New Humans: Memories of the Future at the expanded New Museum, New York

Steven P. Harrington

Right on time for a global stage display of man’s inhumanity to man, the New Museum reopens on the Bowery — two years after closing for an $82 million expansion that missed its 2025 target and landed in early spring 2026. Under longtime director Lisa Phillips, the institution returns much as it has always been: ambitious, fast-moving, and still unusual in one key way — it doesn’t collect art. It stages arguments.

The new building, designed by Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu, sleekly, streetly, serves its function. Circulation — once the museum’s quiet, persistent headache — is solved. New elevator banks, a central staircase, and cleaner movement between old and new galleries make it easy to see the work. The glass façade opens small slices of the city, static yet jarring — a fortress framed in streaming HD clarity — and once inside, the transitions are seamless enough to blur where the old ends and the new begins. Strip away the poetry: the architecture does its job and gets out of the way, which reads as a mature team of designers and theoreticians.

That restraint matters, because the opening exhibition, New Humans, doesn’t hold back from clobbering you with big ideas — and more subtle, darker, compelling ones. With more than 150 artists across multiple floors, it’s an ambitious, possibly overwhelming attempt to map what humanity looks like under all of this pressure — technological, political, biological. The thematic sections read like a checklist of current anxieties and obsessions: Mechanical Ballets, Prosthetic Gods, Hall of Robots, Postapocalyptic Creatures, The City. You can feel the curators tracking how we got here — and where we might be headed as things continue to unravel.

At its best, the show traces a clear throughline through time, pushing earlier experiments to speak directly alongside contemporary work to show these questions didn’t arrive with AI hype. They’ve been building for a century, at least. You may say it is overpacked — a clattering din of voices — and even with all this new space, we humans still need more room for all our profound ideas to land. Would the Earth be large enough to contemplate what we are, with our exaggerated sense of self and appetite for exuberance and waste?

For us — maybe because of New York street art history — one of the clearest voices in this brain noise is Rammellzee. His work doesn’t ask whether we’re post-human — it assumes we’re already in a struggle over what being human means. His armored figures and self-built cosmology — part graffiti theory, part science fiction, part raw invention — imagines with his sense of swagger — the body as a force in motion, adapting, encoding, defending itself. His is not a retreat from humanity; It’s a push deeper into it, through language, conflict, imagination, and dope style.

One thematic subtitle names it plainly: Postapocalyptic Creatures. In case we really do fuck things up beyond repair, what happens then? What sharpens, what falls away? Your niece wonders, quietly, “Would we still have TikTok?”

Speaking of tension, the language of “post-human” suggests we’ve moved beyond ourselves, but nothing here supports that. The artists aren’t post-human. The audience isn’t post-human. The concerns — war, control, care, survival, identity — are as familiar as ever. If anything feels outdated, it’s the idea that we can step outside these conditions rather than work through them. Right now.

The New Museum excels at staging big questions without pretending to resolve them. New Humans continues that tradition. It’s messy, frustrating, sharp. It asks what we are becoming, but the stronger moments suggest a different task: not imagining a world beyond the human, but figuring out how to live with one another inside it — repairing damage, recognizing each other, deciding what, if anything, we carry forward.

The building works. The show jars the brain and heart. And the strongest parts don’t point to some distant future — they point right back at us.

The New Museum. New Humans: Memories of the Future is now open to the general public. For a full list of artists, tickets, directions, schedule of events, and hours, click HERE.