Contemporary art just got a new home in New York’s Lower East Side. After the New Museum expansion, the iconic geometric Bowery building has just reopened, bringing a new chapter for the institution originally founded in 1977. This major two-year project is marked by Tschabalala Self’s facade sculpture, Art Lovers—a site-specific aluminum piece exploring connection and romance.
At the forefront of this next chapter is Salome Asega, the museum’s Deputy Director of Strategy and Innovation and the leader of the cultural incubator NEW INC. By fostering the intersection of art and technology, Asega is helping shape the future of museums. For her, ensuring the next generation of interdisciplinary creators has a platform is critical. In this interview, she speaks with hube about the evolution of NEW INC, the museum’s community footprint, and how a little “good mischief” might be exactly what the art world needs.
hube: You grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada—a city shaped by spectacle. Do you feel that it has had any influence on how you approach cultural production in your work?
Salome Asega: There’s something deeply optimistic about Las Vegas. It’s a place where impossible things are constantly being constructed and made real. I think the city’s ambition and willingness to experiment have stayed with me. It’s a place that takes the role of play seriously and encourages good mischief in civic planning. Vegas is often reduced to mere spectacle, but underneath that surface is an incredibly sophisticated system of labor, technology, architecture, and social design. I think that shaped the way I approach cultural production today: glitz and glamour serve as a hook that allows an infrastructure of play and gathering to take hold.
h: Where does your research process begin? For young artists looking to deepen their own inquiries, what are your recommended entry points?
SA: My research process usually begins with conversation and observation, then moves online, extending into books, film, and other media. My notes app is sacred—it’s a messy place only I can make sense of. I know a research thread is serious when it moves from my phone to my desktop.
For young artists, it’s important to treat research as nonlinear, and build a relationship with the world rather than simply gather information. With NEW INC, we think about research expansively. It is living and creative here. Pay attention to public space, online communities, oral traditions, community archives, nightlife, mutual aid networks, non-human species, gaming environments, and all the informal places where culture is actually evolving.
One of the things I appreciate about NEW INC is that it creates proximity between disciplines that don’t normally engage with one another. An artist might be in conversation with an architect, a creative technologist, a filmmaker, or a social entrepreneur. That cross-pollination is incredibly important right now because many of the compounding social, technological, and climate challenges artists are responding to cannot be understood through a single lens. Our festival DEMO2026 is being shaped in that same spirit. We want it to feel like a living research environment where audiences can encounter emerging ideas, practices, and forms of collaboration in real time.
