New Museum

Although it's stacked in sections, the experience of the New Museum is one of continuity, where visitors flow through the spaces smoothly. As a project conceived by a curator, every aspect seems to exemplify its function as a "site of ongoing experimentation and questioning of what art and institutions can be in the twenty-first century, [...] devoted exclusively to contemporary art" (from the manifest). At the far end of the lobby, a glass-walled gallery makes the art visible before the tickets are even bought, yet separates its visit from the milling bookstore or café to preserve the quality of its observation. The pink and white neon Silence = Death piece draws the viewer down a sunken staircase from the lobby to the lower level's Donor Wall, a conceptual mapping of culture's philanthropists and shapers ("Target: 10M" - "France: 3.2M" - "Hamas: 1.5M") - where one can read the fine print (quotes on giving from great writers and thinkers) while waiting for the green-walled elevator to the upper-level galleries. These pillar-less rooms are lit from skylights and fixtures in a high ceiling that avoid any glare on the glass table-tops displaying Emory Douglas' Blank Panther lithographs on the 2nd and 3rd floors, and prevent shine on David Goldblatt's large photographic prints of post-Apartheid South Africa on the 4th floor. The staircase between the two exhibitions is the centerpiece for Rigo 23's installation, where the viewer passes a cell marked with the year of the Panthers' liberation and ascends the staircase lined with prison bars to the open jail gate and into the Goldblatt show on South Africa's own tenuous "liberation". This spiral path upwards brings the viewer across galleries-in-the-gallery for video viewings (surviving Black Panthers narrate over archival images) and smaller grouping of works (black-and-white images of South Africa under apartheid also by Goldblatt) - parentheses of space smoothly articulated within the larger tour. Ending in the "sky room", the visit displays the rooftops of Soho and the Lower East Side to the wind-whipped visitor, bringing the works in the exhibitions home to the reality of their context - New York, its contemporary issues, and this site for its contemporary art.

The 6th-floor "education center" was temporarily closed during my visit, yet its current project, "Museum as a Hub: In and Out of Context" describes itself as "a partnership of arts organizations looking to pursue experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration, and considers the consequences of being part of a “hub”—what it means to displace conversations and activity from elsewhere to New York".