Exhibition view: *New Humans: Memories of the Future*, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

text by Hank Manning

Reopening after two years of construction, the New Museum inaugurates its 60,000-square-foot expansion with New Humans: Memories of the Future, a gargantuan museum-wide exhibition, hosting more than 700 works by 150 creators—artists, writers, scientists, inventors—from the last 120 years, providing a brute force summary of what humanity might or might have become.

The exhibition is organized into thirteen sections, many of which have ominous sci-fi adjacent names like “Automatic Women” and “Postapocalyptic Creatures.” We begin in “Reproductive Futures,” which, in addition to focusing on human births and new eras of humanity in general, quickly establishes the museum’s maximalist mentality and its attempts to illustrate through juxtaposition. It contrasts the 20th and 21st centuries, artistic and scientific impetus and responses to change, realism and abstraction, utopia and dystopia.

The show also frequently joins well-known artists with newcomers. The first section’s perimeter has familiar pieces: LIFE magazine’s 1965 photographs of an embryo growing into a fetus hang alongside Dalí and Picabia paintings that consider, respectively, globalization and American dominance, and the merger of man and machine. Our eyes naturally veer, though, towards the largest and most animated display in the room: Out of Body, a film by Lucy Beech commissioned by the museum that depicts waves, factories, and other phenomena that may evoke birth. In the center, Tamara Henderson’s Language of Mud, a two-meter-tall sculpture, seemingly embodies Picabia’s conception, reconstructing the female form with ceramic limbs and a faceless tube-filled head.

Replete with spinning gadgets and flashing lights, “Dream Machines” is the most overstimulating room, as well as the one that, on first impression, feels the least human. Its explanatory text (the exhibition demands substantial reading) reminds us that all machines contain some trace of humanity; after all, humans made them. They reflect our goals and thereby reorient the human condition, creating a form of traction in our ongoing development. Typewriters and computers come from the desire to transcend limitations and complete tasks more efficiently. So do slaughterhouses and weapons of war. Hito Steyerl’s film Mechanical Kurds emphasizes that even the most horrifying pseudo-autonomous machines—AI-powered drones—depend on hidden human labor for the most basic of tasks—distinguishing people, vehicles, buildings, and so on.

World War I, the start of the exhibition’s timeline, served as a signifier of and catalyst for “new humans.” Technological developments enhanced our capabilities, enabling us to systematically dehumanize one another. Of course, other developments healed bodies and rebuilt cities. Technology facilitates both destruction and renovation, forming something of a feedback loop of rapid change.

New art movements also developed in response to the horrors of war. Artists needed new modes to elucidate and process unprecedented levels of destruction. The Dadaists, understanding war as inherently irrational, created intentionally irrational art. Surrealists, influenced by Freud, looked inwards, exploring dreams, desire, and the unconscious mind. Bauhaus focused on rebuilding society through functional designs. Throughout New Humans, these movements appear not only as aesthetic developments, but as competing attempts to imagine what humanity could and should become after catastrophe.

Our erratic journey ends in the “Hall of Robots,” which would resemble a haunted house if not for its bubblegum-pink carpeting. Even here, in the final room in an exhibition on humanity’s thoughts about its future, we immerse ourselves in a collection of decidedly obsolete automatons, inspiring nostalgia more than anything else. Most familiar is the animatronic skeleton of the alien from Spielberg’s E.T. We also meet Bruce Lacey’s Superman, looking like a man-cabinet hybrid, with detached spinning eyes and hands; a robot called Jogging Lady plays three videos: two on its chest and another on its belly. And there’s a third robot with a television that projects a dancing clock for its head. Somehow, the oldest design is the one that would blend in most naturally in our present day, perhaps in a biology classroom: Franz Tschakert’s Glass Man, an intricate anatomical model of the human body’s inner workings. Otherwise, this room serves as a reminder that predictions of the future generally prove inaccurate, oftentimes humorously so. Imagined futures reveal more about the fears and desires of the times of their creation than about what eventually arrives in reality.

In recent years, headlines about artificial intelligence, climate disaster, and war have continued to stoke apocalyptic fears worldwide. New Humans neither confirms nor calms any of our current anxieties. One walks away only with an acceptance that the possibilities are endless.

New Humans: Memories of the Future is on view at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York

text by Hank Manning

ART / FASHION/ CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM

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