The New Museum, one of the nation’s leading showcases for the art of our time and New York City’s only museum devoted exclusively to contemporary art, will open its new building on the Bowery to the public on Saturday, December 1, 2007.
Coinciding with the institution’s 30th anniversary, the milestone will be celebrated with 30 hours of continuous free admission to the public sponsored by Target, beginning at noon on December 1st. New York City officials will preside over a grand ribbon cutting ceremony at the New Museum on Friday, November 30th.
The public opening of the new New Museum will conclude a week of celebration and special previews to be attended by the many corporate, foundation, government and individual patrons whose passion for contemporary art and the institution’s mission of “new art, new ideas” have brought the New Museum to the successful conclusion of its $64 million capital campaign.
With the inauguration of the building at 235 Bowery, between Stanton and Rivington Streets at the intersection the Bowery and Prince Street, the New Museum of Contemporary Art will occupy its own freestanding, dedicated building for the first time in the institution’s history. The structure is the first art museum ever built from the ground up in downtown Manhattan. The seven-story, 60,000 square foot New Museum —a glimmering metal mesh-clad stack of boxes shifted off axis in a dynamic composition— was designed by noted avant garde architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based partnership Sejima+Nishizawa/SANAA, with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect. The building has been named for trustees Mitzi Eisenberg and Susan Feinstein and their husbands Warren Eisenberg and Leonard Feinstein, who together provided the lead gift to the
institution’s capital campaign.
“Downtown Manhattan has been home to generations of artists in every discipline from around the world,” said Saul Dennison, President of the Board of Trustees of the New Museum. “Their ideas, energy, and discoveries have always been central to the very identity of New York City, and are more relevant and urgent today than ever. With this building on the Bowery, the New Museum of Contemporary Art is honored to make a contribution to the built landscape of our city and to New York’s continued pre-eminence as a global cultural capital, open to all people and forms of expression.” -- www.newmuseum.org
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