The New Museum was founded in 1977, after Marcia Tucker got fired from The Whitney because the very uptown board didn’t understand her Richard Tuttle show. So she started her own museum, the New Museum, hellbent on keeping it downtown in both location and attitude. It originally occupied a 19th-century limestone building in the heart of SoHo that’s now a fancy co-op called, in a somewhat backhanded gesture, the New Museum Building. I was invited to have dinner in one of the lofts once, by a very famous person who lives there; they had a very nice apartment, probably worth north of $15 million today. As the neighborhood changed, the New Museum needed a new space. Eventually, it took a spot on the Bowery—a street whose name had long become a catchall term for dereliction.
The New Museum is now associated with the loose, raggedy collection of streets that peel off the Bowery. I live in this part of town, and have always thought of the New Museum as my local institution: a supremely ambitious museum that happens to be around the corner. Gioni lives somewhere nearby too.
Its board has expanded gradually beyond the Bowery, and now includes patrons from around the world. Gioni himself is an extremely global guy: After curating the Venice Biennale, he interviewed every other living former director and wrote an oral history of the exhibition, simply for fun. The New Museum has never felt more connected to the larger cross-Atlantic web of institutions. One of the shows premiering this week, Diego Marcon’s fantastic “Arrivederci, Piggies!,” consists of three works and one new commission, produced by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Madrid and Italy), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris), the New Museum (the Bowery), the Renaissance Society (the South Side of Chicago), and the Vega Foundation (Toronto).
Phillips’s Bowery show confronts the local-global conundrum head-on by organizing the most extensive exhibition about a single street ever installed at an art museum. The 400-year span starts with the Lenape footpath and works its way up to today, when one of the last Bowery artists, Billy Sullivan, has painted the denizens as part of a massive installation of portraits. One of his paintings, from 2023, is a portrait of local celebrities Ricky Clifton, Nan Goldin, and Peter McGough. There’s also a photograph of Bridget Donahue, whose gallery, Hoffman Donahue, has been at the foot of the Bowery for over a decade.
“We wanted to play somewhat pervasively with the fact that we open a new building, we have the New Museum, and then you step into their room and it’s like a time machine. You feel like [you’re] maybe in a historical museum,” Gioni said. “And my belief is, yes, we have the New Museum. But every new adventure also necessarily revisits the past, so we have this wonderful show that also localizes the museum in its neighborhood and its history.”
