New Museum to Reopen March 21 With OMA-Designed Annex, Doubling Gallery Space on the Bowery

On a gray Saturday morning later this month, the New Museum’s familiar stack of white boxes on the Bowery will no longer stand alone.

After a two-year closure, the museum of contemporary art in Lower Manhattan will reopen to the public March 21 with a new seven-story annex by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) rising directly beside its signature 2007 building by the Japanese firm SANAA. The $80 million-plus project effectively doubles the museum’s exhibition space and creates what its leaders describe as a single, integrated campus for art, technology and public programs.

Timed tickets for the March 21–22 opening weekend will be free, the museum has said, in a gesture meant to reintroduce the expanded institution to New Yorkers and visitors.

A new neighbor for SANAA’s “stack of boxes”

The new structure at 231 Bowery, to be known as the Toby Devan Lewis Building after the trustee and philanthropist whose $20 million gift was the largest in the museum’s history, has been in the works since the board approved an expansion plan in 2019. Designed by OMA’s New York office—led by partner Shohei Shigematsu with founder Rem Koolhaas—with Cooper Robertson as executive architect, the building adds roughly 60,000 square feet of space and aligns floor by floor with SANAA’s existing 235 Bowery structure.

“This project 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,” Director Lisa Phillips said when the design was unveiled. Phillips, who has led the New Museum since 1999, is scheduled to step down in April, making the reopening one of the final milestones of her 26-year tenure.

Founded in 1977 by curator Marcia Tucker as a “museum of, by and for living artists,” the New Museum has grown from a small SoHo operation into an international institution known for showcasing emerging and underrecognized artists. Its move into SANAA’s 58,700-square-foot building in 2007 marked a turning point, establishing the museum as a prominent architectural presence on a Bowery corridor then in the early stages of rapid transformation.

Within a year of opening the SANAA building, the museum purchased the adjacent property at 231 Bowery, a former factory that it used for offices and special programs. After studying renovation options, the museum concluded that demolishing the older building and constructing a new one from the ground up would be “more efficient spatially and financially,” according to its design announcement.

More transparency—and a new way to move through the museum

The resulting OMA addition is conceived as a complementary but distinct counterpart to SANAA’s offset white boxes. The new building matches its neighbor in height and general massing, but swaps opaque perforated metal for a façade of laminated glass with metal mesh, creating a more transparent exterior that reveals activity inside.

Shigematsu said he saw the commission as an opportunity to enter into “a unique dialogue with SANAA and build alongside one of their seminal works” in a city that has long been central to OMA’s thinking. The firm has designed cultural buildings around the world, but this is its first public cultural project in New York.

Beyond the visual pairing of two Pritzker Prize-winning practices, the expansion addresses longstanding criticisms of the original museum building, particularly its circulation. For years, visitors relied on a single large elevator and an underused internal stair to move through galleries stacked vertically above the street.

The new annex introduces an atrium stair running along the west façade, facing the city, as a highly visible spine connecting floors. It also adds three elevators, two of them dedicated to the galleries. Most significantly for curators and artists, the second, third and fourth floors of the OMA building line up with corresponding gallery levels in the SANAA structure, creating continuous floor plates that can be used for building-wide exhibitions or subdivided for multiple shows.

Overall, the project adds about 10,000 square feet of new gallery space and roughly doubles the amount of area available for exhibitions, the museum has said. The remaining floors accommodate a mix of public and back-of-house functions.

Restaurant, plaza, and new commissions

The ground level features a larger lobby, an expanded bookstore and an 80-seat restaurant designed by Shigematsu and operated by the Brooklyn-based Oberon Group. The restaurant, which the museum has described as embracing a “zero-waste” ethos, includes a new-media commission by artist Ian Cheng and custom furniture by designer Minjae Kim.

Outside, the entry sequence has been reconfigured to create a setback plaza that aligns the museum’s front with Prince Street, giving the Bowery a new pedestrian gathering space. That plaza and the exterior of the new building will debut with site-specific commissions: a major work by Tschabalala Self on the façade and a piece by British artist Sarah Lucas at street level. Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová has been commissioned to create a large installation for the interior atrium.

Upper floors house the museum’s growing mix of programs beyond traditional exhibitions. The fifth floor will provide a permanent home for NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator that supports artists, designers and technologists. The sixth floor combines an artist-in-residence studio with a flexible forum space for talks, performances and public events. Education facilities and additional event spaces occupy the seventh floor, which will connect to the existing Sky Room atop the SANAA building.

Opening exhibition: “New Humans”

The reopening will be marked by a building-wide exhibition titled “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” gathering works by more than 200 artists whose practices explore how technology and social change are reshaping human experience. The show mixes historical figures such as Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, Kiki Kogelnik, Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon with contemporary artists including Tau Lewis, Wangechi Mutu, Precious Okoyomon, Anicka Yi, Pierre Huyghe, Meriem Bennani and others.

The museum has framed the exhibition as an inquiry into the ways artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate disruption and other forces are altering not just everyday life but the definition of what it means to be human. Installations and artworks will be distributed across both buildings, testing the flexibility of the newly unified galleries from the outset.

Funding, context, and the Bowery’s changing landscape

Financing for the expansion comes from a combination of private philanthropy and public funds. In addition to Lewis’ naming gift, support has come from other trustees and donors, along with at least $3.1 million from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and $1.84 million from New York State agencies through regional economic development programs.

City officials have promoted the project as part of a broader strategy to bolster New York’s cultural infrastructure and tourism economy. The New Museum’s expansion is among several high-profile museum building projects reaching completion in 2025 and 2026, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries and an enlarged Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

On the Bowery, the New Museum’s growth has unfolded alongside a broader transformation of the once-notorious skid row into a corridor of galleries, hotels and upscale restaurants. The original SANAA building was an early symbol of that shift. Renderings of the OMA annex, when first released, drew criticism from some local observers who saw the glassy, donor-named addition as another sign of escalating real estate values and the loss of smaller-scale spaces.

The museum has responded by emphasizing the public dimensions of the project, from free reopening days to expanded education programs and residencies. In its design announcement, it said the new building would “open up the museum to the city” and provide “more opportunities for artists, students and the public to engage with new art and ideas.”

When the doors reopen March 21, that promise will be tested in real time. For the first time, visitors will be able to move laterally between galleries designed by SANAA and OMA, watch city traffic through the new atrium stair and linger in a plaza that did not exist a few years ago. On a street where the physical and economic landscape has changed dramatically over the last two decades, the expanded New Museum will present not just new art, but a new profile—brighter, larger and more exposed—on the Bowery.