The New Museum, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is one of the world’s most important contemporary art museums. It has an international focus, and because it doesn’t collect, can be more responsive to art world currents than traditional museums.
It reopens in 2026 with a second building that doubles its footprint. The New Museum on the Bowery’s original opening in 2007 revitalized what was once one of Downtown’s toughest neighborhoods.
Exhibitions with Latin Artists
New Humans: Memories of the Future
The reopening exhibition is about how technology and social changes have redefined the concept of humanity in 20th and 21st-century art.
Mar 21, 2026 – August 23, 2026
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The exhibition goes some places you wouldn’t expect. The lead curator Massimiliano Gioni is Italian, so Italian Futurism, the early 20th-century art movement that glorified machines and hoped to lead Italy into the industrial age, is a reference.
That movement didn’t turn out so well because it promoted war as a cleansing ritual. Futurist imagery was fast and sexy, but war is a dead end. Ironically, a lot of technology supports war, and the social problems created by unfinished decolonization support culture wars.
There are several notable contemporary and historic Latin artists.
Lenora de Barros (1953) is a Brazilian visual and performance artist who uses language as a material. 🇧🇷
Martha Boto (1925) is an Argentine kinetic artist. 🇳🇮
Julien Creuzet (1986) is a French Martinican who creates a sensory archive of Caribbean life at the intersection of Indigenous, European, and African traditions. 🇫🇷 🇲🇶
Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was a Spanish surrealist whose surrealist images stretch the human form in fantastic ways. 🇪🇸
Jaider Esbell (1979-2021) was an Indigenous Brazilian Macuxi artist who was a leader in Brazil’s Contemporary Indigenous Art movement which uses artivism to defend Indigenous land rights and culture. 🇧🇷
Teresita Fernández (1968) is a Cuban American artist whose practice is built around landscapes and themes of the erased identities of non-European peoples. 🇨🇺
Gyula Kosice was an Argentine-Hungarian pioneer of kinetic art. 🇳🇮
Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) was a renowned Chinese Cuban surrealist whose Afro-Cuban themes turned something old into something new. 🇨🇺
Julie Mehretu is an Ethiopian artist. 🇪🇹
Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) was a Cuban American artist known for her earth-body art and themes of exile, identity, and the female form. 🇨🇺
By bringing Mother Earth into her practice, Mendieta touched the Gaia Hypothesis that Earth is a living organism. I think that is true. We just don’t have the mental capacity to understand it.
Her practice was influenced by Afro-Cuban and Indigenous religious traditions. Some Americans freak out about blood sacrifice, but all ancient traditions practiced the idea that to get something, you have to give something. I always wondered what happened to the religion of the Indigenous Taíno of Eastern Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. It’s still here. It got absorbed into Sèvis Ginen in Haiti and 21 Divisiones in the Dominican Republic. As Cuban, she was aware of those traditions.
Mendieta’s work also spoke against violence towards women, especially in her famous “Rape Scene” (1973). Ironically, she died after “falling” out of a Greenwich Village window during an argument with her husband.
Berenice Olmedo is a Mexican artist whose sculptures explore how orthopedic and prosthetic devices fragment the human body. 🇲🇽
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) was a Spanish scientist called the “father of modern neuroscience” for his discoveries and hypotheses (later proved true) about the nervous system. His drawings of neural structures are still used today. Nobody knows how he could see down to the cellular level without any tech. 🇪🇸
Santiago Yahuarcani is an Indigenous Huitoto Peruvian artist. 🪶 🇵🇪
The exhibition includes Indigenous and Latin artists from Argentina, Brazil, Martinique, Mexico, Peru; Latin Europeans from France, Italy, Romania, Spain; and Latin roots artists from Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.
New Museum Reopening
New New Museum Reopening
Free entry weekend with registration
Saturday, March 21, 2026
New Museum Tickets
New Museum
235 Bowery
(at Prince St)
Lower East Side, Manhattan