Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977 to show work by living artists; its Bowery building by SANAA's Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa opened in 2007, the first art museum built from the ground up in downtown Manhattan.
The SANAA building stacks offset rectangular boxes, so the galleries are separate floors rather than one continuous route; the expansion that reopened in March 2026 added an atrium stair and further elevators to link them.
Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum in 1977 to show work by living artists and to question how museums went about their business. Its addresses track downtown itself: first rooms inside the New School on Fifth Avenue, then the Astor Building at 583 Broadway in SoHo from 1983, and finally the Bowery in December 2007, on a stretch of street still shared with the restaurant-supply trade.
The Bowery building, by the Tokyo practice SANAA with Gensler as executive architect, is a stack of rectangular boxes pushed off-center from one another. The offsets are not decoration: each shift leaves a setback in the roof of the floor below, and those setbacks carry the skylights that light galleries otherwise built with almost no windows, on the reasoning that a gallery needs wall more than it needs a view. Every level is column-free and a different height. The consequence for a visitor is that the museum reads as a sequence of separate rooms stacked up rather than a circuit you can walk in one line.
That is what the recent expansion set out to address. The museum closed in March 2024 and reopened on 21 March 2026 with a new building alongside the old one, designed by OMA — Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas — with Cooper Robertson as executive architect. It roughly doubles the museum’s floor area and adds an atrium stair, three elevators and a reworked entrance plaza, so movement between levels is no longer entirely a matter of waiting for an elevator. New rooms include a seventy-four-seat forum for talks and screenings, an enlarged Sky Room at the top of the building, a studio for an artist in residence, and space for NEW INC, the incubator the museum started in 2014.
Exhibitions here change rather than settle, so it is worth checking the calendar before traveling. The museum has been affiliated with the digital-art platform Rhizome since 2003, and launched its triennial survey of younger artists in 2009.
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002 · Official site ↗
The New Museum of Contemporary Art is a museum at 235 Bowery, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker.
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