New Museum: museum as incubator
#artpool
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
In hosting the first museum-led incubator, the New Museum demonstrates a truly advanced concept of what it means to foster new art and ideas.
As a major contemporary art museum, the New Museum provides a key example of how museums can truly champion the development, as well as the use, of new media technology within the art world. NEW INC. is the museum’s art, design, and technology incubator helmed by the newly appointed director Julia Kaganskiy. The goal of the not-for-profit initiative is to create a fluid professional development program and creative workspace that will support members working at the intersections of the arts and technology.
Kaganskiy is a 27-year-old best known as the founder of #ArtsTech meetup, an events and networking community of over 4,000 Twitter-happy participants, she has also served as an editor for the Creators Project, a technology series presented by Vice and Intel. Kaganskiy convenes the information economy equivalent: an eclectic community of artists, technologists, designers and thinkers cultivating collective knowledge for a more artful and more efficient city.
In an interview, Kaganskiy said: “I see NEW INC as similarly straddling and hopefully uniting various different creative communities, as well as creating an important bridge between the museum and the tech community. Creating bridges between these different groups is an important aspect of this initiative, and I think that’s also one of the things that will help catalyze fresh thinking and new ideas. Connecting people to one another is, in a way, one of the most powerful things we can do”.
She also stated: “The New Museum is one of the most progressive institutions that I know of, and I really can’t think of another museum where this type of project could flourish. It’s really something that very much emerges from the ethos of the museum — a commitment to supporting new art and new ideas while at the same time re-envisioning curatorial practice and museum practice in the 21st Century .”