the existing building were to connect to it, with a public plaza at the corner of the Bowery and Prince Street.
Source: timeout.com
- 2026
The museum reopens after a $125 million OMA-designed expansion
After closing in March 2024, the New Museum reopens with a connected new building at 231 Bowery designed by OMA, adding about 60,000 square feet across seven floors to its original SANAA-designed home. The expansion, which topped out in November 2024, roughly doubles the museum's exhibition space.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- New MuseumWikipedia
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