New Museum Buys Adjacent Building

By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: September 8, 2008

Not even a year after it opened a new $50 million home on the Bowery, the New Museum of Contemporary Art has acquired an adjacent building for $16.6 million, museum executives said Monday. Just south of the museum at 231 Bowery, the building is a 47,000-square-foot, five-story structure now used by a restaurant-supply company.

Lisa Phillips, the museum’s director, said the institution would run the building “as is” for the time being, with a new ground-floor tenant. The museum, at 235 Bowery, will also use some of the vacant space for additional offices and storage “till we develop a long-range plan,” she said, adding, “There is so much possibility for institutional growth.”

The museum’s ideas for the space include using it for expanded programming or revenue-generating activities and running it as a separate but complementary adjunct, Ms. Phillips said.

The museum, which had been working on the deal for the last six months, paid for the new space with money raised and contributed by the board and some outside financing, she said.

The purchase seems likely to speed the transformation of the area surrounding the New Museum. Since it moved there from SoHo, opening last December in a building designed by the Tokyo firm Sanaa, galleries and restaurants have been popping up on a strip that was long known for flophouses, bars and stores that sell light fixtures and restaurant equipment.

Founded in 1977, the institution bills itself as Manhattan’s only museum dedicated to contemporary art. Coming shows include “A. L. Steiner + robbinschilds,” a series of site-specific performances, multichannel video installations and video projections; and “Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone,” described as the first solo exhibition and retrospective of Ms. Heilmann’s paintings, sculptures and furniture in a New York museum.

Assessing the museum’s design by Sanaa’s founders, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote in The New York Times in January 2006: “Wrapped in a woven aluminum mesh skin, the stacked forms give the composition a mysterious quality, suggesting a culture in constant flux.”

Ms. Phillips said she hoped the museum would continue to be a part of the neighborhood’s evolution. “It’s an opportunity,” she said. “It’s an investment in our future growth. We’re a dynamic, growing institution.”