” The New Museum today announced the complete artist list for New Humans: Memories of the Future, the first exhibition to span the entirety of the expanded New Museum, opening on March 21, 2026. Across the New Museum’s SANAA-designed building and OMA-designed expansion, New Humans will trace a diagonal history of the past one hundred years through the work of more than two hundred international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and societal changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures. Continuing the New Museum’s long history of presenting provocative and timely group exhibitions, New Humans: Memories of the Future will explore artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes…
…New Humans considers how scientific advances have completely reconfigured representations of the human body, offering portraits of life from the embryonic stage to bodies that may inhabit post-human worlds yet to come. The exhibition features diagrams, models, and documentation of various scientific discoveries that revolutionized our understanding of humanity’s inner workings. Lennart Nilsson’s photographs of human embryos, Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s diagrams of the brain’s internal structures and pathways, Franz Tschakert’s Glass Man, and Wilder Graves Penfield’s model of the sensory homunculus, among many others, offer both anatomical insight and artistic inspiration, while artists like Yuri Ancarani, Lucy Beech, and Angela Su create works that mine the fields of surgical technology, bioengineering, and medical illustration with surreal effect. The characters that populate the exhibition range from sleek automatons to figures fractured by the machine of war to human-animal hybrids in states of transformation and evolution. Mechanical life forms by artists like Lee Bul, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Pamela Rosenkranz, and Andro Wekua appear alongside iconic artificial beings from popular culture, like Carlo Rambaldi’s E.T. and H.R. Giger’s biomechanical Necronom, made famous in the film Alien. Through this archive of evolving human forms, the exhibition highlights how machines have profoundly altered humanity’s understanding of labor, gender, collectivity, intelligence, and creativity.”