NewMuseum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212.219.1222
newmusem,org

The New Museum, designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA with Gensler, New York, serving as Executive Architect, is a seven-story, structure located at 235 Bowery between Stanton and Rivington Streets, at the origin of Prince Street in New York City. The first art museum ever constructed from the ground up in downtown Manhattan, the New Museum will open to the public on December 1, 2007, coinciding with the institution’s 30th anniversary.

The New Museum building is a home for contemporary art and an incubator for new ideas, as well as an architectural contribution to New York’s urban landscape. Sejima and Nishizawa, who received the commission in 2002, have described the building as their response to the history and powerful personalities of both the New Museum and its storied site. “The Bowery was very gritty when we first visited it,” they have said. “We were a bit shocked, but we were also impressed that a contemporary art museum wanted to be there.”

Current exhibitions:

Ugo Rondinone, Hell, Yes!,
12/1/07 - 7/19/09

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone has spent the last twenty years working in a diverse range of mediums, including painting, drawing, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Whether trance-inducing mandala paintings, large-scale drawings from nature, or moody multi-channel video environments, Rondinone’s work explores notions of emotional and psychic profundity found in the most banal elements of everyday life.

Since 1997, Rondinone has included the practice of making signs in his varied oeuvre. He takes phrases from pop songs and everyday exclamations and makes them into rainbow-hued, neon-lit sculptures that are joyous affirmations of love and life. For the opening of the New Museum at 235 Bowery, Rondinone will reprise his 2001 work Hell, Yes! The installation encapsulates the philosophy of openness, fearlessness, and optimism that surrounds the New Museum’s reemergence in the contemporary art community, as well as its history as the home of socially committed contemporary art.

Jeffrey Inaba
12/1/07 - 7/19/09

Jeffrey Inaba uses a radical approach to research and design to make opaque information come alive. Inaba has created Donor Hall for the New Museum’s lower-level hallway, a bold, immersive graphic environment that identifies and quantifies public and private philanthropy around the world. The presentation is based on research on dozens of organizations—from sports, media, politics, education, religion, finance, paramilitary, and non-governmental organizations—and tracks the amounts of money various organizations donate to culture.

INABA and C-Lab have culled publicly available information about contributions to arts and culture around the world from the past three years, drawn from sources such as tax filings, corporate annual reports, newspapers, and research papers, indicating the contours of global generosity. Donor Hall covers the walls along the path leading to the Museum’s theater. The graphics convey information via traditional pie charts, in addition to images of actual pies, as well as pie-shaped foodstuffs, including hamburgers, sushi rolls, cheese wheels, and pizza. Superimposed on the charts are international pictograph-style depictions of animals associated with prosperity. Also imbedded in the imagery is hypertext drawn from classical American literature. By organizing allusive, disparate, and incongruous bits of data into legible interfaces, Inaba makes a world driven by such data and sustenance more open to understanding and change.

Be(com)ing Dutch
1/15/09 - 3/29/09

Be(com)ing Dutch is a large project developed over two years both inside and outside the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Consisting of debates, reading groups, artist's projects, exhibitions, and residencies, it interrogated various forms of collective participation and production. As questions of cultural identity and normative “national” values become ever more of an issue in political and cultural debate, Be(com)ing Dutch asks whether art can offer alternative examples of thinking about how we can live together today.

Like the Be(com)ing Dutch exhibition in Eindhoven, “Museum as Hub: Be(com)ing Dutch at a Distance” at the New Museum is guided by three broad directional themes: Imagined Past, Imagined Present, and Imagined Future. Michael Blum’s installation Exodus 2048 transforms the Museum as Hub space for the duration of the exhibition, representing an Imagined Future where the museum itself serves as a fictional camp for Israeli refugees. The Imagined Present is represented in Lidwien van de Ven’s Freedom of Expression, originally an installation at the Van Abbemuseum and re-created here as a poster in the Museum as Hub newspaper and a special presentation and screening organized by the artist to consider the issues of Islamaphobia, new right-wing thinking in Europe, and the politics of citizenship and immigration. Finally, screenings of Johan van der Keuken’s film I love $ in the New Museum theater reference the Imagined Past: the film shows an almost prophetic and still-topical treatment of global capitalism.

The exhibition and the entire Be(com)ing Dutch two-year project concludes with the project’s book launch and closing reception on March 27.
For more information about Be(com)ing Dutch, please visit becomingdutch.com.

Crystal Palace
1/28/09 - 3/8/09

Mathias Poledna's new work, Crystal Palace, is a 35mm film installation comprised of a small number of long, static shots of the montane rainforest landscape of the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. Using tightly framed medium-close to medium-wide shots, the film's carefully selected scenes focus on the complex patterns, textures, and the overall abstract qualities of this environment, seemingly without human presence. Only subtle changes in light and movement in foliage provide visual cues to the passage of time. The film is accompanied by a dense and highly edited soundtrack created from on-location and archival field recordings, oscillating between drone-like noise and distinct insect and bird sounds.

Poledna's title, Crystal Palace, evokes the glass-and-steel structure of that name constructed for the Great Exhibition in London of 1851, an important precursor of modern architecture and industrialized construction that was built to present the newest products of the capitalist economy, as well as exotic displays, flora and fauna. Poledna's work explores how meaning becomes attached to images and sounds; it creates a complex tension between a specific place, its cinematic appearance, and historical concepts circulating around it. In Crystal Palace, Poledna specifically references Sounds of a Tropical Rainforest, a 1951 album of staged field recordings produced by Folkways Records for the American Museum of Natural History to accompany an exhibition about Amazonian tribespeople.

Poledna's work is also informed by film history, particularly the interconnections between early film and popular and avant-garde cinema, as well as the history of visual ethnography. Unlike traditional documentary and ethnographic film, Crystal Palace lacks an authoritative, narrative voice as it investigates a foreign place through an extremely narrow focus and highly subjective camera framing. Simultaneously engaging with as well as collapsing cinematic conventions of narrative development and closure, Poledna's film explores the ambiguities and constructed nature of historical representation. - Russell Ferguson