This morning, over a breakfast that included gingerbread cookies shaped like the facade of its building on the Bowery, the New Museum announced its programming for the upcoming year as well as a tidbit of news about a new half-million dollar donation by the Keith Haring Foundation.
In her opening remarks, director Lisa Phillips told the crowd that the Foundation had just given $500,000 to support the museum’s School, Teen, and Family programs (this is over and above the $1 million gift the foundation gave in 2008 to support the position that Ms. Burton currently fills — Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement). “Eighty percent of our education and community programs serve people from the surrounding neighborhoods of the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and the East Village,” said Phillips. “The support of the Keith Haring Foundation has been key in making these developments possible. In the next phase, we’re going to emphasize bringing you together around issues of social responsibility.”
Burton’s position has likewise been renamed. She is now the Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement, and her duties will encompass forecasting new goals such as “interactivity, diversity, opening up new dialogues,” according to Burton, as well as an emphasis on the “behind the scenes of shows and discussions of process.”
Massimiliano Gioni briefed the crowd on the upcoming exhibition program noting that it will as always be devoted to artists who haven’t received the institutional support that they deserve. Some of the highlights are the first museum exhibition of Pawel Althamer opening in February, which will include the installation “Venetians,” which Gioni selected for “The Encyclopedic Palace” at this year’s Venice Biennale, and “Draftsmen’s Congress,” for which the public will be invited to take over the fourth floor to “paint continuously.”
In May, Ragnar Kjartansson will present a new performance piece and video installation, “Take Me Here by the Dishwasher — Memorial for a Marriage.” As Gioni explained it, Kjartansson has always been perturbed by the myth in his family that he was conceived on the set of the first Icelandic feature film during a “slightly soft erotic scene.” Gioni explained Kjartansson’s dilemma: “If you were conceived on a film set, you go through your life wondering if your life is a fiction or not.”
Camille Henrot, the winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale this year for being deemed a promising young artist, will be bringing to the museum a work she first presented at the Biennale, “Gross Fatigue,” which offers a video history of the universe.
Next fall, the museum will present the first solo exhibition at a U.S. museum devoted to British artist Chris Ofili since his 2005 show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Spread out across the three main galleries of the museum, this show will span the artist’s career and include some of his most influential works, like “The Holy Virgin Mary,” which was central to the controversy surrounding the 1997 “Sensation” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, because the work incorporated resin-covered lumps of elephant dung.
Spring 2014 will also be “a season devoted to voice,” including an exhibition of Jeanine Oleson’s work and performances that explore the role of voice through a new experimental opera. More immediately, in January, as part of the Museum as Hub initiative, the fifth floor of the museum will be transformed into the interior of a spaceship inspired by a Czech science fiction film, around which more than 50 artworks by Eastern European artists will be displayed in an allegory of “anthropological science fiction” intended to show the exhibition space as an “estranged and exciting universe” and the inherent cross-cultural translation that occurs in the presentation of art.
Sounds like it’s going to be a very good year at the New Museum.
— Rozalia Jovanovic (@Ruschka)