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SANAA-designed building will bring contemporary art downtown
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Despite the gloomy, overcast weather, the more than 200 people gathered in the empty parking lot at 235 Bowery on October 11 were jubilant. Convened under a white tent, and armed with "emergency" ponchos in case there was a deluge, the visitors -- artists, board members, patrons, city officials -- were there to celebrate the groundbreaking for the future home of the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
The museum, founded in 1977, is the city's only showcase dedicated solely to international contemporary art, and it mounts half a dozen shows a year. According to its literature, the museum "is guided by the conviction that contemporary art is a vital social force that extends beyond the art world and into the broader culture," and the museum not only seeks to engage those who are contemporary art aficionados, but also attempts to entertain and enlighten those who are less educated in the idiom.
Additionally, the museum is home to the Zenith Media Lounge, established in 2000, which is arguably the only space in the city dedicated to mounting shows of new media, exploring digital art, experimental video, and sound works.
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| Feinstein and Eisenberg couples at groundbreaking |
With the goal of underwriting a capacious permanent home, the museum began a capital campaign fund in 2003, part of which involved selling its original home at 583 Broadway. The sale enabled it to begin construction on the new downtown location and increase its endowment. Generous trustees contributed more than $20 million, and the fundraising continues. This year, a lead gift was provided by Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg and Susan and Leonard Feinstein; Messrs. Eisenberg and Feinstein are the founding partners of Bed Bath & Beyond and Mitzi Eisenberg and Susan Feinstein sit on the museum's board. The museum expects to make announcements within the next several months to update the public on the funding campaign to date.
After the building's sale, the museum relocated to temporary quarters in the Chelsea Art Museum on West 22nd Street. The New Museum will remain there, during this transition, until late 2007, when its new, state-of-the-art facility is projected to be completed -- just in time to mark the museum's 30th anniversary.
The new footprint of the museum on the Bowery is between Stanton and Rivington Streets. Here, the striking structure will stand out among the restaurant supply stores, industrial lofts, and commercial businesses that dot the neighborhood. The plans call for a dramatic pillar of rectangular boxes, stacked slightly akimbo off a central axis and wearing a skin of matte silver cladding. Skylights and windows will punctuate the expansive surfaces and provide visitors within the museum snippets of vistas of busy cityscapes while allowing light to flood the column-less galleries.
In addition to expanded exhibit space, the 60,000-square-foot, seven-story building will house a library and study center, a 188-seat theater, classrooms, a café, rooftop terraces, and a sun-lit lobby bookstore. The ground floor will also house the Marcia Tucker Hall, named for the founding director of the museum who for 20-plus years guided the institution; she is currently the director emerita.
The museum is known for presenting many non-traditional exhibitions featuring emerging and established artists from such far-flung places as Bulgaria, Cameroon, Turkey, and Cuba. In summer 2004, anticipating its move, the museum staged an exhibit that was conceived to help introduce itself to its new neighbors, cementing fresh relationships and helping visitors familiarize themselves with the community that will soon be the museum's home. The experimental site-specific showcase, called Counter Culture, featured the work of six artists. Each was matched with a local business or organization, making the resulting art works inextricably linked to the district.
Among the presentations were artist Raul Vincent Enriquez's somewhat iconoclastic walking tours of the environs. The collective Flux Factory presented Secret Spaces within Bowery Martial Arts, an interactive exhibit that required visitors to locate talismans secreted away by the artists. The hidden objects then further required them to perform a "mission" -- both silly, like shopping on the Bowery, and serious, such as learning about the locale's topography.
Conceptual artist Marion Wilson, paired with the Bowery Mission, created a fanciful, lighthearted movable pushcart, This Store Too. The exhibit, which paid homage to the Claes Oldenburg This Store created more than 40 years earlier, also served as a paean to the endless stream of pushcarts that populated the Lower East Side a century ago as waves of immigrants discovered ways to earn a livelihood. Wilson's pushcart offered intriguing artifacts, all of which incorporated possessions that she bought from the Bowery Mission's residential clients -- even dreadlocks, which were worked into bouquets of artificial flowers as stems.
At the groundbreaking ceremony, Kent Barwick, the president of the Municipal Art Society and a downtown resident for many years, noted that various geographic areas, or actual streets, of the city are often inextricably associated with images that have come to mean something globally: Fifth Avenue mansion, Broadway star, Wall Street tycoon. But the Lower East Side, he pointed out, has taken the not-so-respectable association of "Bowery bum" that has sometimes been applied to the general area and turned it on its head -- the neighborhood has emerged as one of the most dynamic and exciting areas of the city, a magnet for generations of artists, writers, poets, filmmakers.
The ceremonial groundbreaking, Barwick went on to say, represented another breakthrough for downtown -- the first art museum building constructed in downtown Manhattan in more than a century. He observed that the museum would engender a "sense of style and energy" and be a magnet for anyone interested in the latest in contemporary art. Its new space would provide for features and facilities that had not been possible before.
The ceremony opened with a performance by Laurie Anderson, who played a short, digitalized, original musical composition. Her presentation was followed by remarks by Saul Dennison, the president of the board of trustees of the museum. "Downtown Manhattan has been home to generations of artists in every discipline from around the world," he stated. "Their ideas, energy, and discoveries have always been central to the very identity of New York City and are more relevant and urgent today than ever. With this building on the Bowery, the New Museum of Contemporary Art aspires to make a contribution to both the built landscape of our city and New York's continued pre-eminence as a global capital, open to all people and forms of expression."
Commissioner Kate D. Levin, Department of Cultural Affairs, spoke next and observed, "This administration is delighted to be a key partner in creating this spectacular new building for the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Cultural organizations are a force for revitalization in communities across the five boroughs, bringing with them new audiences and some of the most distinguished architecture in the city. The New Museum's dramatic redesign promises to further animate the Lower East Side neighborhood, and its innovative programs and exhibitions will help fuel the vitality of the city's creative community as a whole."
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| SANAA architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa |
The museum's architect is the acclaimed Tokyo-based firm Sejima + Nishizawa/SANAA Ltd. Partners Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have been acknowledged internationally for their innovative work -- minimal in its aesthetics and sophisticated in its completed applications. The firm is widely considered to be among the most original and influential of a new generation of architects. In Japan, the company has completed numerous critically acclaimed commercial and institutional buildings, community centers, homes, and, not coincidentally, museums; many are striking for their highly original facades.
The new museum's design is expected to captivate the neighborhood and is greatly anticipated by architects and "civilians" alike, as it was named one of the top ten architectural projects of the year in the 2003 by the New York Times.
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| Shinto priest in action at museum's groundbreaking |
To cap off the ceremonial part of the groundbreaking -- before patrons and the general public were invited to take a shovelful of earth and symbolically move it -- a traditional and stirring Japanese Shinto ritual known as a Jichinsai was performed by the Reverend Mitsutaka Inui of the International Shinto Foundation. On the stage was a Shinto altar, replete with foliage, ceramics, and fruits. For ten minutes, the Reverend Inui sprinkled confetti bits of blessed rice papers to the four corners of the site as he sanctified the space. With the priest dressed in ceremonial white robes and a traditional black hat at its center, the silent, striking ceremony was accompanied by the quiet murmur of traffic traveling over wet roadways, as a kind of white noise behind the on-stage drama. Once the space was purified, the priest offered greenery at the altar, asking for safety during construction. Attendees were asked to participate by bowing and clapping when requested. In the distance, and almost on cue, as if ordered by an in-the-wings Hollywood director, church bells chimed in unison.
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, (212) 219-1222; www.newmuseum.org.
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