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When the mercury tops ninety, cool people head
for some place cool—and one of the coolest of the cool places in
Manhattan is the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s new home.
Designed by the Japanese firm, SANAA, the New Museum’s new
building is downtown’s first art museum constructed from
scratch—in this case a former parking lot on the Bowery. As the
architects put it, mildly understating the case, “The Bowery was
very gritty when we first visited it.” That was then, way back
in 2002. Now, as anyone who’s been paying attention in class
knows, the Bowery is home to multi-million dollar condos (or at
least they were yesterday…), with its own Whole Foods and a
Ralph Lauren boutique right around the corner. Yet it’s the New
Museum that has completely redefined the neighborhood. Like a
seven-story stack of slightly off-kilter silver building blocks,
the New Museum glistens and gleams, beckoning to pedestrians on
Prince Street with as much allure as the Emerald City held for
Dorothy and her pals. Hell, Yes reads the
rainbow-colored sign splashed across the museum’s façade—an
adage perfectly suited to the New Museum’s can-do spirit and
let’s-put-on-a-show mentality.
With a mission statement as simple as New
art, new ideas, the New Museum makes good on that premise
with its latest exhibit The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,
a collection of works from 50 artists from 25 countries all
under the age of 33. Perhaps an unconscious homage to the New
Museum’s own age (the new building opened in December of 2007,
coinciding with the New Museum’s thirtieth birthday), your first
response to such an arbitrary line in the sand might be, Big
deal. Younger than springtime, so who cares? You should.
There’s fascinating work to witness—and not all of it
videography, art’s latest flavor du jour. Photography by
LaToya Ruby Frazier, for example, is as gritty and real as the
Bowery used to be, and Frazier taps into the documentary vein of
her antecedents, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Carrie Mae
Weems.
And once you’ve scaled the artistic heights, there’s the New
Museum’s glorious seventh-floor Sky Room, with its wrap-around
outdoor balcony— from which you can stand and wave at the
pedestrians on Prince, and beckon to them like Glinda.
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