After 2 Years, the New Museum Reopens With a Makeover

0:00This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. The new museum is back. After being closed for two years, there's been an $82 million restructuring of the battery space. And it is much, much bigger. 60,000 feet of expanded exhibition area that doubles the museum's previous capacity. The new new museum reopens to the public tomorrow with a building-wide exhibit that includes work from over 150 artists. The show is called New Humans Memories of the Future, opening this weekend. And to see the show, it is free. With me now to preview the new museum's opening and what you'll find in the expanded space is longtime director Lisa Phillips, who has announced she's retiring in April after 27 years in charge. Hi, Lisa. Hello. And we also have with us artistic director, Massimo Liano, Joni. Welcome back to the show.

1:04Thank you. I'm going to ask you the basic question, Lisa. How are you feeling now that the museum is about to open? Very excited and also relieved that it is. Finally, the day has come and it's the first day of spring. It's a perfect day. How are you feeling now that the museum is ready for this? Very excited, a little exhausted, like probably all of us, but we have a great show and a great building and ready to welcome all of the viewers. Explain to us how the expansion of the building. Why was it needed? Why did you see it as its vision? Yes, so we have been expanding continuously over our 50-year history and this is the latest expansion and we finally now have a space that is commensurate with our ambition and our program. We needed more space, we needed a vertical circulation, we needed more of a horizontal flow, and we needed production spaces to support the artists that we have in residence

2:08and that are making new commissions that we work with on a regular basis. Tell us a little bit more about the architecture firm. Yes, so the building is, it's really now a second building, expanding on our first and connected to our first. We call it a new campus, multiple buildings, but it's an unusual situation because the first building which we opened in 2007, designed by the Japanese firm Sana, they went on to win the Pritzker Prize after that building went up and it is a very distinctive piece of architecture and it's our flagship building. So it was quite an assignment for OMA, who is the architect of our second building, to build right adjacent to this architectural landmark and monument. So we did an architectural competition 10 years ago and we selected OMA, this is their first public building in New York City.

3:14Oh, that's interesting. And we're just thrilled about it and we chose them because of the way they responded to this very, very specific condition of building right adjacent to an architectural monument. Musmoliano, what excites you about the new space in terms of what you can do as a curator? Well, I always say the museums are a gym for the mind. You go to museums to exercise freedom and to learn to coexist with difference and so we'll do more of that. The flow that is created by the new staircase makes the whole experience of navigating through the space much more exciting with incredible visitors inside and outside. But most importantly for me and I think for the viewers and the artists we have more room for art. We'll continue doing what we specialize in which is to give the first exhibitions to artists and that can be very young artists or very established for different reasons haven't had the recognition they deserve

4:19in New York City and then big thematic shows that tackle the most urgent questions of today. The new museum from its very origin has given amazing foreshows to artists ranging from Adrian Piper to Jeff Coons, David Mons, Anna Mendieta, John Baldassali, Faith Ringold and Judis Chicago. You name them and we'll continue doing that and we really are a sight of productions of the future if I need it to be very ambitious but that's really what we do. Lisa, what did you learn from the original move in 2007 that helped you and helped to architects understand what they needed to do? So that was our first freestanding dedicated building and it gave us a recognition in the world and certainly within the city that we had not had previously so it really expanded our audience

5:24and recognition for who we are at our mission and our special place in the city. We don't have a collection at the New Museum. We're a non-collecting institution but we support the production of new works and support new projects by living artists. This is what we do and that's a very special and different kind of mission for most museums. How did you consider how the museum would fold into the neighborhood as you were creating it? Yeah, that's a great question. We just migrated a few blocks east from Broadway where we had been before over to the Bowery and the Bowery at that time was kind of this inter-zone between neighborhoods but a place that people really weren't looking at and we thought that was really perfect for us because it wasn't sufficiently appreciated, recognized and active as it could be. We also always follow the artists and the artists,

6:30of course, had been there for many years. Many artists that we knew were working, living and working on the Bowery and we started to do an archival project called the Bowery Artist Tribute collecting information on the hundreds of artists that have lived there since the 1950s from every generation, from abstract expressionists to pop artists, minimalist, post-minimalists, and on to today. That was one way that we got very familiar with the neighborhood but we've also partnered with other organizations all around the Lower East Side and surrounding neighborhoods of Little Italy, Chinatown. It's really cool with a new museum because the staircase is massive and you're going of the staircase and you're going of the staircase and you're going of the staircase and then you get to the top and there are these sky rooms up there. What is your

7:31hope for how the top of the museum is going to be used? Well, OMA had this great idea, this great vision. First of all, they set back at the bottom and by doing that, they actually create a plaza at the terminus of Prince Street. Actually, if you walk straight from the studio where we are recording, you'll meet the new plaza and OMA's office is next door. It's a beautiful downtown story. Also, Liza is too modest but she built two buildings in downtown and by two preets get a world-winning architects. I don't think there are any other directors in New York City and Sana was the first building designed by a woman. The first museum designed by a woman in New York City until the shed opened and there is a record worth celebrating. So OMA had this great idea to slend back at the bottom, opening up a plaza where we also have commissions by new artists and then they slanted at the top which lets the Sana building shine. I always thought of it as a

8:31kind of controlled tower that captures all the signals of creativity from around the world and at the top they concentrated all the activities such as education, new ink, our offices. So they thought of the top as the brain and the site of production and intellectual and discursive platforms and then the rest of the body is the the dream of the mind where you encounter artists and artworks and what I hope are inspirations for artists and for our visitors. We are previewing the reopening of the new museum following its two-year closure and an 82 million dollar renovation and expansion. The museum reopens the public tomorrow. There's a building-wide exhibit called New Humans Memories of the Future. My guests are the new museum director Lisa Phillips and artistic director MassMilliano Shionny. Lisa, how did you operate the museum when it was closed for two years? We had a big construction project going on. It was very demanding.

9:36But it also gave us an opportunity to spend a lot of time with our international community. We have an international board. We have international supporters. We have international partners. And so while we are very rooted in downtown New York and this city, we really have an international profile and MassMilliano is a testament to that. We have a staff that is spending a lot of time in the rest of the world. And we had more time over the last two years to re-engage and interact with those partners. And we worked a lot actually in the neighbors too. You know, the Lower East Side is, I live in the East Village in St. Mars. The Lower East Side is a very special place in New York with a great cultural and linguistic diversity. I always say we are

10:37a museum with an accent and that reflects not my own accent, but the accents that are spoken in the Lower East Side, which is one of the most diverse neighborhood in New York. And while we were closed, particularly with our education department, we did a lot of literally door-to-door work. We have teaching artists that offer after-school programs in public housing in the Lower East Side. We have a teen's programs that welcome now 100 teens every year. They stay with the new museum, they learn by meeting artists, they learn making art, they learn how museums create new professions. So there has been a lot of work behind closed doors that has also rooted us more in our neighborhood than in the communities around us. It was an $82 million project, Lisa. I went and I looked at the donors and I thought like, what was Lisa's pitch to these people about why they should give to a new new museum? Well, we are always new. We have to be. It's our mission, it's our purpose,

11:43it's our name. And so as I mentioned, it's been a long evolution over 50 years from a single room operation with a volunteer staff of three to what we are today, which is a world-class institution that's known throughout the world and really recognized for its outstanding program. So our community understood, understands, and understood that we needed to keep growing. We needed an expanded campus. We needed this second building. We already owned the building. We had purchased it right after we opened the Santa Building. We purchased a building next door and we had filled it with programs, but we couldn't make it publicly accessible in its form. In the state that it was in, it had to be either renovated or rebuilt. And we concluded

12:45ultimately that rebuilding was the best way to connect it to our existing building seamlessly and to fulfill the civic function that we must uphold. So that's that's all good reasons. That's all good reasons. And we had a community that really wanted to stand behind us and support us. Including the city and the state. I was amazed at how big it was. Going from room to room to room to where I was like, this place is huge. It is exponentially large compared to what it was. It is twice as big as we had been previously, but it feels three times the size. But the beautiful thing about the design of that OMA presented is how it sets back, as MusMilliano said, from the street. When you're looking at it from the street, it looks much smaller than the Santa Building, but in fact, it's not. It just is a much deeper floor plate.

13:48But it gives a lot of respect to the first building. While preserving its own very unique character, which is full of unexpected moments, like the stair. We'll talk more about the new museum after a quick break. This is all of it. You're listening to all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests in studio are new museum director Lisa Phillips and artistic director MusMilliano Gianni. We're talking about the new museum reopening to the public tomorrow in a brand new space. They have a building wide exhibit, new humans and memories of the future. MusMilliano, what's the big idea of this show? Well, the big idea of the show is very much inspired by the building itself. We thought we are opening a new building, opening a new building in 2026 is a different proposition that opened the

14:50first building in 2007, ideas of growth and whether there is even such a thing as the future have changed in the wake of COVID. And so we thought by building a new building, we are essentially giving a vote of confidence to the fact that there is a future. And we thought, oh, let's look at how artists have imagined the future. And we made it then bigger by looking at throughout the 20th century and looking at architects, writers, scientists, the couple of basket cases and other visionaries that particularly are surveying how definitions and understanding of the human have changed under the pressure of new technologies. So it's a show very much about the fears and aspirations we are witnessing today because of AI and the new technologies. But it compares our experiences today with a whole history that also proves that we've been there before. We have confronted these fears and these myths and these hopes and fortunately we survived them and

15:50at times that tremendous cost, but we also survived them and we are better for it. There's a quote in the opening wall text from a check writer from 1920 that says, nothing is stranger to humans than their own image. How does that sentiment connect to the art you curated for the exhibit? Yes, that was very much an inspiration for the entire show. So the word robot that we speak of every day now, we go to the point that our computers ask us to demonstrate that we are not robot by identifying the traffic lights and zebra crossing. So we are at the point in which machines are asking us to prove we are not machines and it's certainly a very strange existential moment to be in. But the word robot was actually invented in 1920 by Karl Capuch in a little play, beautiful play that I really advise everybody to read called Rossum Universal Robots. It's a parable of fears of substitutions by machines and in that book he says,

16:52nothing is stranger to humans than their own image and the show is essentially about that. In a way, the show is less about technology is more about how we represent and understand ourselves differently because of technology. So in a very simple way, you could describe it as a show about portraiture, engaging monsters and Frankenstein, sent robots and synthetic creatures. We have ET, the actual automaton for ET, we have alien, we have creatures from particularly the show is based on a symmetry between 1920s and today. I hope it's not a faithful symmetry because unfortunately terrible things happen one hundred years ago, many of them are still happening today and so it does analyze also the conflation of totalitarian ideologies and technology. But it does so I hope also offering a glimpse of hope again because if we have confronted those strategies and survived them, we know we can do it again particularly with the help of

17:53visionaries and artists seen in the exhibition. Lisa, when you think about art, what's especially important about art during times of tremendous technological change? Well, artists are usually among the first people to see the future and so we are a place for investigation, exploration, discovery. This is so important and of course we bring artists together to do that with the public and so these are conversations that are critical to have right now. We're at the dawn of a new age at this moment. Now the new museum has had a long involvement with technology going back over 20 years. We brought in an organization called rhizome.org as an affiliate. We started

18:55an incubator for our technology and design 10 years ago. We have a lot of expertise in this area on staff and we have had continual daily conversations about how these changes are taking place and how we should be responding, greeting and how artists are responding. So it is part of our culture. It's part of the bigger culture. It's it's key. It sounds like it's been going hand in hand with the new museum. And as I said, it is the dawn of a new age. This exhibition is so timely and perfect for now and I do believe that this change that we are entering into and this is the dawn of this age is more profound than the industrial revolution. So you know there was just a lot for us all to think about. And it's Massimo Liano said when machines are asking us if

19:57we're machines where you know we cross the line. We cross the line. There are over 150 artists in this show. What was your creation process like? You don't have to do this. I walk through it, I don't know. It was a kind of sleepwalking. No, it's a show that took not that long to actually execute. I would say maybe two years or a little more. But you know, frankness is a show I've been thinking about for a long, long time. There are objects in there that I've seen in 1995 and I've been dreaming to bring together. There are many objects that you know sometimes at least the way I work, I make shows so that I can show objects and artworks that have been thinking about for a long time. But also to answer your question about how it changes museum. You know, this exhibition is based also on a polemical proposition in a sense that the transformation is such that maybe we need it also to expand our notion of art and expand our notion of museum. So it's a show that includes

20:58visual culture, popular culture, scientists, writers. So it's a big machine in itself. And we've gone as far as asking Gemini to create a little selection of images and write its own label scary enough. It's as good as the ones written by ourselves. And you know, it's a show that more of sand where we have masterpieces like Salvador Dali and loans from Mama Metropolitan, the Tate and museums all over the world. But we also have images that we literally just download from the internet and they are out there in the public domain. So from also the aspects of how to put a show together, it might look somewhat traditional, certain it's not because it has more moving parts than your kitchen. Being parts overhead. Yeah, snakes and flying robots. Flying robots. But it's also produced through that explosion and inflation of images that we are used to. You know, I think too often we imagine the museum as a place of contemplation and

22:03this show imagines the museum as a kind of situation room where we learn how to deal with an inflation of images that is transformative. And towards which we need to think critically not in any, you know, boring way, but certainly with the urgency that it's required by the times. Did you have any sort of change in opinion or some sort of revelation after doing this show about technology in art? That's a very good question. I don't know, you know, I think when you, when I, if I were to generalize broadly, I think you could say that most of the artists in the exhibitions are either using, they are very pragmatic about technology. It's beautiful to see how they embrace throughout 100 years of history. Technology and they sabotage it to a certain extent. They are, they are, they use it as a medium as much as they would use oil paint or a

23:05pencil. But by doing so, they reinvent it and they glitch it, they sabotage it and they sure circuit, you know, I, I mentioned the, the writing of Umberto Eco in, in the catalog who before becoming the noted simulation and novelist, he was, he wrote a beautiful essay called program art. He was writing in the 1960s about artists using computers early on and he says something beautiful, he says, artists are mystics of arrhythmia, which means they are mystics of exceptions, mystics of mistakes, mystics of breaking down the efficiency of the machine and that show is full of machine. Unfortunately, literally also breaking down. It's going to be a maintenance nightmare. We have opened for 24 hours and we are literally, this is a big shout out to, to all the team, the, you know, machines require more taking care than humans. And, but it's beautiful to see how the artist's wind vents, it kind of gems the machine and by doing so, discovers new possibilities

24:05for it. We are talking about the reopening of the new museum after a two-year closure. It is got a building-wide exhibit called New Humans, Memories of the Future. My guests are new museum director, Lisa Phillips, an artistic director, Massimiliano Gianni. Tomorrow it is open from 11 to 7. What can people expect in terms of festivities, Lisa? Well, we are sold out this weekend. We have a free weekend on, on offering. Members can come in. They can skip the line and come in. So, just going to put a plug-in for membership, but they can expect lots of surprises. Something that you would never see in another museum, and that is what we do. There are some challenges, of course. It challenges you to think differently,

25:06to think about the world differently. And so, it both excites and delights. And look forward to welcoming everyone. I wanted to ask about the museum's facade. There is a piece that people see called art lovers. Before they even go in the museum, do you tell us a little bit about it? Yes, it is a beautiful piece by Shabbalala Self, who is a Harlem-born artist and a friend of the museum. She had her first big break with Trigger, which was an exhibition about gender at the new museum. And then she went even on to support an exhibition by Faith Ringel, which is so special. You have a younger artist who can support the legendary artist, who she recognizes as an inspiration since she was a teenager and had met Faith at an event. And so, we invited her to be on the facade. It's part of a program that started in 2007 and has featured artists ranging from Glenn Lygon, Chris Burden, is against and many others. And remember, when we commission works,

26:09we don't own them because we don't have a collection. So, we gather resources, we produce the works together with many friends. But then, after presenting them, the work also remains in the property of the artist, which is truly genuine support. And then it goes on to have a life of its own, you know, our wonderful rose by Isagansk and it's now planted in the garden of MoMA. And that's a perfect metaphor of the seeds that we plant literally around the world. And so Shabbalala had the inspiration from the building itself. We called the point where OMA, Shoshigamatsu's and Remkura's building and Mitz, Sejima's and Nijazawa's building. We called that actually Shoi baptize that the KISS point. And so, Shava had this beautiful idea of this black couple of lovers meeting on the facade. Actually, we are looking for volunteers they want to propose on one of our skybridge that are right at this KISS point. And it's just a beautiful image of, you know, not only two buildings

27:13coming together, but people coming together. This weekend, we have some 12,000 people coming. We still have tickets. Sure. If you want. But, you know, yes, it's a show full of puppets and monsters and robots, but it's a show that I think also reaffirms the fact that humanity is a process of social construction. And that means in much more simple words, it's a show about bringing people together and people looking at people. And that I think is what Art does and what Shabbalala telegraphs with that image. You go to museums to encounter art, but you also go to museums to be with others. And I think that's also what our building, now two buildings say, it's two things coming together and that's where art starts. You know, it's you can do it alone, but you need there's two shared with. This text we got said, hi, Alison and team, really enjoying this conversation of new museum directors. Big thanks to Lisa for all she did for the institution and creating many,

28:16many great memories among our family's favorite was the amazing faith wringled retrospective. That was great. Happy retirement to Lisa. What's next? We look forward to the new space. It's sort of a bittersweet opening for you. You're retiring in April, which is just not that far away. Made the announcement in 2025. Why was this? Why was this the right time? Well, I've been at the museum for 27 years and have taken it this far. And I am 71 years old. So it is time to hand it over to the next generation. It is the new museum after all. The new museum, it should always be new, always be reinventing. And this seemed like really the perfect moment to turn the reins over to the next generation who have been so essential to the place,

29:19to the art that's being created today, but also to the operation of the new museum. And we have such a fine staff and so many future leaders on our staff right now that are great colleagues and have really made this possible and have grown up at the museum. So we've been working together for 17 years. Yeah, 2006. So 20 years that we've been working together. I was young when I came. It was really young. So we've been through a lot and it's been an incredible journey and we've been able to take it to this point, which really does match the ambition of our program and our staff and our vision. You know, we have a little mouse now as part of the exhibition. It's a robotic mouse in the lobby by Ryan Gander. And it's, I think it's quite nice in New York City,

30:19whereas we know the kings of the street, the rats. We celebrate a little mouse, which I think it's it's a nice allegory of a museum that yes, it's doubling its size. It still remains small and I think will make special the new museum. You can still see a show in a few hours. It's not a multiplex. It's still at an art house and or maybe an art mouse and it's it's a it's a place that it's nimble and fast and and can change and then Lisa is kept really non bureaucratic and fast and and that are all qualities that are necessary to really capture and amplify the signals of contemporary art. You know, and even in this moment of growth, I think it's important to remember we we are probably the fastest museum in town and and the one that is most receptive to to change and to difference and and I think that symbolize but the little mouse in the entrance we are not you know we are not a limo. We are still a smart car even as we are growing.

31:22Quickly in the last minute what are you most proud of in your 27 years? I think the staff, the community that we've built, the board is really exceptional and the programs that we've presented during this time are history-making. That's what we do. We make history at the new museum. We've been so important to so many artists and they give back in so many ways and have been incredibly generous to the institution and I'm very proud of that and our place in the city. I know we're giving the city something amazing with these two buildings. The new museum is open to the public starting tomorrow. My guests have been new museum director Lisa Phillips and artistic director Musmily though. Johnny, thank you for being with us. Happy opening. Thank you so much for having us. Break a leg. See you all there and that's all of it.