New Museum's Shiny New Building Leaks During Flash Floods
No artworks were harmed, but extreme weather shuttered the Lower Manhattan museum for a full weekend.
Just a few months after the reopening of the New Museum's expanded building, a water leak shut down the Manhattan institution for a full weekend.
According to Artnews, museum workers scrambled to address a "significant" leak during the flash floods of July 18, using buckets to catch water that streamed into a gallery housing artist WangShui's piece "oppose the serpent" (2024).
In an email to Hyperallergic, the New Museum said that "immediate steps were taken to address the leak," and that no artwork was harmed.
In an Instagram post on Saturday, the museum announced that it would be closing for the weekend due to "extreme weather in New York City."
The Lower Manhattan museum unveiled its $82 million OMA-designed expansion in March after two years of closure. The 60,000-square-foot expansion doubled the institution’s exhibition space, adding much-needed breathing space, but as Aaron Short reported for Hyperallergic, "bits of masking tape were still stuck to the stairway railings, and a handful of missing wall panels revealed internal wires, rebar, and insulation."
WangShui's work is included in the inaugural exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, which explores what it means to be human amid the cataclysmic technological changes of the 20th and 21st centuries through the work of more than 150 artists.
The new building received mixed reviews from Hyperallergic's critics with Editor-at-Large Hrag Vartanian calling it a "mishmash of Obama-era startup culture, dated by the lime green and perforated metal."
