[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/000028410014.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tThe New York\u2013based Swiss Institute has acquired the ground floor and lower level of 250 Bowery, which will become its permanent home when it opens in spring 2027.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn an interview, Swiss Institute director Stefanie Hessler described the move as a \u201cnew chapter\u201d in the institution\u2019s history as it celebrates its 40th anniversary. The organization had been looking for about 2.5 years for a new home while also securing the funds needed to purchase the space.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWe wanted to find a space that matches the profile of Swiss Institute,\u201d Hessler said, noting that it was important that the new location \u201chas that downtown feel and character to it that will allow us to show forward-looking exhibitions and invite artists for their first solos and to really bring those international as well as New York perspectives to the Institute.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Swiss Institute\u2019s new location once housed the International Center of Photography and is a few minutes\u2019 walk to the New Museum. \u201cWe\u2019re excited to take that space over and, with the remodel, to turn it into Swiss Institute,\u201d she added. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Bowery site will be Swiss Institute\u2019s sixth location since its founding in 1986 by a group of Swiss patrons and the artists they supported. The organization started in a townhouse in the Upper West Side before moving downtown in 1994, first to SoHo, then to Tribeca, and finally to St. Marks in the East Village, where it opened in 2018.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cFor forty years, SI has demonstrated how an independent institution can shape contemporary culture through a deep commitment to artists and experimentation,\u201d Maja Hoffmann, board president and one of the world\u2019s top collectors, said in a statement. \u201cEstablishing a permanent home at 250 Bowery secures SI\u2019s position for future generations, creating a lasting space for creativity, international exchange, and community-building. At a moment when cultural institutions are being challenged to evolve, this next chapter reflects SI\u2019s belief in the power of art to inspire new ways of thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWith the move, the aim is to keep up the momentum that Swiss Institute has established in recent years that has made it one of New York\u2019s most closely watched nonprofit art spaces, where exhibitions of \u201cemerging artists and overlooked positions, and experimental, forward-thinking art-making\u201d are at the center, as Hessler characterized it.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe current exhibitions at the St. Marks space, on view through July 5, will be the last in that location, though the organization won\u2019t pause its programming. Earlier this month, it opened a group exhibition titled \u201cRegift\u201d at Luma Westbau in Zuirch, and in the fall, it will mount \u201cKino East,\u201d an off-site project by Zurich-based, Polish artist Rafa\u0142 Skoczek.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor the next several months, the Bowery location will undergo a renovation by Los Angeles\u2013based architecture firm Johnston Marklee, which has transformed Roy Lichtenstein\u2019s studio into the permanent home of the Whitney Museum\u2019s Independent Study Program, updated the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland, and designed the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tThe new location will also see its footprint grow by about 4,000 square feet to 11,000 square feet. While that is a benefit of the new space, Hessler said it was most important that the permanent home be \u201ca place that can support an artist\u2019s vision and that can continue to be artist-centric,\u201d as well as a space that could be flexible and reconfigured for each exhibition.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Bowery space also has a series of large windows that Hessler sees as an \u201copportunity to engage with the city and with the neighborhood\u201d via artist interventions that can act as a \u201cmembrane between the exhibition space and the street.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tConnecting to the local community has also become a focus of the Swiss Institute as of late. In September 2024, Hessler organized \u201cEnergies,\u201d which looked at a \u201clargely forgotten yet influential piece of neighborhood history,\u201d per the exhibition description. Its reference point was a co-op in the East Village where its inhabitants installed a wind turbine and solar panels on their rooftop to generate their own electricity during an oil crisis in the 1970s. In addition to the archival research and oral histories produced for the show, \u201cEnergies\u201d also featured the work of contemporary artists whose works \u201cthink about the social, ecological, technological, political dimensions of energy,\u201d Hessler said.<\/p>\n
\n\tTo inaugurate its permanent home, Swiss Institute will mount a group exhibition titled \u201cThe Environment\u201d that will involve a series of artist commissions that respond to a project by experimental filmmaker Bud Wirtschafter in which he gave downtown New Yorkers 16mm cameras and he \u201casked them to self-represent and self-document their environment or what they felt was important about their environment,\u201d Hessler said. \u201cAt that time, of course, few people had access to cameras, and so the films that came out of it were really a beautiful testimony to the concerns of people in the neighborhood, but also how they saw their own lives, how they wanted to be represented.\u201d The resulting films were projected on building facades around the community.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThe Environment\u201d will \u201crevisit the methodology\u201d of Wirtschafter\u2019s project during a time when \u201cwe all have access to cameras,\u201d Hessler said. For her, the question now becomes about \u00a0what does it actually mean to express what\u2019s important to one\u2019s environment at a time where these technologies don\u2019t necessarily make processes more democratic or equitable.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tInstead, the commissioned artists will work with communities where they are based or in New York to create works in various mediums\u2014moving-image, installation, performance, public art\u2014that \u201crespond to these contemporary questions: What constitutes our environment? Who has access to it? Who shapes it? Whose voices get heard and whose do not?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/swiss-institute-permanent-home-250-bowery-relocation-1234790588\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/000028410014.jpg?w=1024″] The New York\u2013based Swiss Institute has acquired the ground floor and lower level of 250 Bowery, which will become its permanent home when it opens in spring 2027. In an interview, Swiss Institute director Stefanie Hessler described the move as a \u201cnew chapter\u201d in the institution\u2019s history as it celebrates its 40th […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2017700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2017700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2017700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2017700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2017700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}