The Lower East Side is a bear-rug of a neighborhood: a once-vibrant arts community taxidermized into an endless string of vanity boutiques. As one passes twee establishments like a lifestyle-brand café selling 200-dollar plastic shirts, it’s hard not to wish for a great flood to wash it all away. It is completely uninhabitable during an NYC heatwave. Delirious and aimless, my party stumbled into a striking building that seemed to tower above the surrounding row houses: a building that looked as if someone bulletproofed the stacked blocks of a toddler. For all we cared, it could have been built on a fault line. It was like the air itself ushered us through those doors. Fortunately, that chance encounter with generous air conditioning led to a real day of culture.

The New Museum is Manhattan’s first institution dedicated exclusively to displaying contemporary art. For almost a decade after its founding, it was a museum without a permanent address. First envisioned as a place entirely for the works of the living, it took an AIDS crisis for that rule to even slightly waver. While its focus has since expanded, its service to emerging ideas remains intact. As it grew into a tall cast-iron building, it matured into a temple for the surrounding counterculture. Now, although it resides in a veritable architectural feat, the New Museum feels like the only record left of its neighborhood’s scrappy art scene of yore. Recent renovations have doubled gallery space with a glass building that juts from the gray tower like crystal from a host rock. As it turns out, I had accidentally caught the tail end of its grand reopening exhibit, New Humans: Memories of the Future. This impromptu trip was far and away one of my favorite museum-going moments of the year, and one of neighborhood-redeeming magnitude.

As I wandered through sections named “Homunculi,” “Dream Machines,” and “Prosthetic Gods,” I could just feel there was something special about the show’s curation. Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni describes the exhibit as interrogating the “similar conditions of technological transformation…between the 1920s and today.” Throughout the gallery, striking piece after piece captures how artists process the upending implications of “progress,” whether in conversation with the conveyor belt or the chatbot. Works like Jenna Sutela’s “HMO Nutrix” (a fountain filled with artificial breast milk) or Anicka Yi’s floating “aerobes” (jellyfish-like robots that stalk visitors from the sky) have since stuck with me just as much as the Francis Bacon across the hall. 

It’s no secret that significant swathes of Gen Z have the neoclassical taste in art of an arms dealer. One of the many things I loved about New Humans was the foothold afforded to that audience by organizing halls around these looming paradigm shifts. Room themes like “Reproductive Futures” connect visitors to transgressive works by embedding art within their unprocessed anxieties. By daring visitors to say their 6-year-old could make “HMO Nutrix,” this curatorial philosophy centers the utility of art in a world of CRISPR baby startups. Although the artists it typically displays aren’t breaking Sotheby’s records (yet), its embrace of tech feels nothing like a funhouse or Exploratorium. From robots to video art, and readymades to paintings—this museum is filled entirely with pieces that deserve to be mulled over. The New Museum has convinced me it’s not novelty or gimmick. This transgressive temple to contemporary art returns groundbreaking artistic experimentation to a neighborhood that has long been mined for parts.

Mannix Beall-O’Brien makes a new case for visiting the newly renovated New Museum in New York City’s Lower East Side… we knew you’d need to hear it from the Nassau (New-ssau) Weekly at the start of a new school year…… v (Greek letter “nu”).