vip in the city

New Museum opening

Technically, the first snow of the season arrived on November 19, but that ephemeral dusting was so slight as to hardly register. The snowfall on Sunday morning December 2 was more substantial, and seemed to inaugurate the true start of winter.

Since its founding by the late Marcia Tucker in 1977, The New Museum has demonstrated a commitment to showing visionary, daring work by living artists. Over the next three decades, the museum would be housed in a series of roving spaces: a staff of three began with an office in the TriBeCa Fine Arts Building on Hudson Street, hosting exhibitions offsite at donated galleries at the New School, later working out of spaces on Broadway, and more recently occupying temporary quarters at the Chelsea Art Museum.

For its first permanent home, the museum commissioned a building with a relatively modest budget of $50 million by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Tokyo-based firm SANAA (an acronym for Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates). Prior to their hiring in 2002, SANAA had not yet built outside of Japan, which made the firm an unusual choice in this era of starchitects.

The results have been well-received: a seven-story stack of shimmering two-ply silvery grey boxes each teetering slightly off center, with three floors of exhibition space, levels for educational and administrative purposes, and a top floor offering open, spectacular views of downtown.

To commemorate the grand reopening of the New Museum, beginning at midnight on December 1, the museum was open to the public for 30 consecutive hours. We registered for tickets on Sunday morning, and at 10:00AM, we made our way through the falling snow to the Bowery to tour the new space.

The museum’s inaugural exhibition concentrates on works that are purposefully Unmonumental, the kick-off to a three part, five month long exhibition that explores sculpture, audio, and collage by some of the most prolific and relevant international artists today. Not particularly my taste: sculptures made from a bundled pillar of old clothes and stuffed animals (“Bale Variant Number 001”) by New Yorker Shinique Smith, a plywood box through which was threaded flea market belts (“Split Endz (wig mix)“) by Glasgow-based Jim Lambie, an arched sculptural stack of broken wooden chairs (“Myth Monolith (Liberation Movement)”) by Marc André Robinson… well, actually I did think that last one pretty cool, if precarious-looking.

The stark white galleries, hallways, skylights, and hidden stairways were a destination unto themselves, though: a marvel to be contained within the museum’s 71’ by 112’ footprint.

The view out through the metal mesh:

New Museum staircase:

For those who missed the grand opening in December (and who wish to bypass the usual $12 admission fee), the New Museum still offers free hours on Thursdays from 7:00-10:00PM.

Tags: museums, New Museum, snow