NEW YORK, NY.- 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.

The exhibition stretches across history and features artists from more than fifty countries, highlighting rarely seen works reaching back over a century while also premiering more than fifteen new commissions produced by some of today’s most exciting contemporary artists, including Ryan Gander, Camille Henrot, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Wangechi Mutu, Hito Steyerl, Alice Wang, and Santiago Yahuarcani, among many others. Canonical figures of twentieth-century art, like Constantin Brâncuși, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and August Sander, are brought into dialogue with overlooked and eccentric visionaries like Bruce Lacey, Rammellzee, Toyen, and Unica Zürn. The wide range of works on view captures individualized responses to moments of sweeping global change. Seen through the lens of today, these artists offer proposals that resonate with our contemporary moment, but also document dreams of futures that never arrived.

As with earlier thematic exhibitions at the New Museum, New Humans finds the roots of the contemporary in the layers of the past. In particular, the show highlights the recurrence of collective fears of and aspirations for new technologies as they arrive with the immense potential to shape, or even dominate, human life. Working against the idea of linear progress in both humanity and technology, the exhibition stages the relationship between the two as a series of leaps, returns, and reversals, placing artists and objects in critical dialogue across time. Most notably, New Humans establishes a symmetry between the 1920s and the present: The early decades of the twentieth century saw the first appearance of the term “robot” and the rise of automated factory labor, along with the emergence of mechanized warfare and the explosion of new media. All these phenomena are echoed by today’s disruptive diffusion of AI, the brutal efficiency of contemporary warfare, and the myriad apparatuses of misinformation that characterize communication in the digital age.

Highlighting these transhistorical correspondences, the show connects the medical devices invented for soldiers returning injured from World War I to contemporary imaginings of a transhumanist future, while the image of the “New Man”—and that of the “New Woman”—in the work of the early twentieth-century avant-garde presages the cyborgs and bioengineered bodies imagined by the artists and technologists of today. Broken and reassembled bodies in the work of artists like Hans Bellmer and Hannah Höch, for example, anticipate the transhuman bodies imagined by artists like Berenice Olmedo, Cao Fei, and Janiva Ellis. Similarly, the glut of AI-generated images and videos flooding our digital landscape and challenging our understanding of creativity finds its precedent in the machine-aided computer drawings and programmed art of the 1960s created by pioneering women like Analívia Cordeiro, Vera Molnár, and Lillian Schwartz.

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.

The show identifies pivotal historical moments like the birth of the myth of the “New Man,” as envisioned by the early twentieth-century avant-garde in works by artists from El Lissitzky to Francis Picabia, and the appearance of the “New Woman” in the context of the Bauhaus, through works from Marianne Brandt, Karla Grosch, and Florence Henri. The Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists all imagined their own varieties of mechanical offspring—children born without mothers—that reflect both a wonder at the technological revolutions taking place in the early decades of the twentieth century and the looming specter of fascism that would overtake Europe before World War II. From the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s industrial readymade God, created in collaboration with Morton Livingston Schamberg, to Dalí’s Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, the children of the machine inaugurated a terrifying new world where technological and political upheavals would prompt the birth of even more surprising new humans to come.

The post–World War II period saw the emergence of a more monstrous form of figuration in response to the horrors of the Holocaust and the devastation of the atomic bomb, uniting artists as varied as Francis Bacon, Jacqueline de Jong, Alberto Giacometti, Eva Hesse, Alina Szapocznikow, and Tatsuo Ikeda. At the same time, a wide range of international figures, like F.N. Souza, Demas Nwoko, and Uche Okeke, imagined a new postcolonial body that extended beyond that imagined by European modernism—new humans for new nations. These moments highlight the tension between a pristine, engineered human of the future and the kinds of bodies warped and broken by technologically amplified violence, as well as the myriad bodies that fall outside of a techno-utopian vision, where aberration and an embrace of nonhuman relationships offer a radically liberatory potential. Many of these themes return in the work of contemporary artists such as Julien Creuzet, Jaider Esbell, Jana Euler, Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Tau Lewis, and Portia Zvavahera, who reimagine speculative universes in which the definitions of the human are constantly renegotiated with both the animal and the natural world.

The exhibition offers prototypes of beings that may be able to navigate an uncertain future and visualizes the spaces—both natural and architectural—in which new forms of life may be able to thrive. The dreams of imaginary cities conceived by Sophia Al-Maria, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Gyula Kosice, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Hariton Pushwagner, and Albert Robida serve as habitats for chimeric beings like Anicka Yi’s hovering aerobes, which will be flying in the fourth-floor galleries of the new OMA-designed building. The shifting definitions of the human reflect the collective advances and upheavals of society at any given moment in time, and the artworks brought together by this exhibition offer myriad possibilities for the humans we may become.

New Humans: Memories of the Future is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director; Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Senior Curator; Vivian Crockett, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator; and Madeline Weisburg, Senior Assistant Curator; with Calvin Wang, Curatorial Assistant. With thanks to Lexington Davis, former Curatorial Fellow; Laura Hakel, former ISLAA Curatorial Fellow; Clara von Turkovich, former ISLAA Curatorial Fellow; and Ian Wallace, former Curatorial Assistant.