Description of the attraction
The New Museum of Contemporary Art is the only one in New York fully dedicated to modernity. All works (artists from all over the world are exhibited here) are made by living or just recently deceased authors, they truly relate to the present time.
The museum was founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, who previously worked as a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Liberal, decisive and daring (her motto was "Act first, think later - so you have something to think about"), Tucker was a stranger to Whitney. The exhibitions she organized there were considered provocative. It is natural that Tucker was fired, but for her it did not become a tragedy - she just took and created a new museum. So she called it - New.
Marcia Tucker has learned from experience that the work of contemporary artists is not easy to adapt to traditional collections. Her New was originally conceived as a platform for the promotion of experimental ideas and became a haven for artists rejected elsewhere. Over the years, Novy has held many exhibitions by contemporary authors - both solo (Joan Jonas, Leon Golub, Linda Montano, Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Christian Boltanski and others) and collective (Art and Ideology, Damaged Goods, Bad Painting "," Bad Girls "). In 1989, the museum was hosting an exhibition with the truly provocative title "Have you attacked America today?" The display in a huge arched window on the first floor (then the museum occupied a building on Broadway) was so clearly a parody of American patriotism that angry townspeople smashed the glass with a garbage can.
The current museum building on Bowery Street in Lower Manhattan was built in 2007 specifically for the New. Japanese architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa designed a building ideal for a museum that specializes in outrageousness. The house is a column of six rectangular "boxes" stacked on top of each other and shifted in different directions. All the walls are covered with anodized aluminum mesh - it hides the windows, and the building appears to be covered in silver leather. It looks especially impressive in the evening, when electric light breaks through the mesh. The interior spaces are also light and minimalistic.
In memory of the founder of the museum (she died in 2006), the first floor of the building is called Marcia Tucker Hall. This floor differs sharply from the aluminum "boxes" above it - it is completely glazed, it seems to grow out of the sidewalk, reveals a café and a bookstore inside, and boldly waits for the next trash can.
