The New Museum’s huge new building officially opens this spring!

Mark your calendar: on March 21, 2026, the New Museum is throwing open the doors to its long-awaited new building—and New Yorkers get first dibs with free admission all opening weekend.

The 60,000-square-foot expansion, designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, doubles the museum’s gallery space and gives the Bowery icon a major glow-up. The new addition slips in right next to the existing SANAA-designed building, bringing a larger Sky Room, a new 74-seat forum for talks and screenings and a street-level entrance plaza that finally gives the museum some breathing room.

Inside, the reopening exhibition, "New Humans: Memories of the Future," takes over the entire expanded building with work by more than 200 artists, writers, scientists and filmmakers, exploring how technology and social change keep reshaping what it means to be human. There’s a mix of contemporary heavy-hitters like Hito Steyerl, Wangechi Mutu and Anicka Yi alongside 20th-century visionaries including Salvador Dalí, Hannah Höch and H.R. Giger. There are also new site-specific commissions, like a façade work by Tschabalala Self and a monumental sculpture by Klára Hosnedlová.

As part of the reopening, the museum is debuting its first full-service restaurant, run by the Oberon Group and led by chef Julia Sherman, plus a doubled-in-size store packed with artist-made objects you can browse without even buying a ticket.

Opening weekend—Saturday, March 21, and Sunday, March 22—is completely free, but you will need to snag a ticket in advance. Registration for free opening weekend tickets goes live on the New Museum’s website next month, but members get an extra perk: preview days before the public opening. (If you’re feeling fancy, you can sign up for a membership now.)

Regular tickets will then go on sale in February. Admission is $25 for adults, with discounts for students, seniors and people with disabilities, plus free entry for visitors under 18 and SNAP/EBT recipients. The museum will be open Tuesday through Sunday, with pay-what-you-wish hours on Thursday nights.

This is one of the city’s biggest art openings in years—and for one weekend, it won’t cost you a dime to be part of it.