You Can Now Take A Virtual Tour Of The New Museum

LOWER EAST SIDE, NY — The New Museum is celebrating its not-so-new birthday by launching a livestream of its Lower East Side galleries, allowing people throughout the city and viewers from home to explore the artwork virtually.

The New Museum, located at 235 Bowery, is launching New Museum Live to celebrate its 40th anniversary. The contemporary art museum first opened in 1977, with its founder famously proclaimed that the museum would completely empty its walls and start afresh every 10 years, to make sure the space always had the newest and most boundary-pushing art.

Although the New Museum doesn't automatically chuck artwork after 10 years, the institution has remained dedicating to showcasing up-and-coming artists who might not have exhibited elsewhere.

To celebrate its 40 years in the NYC art world, the new livestream will allow visitors to virtually travel through the five floors of the Lower East Side space. Some of the live streams will also be displayed at various spots throughout the city including Times Square, Hotel Indigo, Barcade, 120 Wall St. and more.

The live stream will be available throughout most of the month online as well, so you can browse the New Musem's extensive collection piece by piece, and click on each artwork to learn more about it and the artist. New Museum Live will run through Dec. 31, according to a statement from the institution.

The New Museum Lives comes through a partnership with the Droga5 group.

"'New Museum LIVE' takes inspiration from one of the New Museum's very first exhibitions, the ‘Window Series,’ which invited artists to display their works in street-level windows for the public to see" Droga5's Don Shelford explained in a statement. "A definitive moment in the museum's history, it established their mission as a forward-thinking establishment challenging how the museum should function. ‘New Museum LIVE’ can be viewed as a modern-day interpretation of that series, allowing New Yorkers to view new art in ways they've never been able to before."

You can take a look at the livestream here.

Lead image: Rendering courtesy of the New Museum