Next year, New York’s cultural landscape will welcome a new, bold player. Canyon will debut in 2026 as a hub for video, sound, performance, and other time-based work—purpose-built, it said in its announcement, for “art that resists the quick glance.”

The time is ripe for such a space dedicated to durational art, said Robert Rosenkranz, the philanthropist, collector, and mastermind behind Canyon. “It’s not just a genre,” he told me over email. “It’s a form expression for a younger generation of artists, which is both natural for them, profoundly inventive, and engaging for their viewers.”

Located in a vacant commercial space on the Lower East Side, Canyon is set to host 18,000 sq ft of galleries boasting all manner of state-of-the-art sound and display technologies. A performance hall, built to seat up to 300 people, will play host to concerts, screenings, performances, and podcast tapings. A capacious skylit piazza stocked with food and beverage options (a cafe, bars, and full-service restaurant are planned) will offer an area where visitors can commune.

Designed by New Affiliates Architecture, the venue is intended as a marriage between a museum, performing arts venue, and social scene—one that Rosenkranz hopes will “encourage visitors to take the time to have the experiences the artists intended.”

Rendering of the interior of Canyon. Photo: New Affiliates Architects.

For Joe Thompson, the founding director of MASS MoCA who is helming Canyon, the new hub aims to welcome “the widest possible spectrum of audiences”—hence the hybrid space—while addressing the changing appetites and habits of today’s visitors.

“To me, there are several mysteries that Canyon will explore: on one hand, video infuses our daily lives, and yet video and other forms of art that take time, are often less visited in conventional museum spaces. And we know that many people—often younger audiences—are intrigued with immersive, all-encompassing ‘experiential art’ and yet many of those same people are not feeling at home in galleries, museums, and performing arts venues,” he told me over email. “Both suggest challenges, and room for new ways of interacting.”

The rise of experiential art has indeed sparked the emergence of venues custom-built for such experiences. Giants Artechouse and teamLab aside, there’s Mercer Labs, which opened last year in New York; Museum of Art + Light, newly launched in Kansas; and Dataland, a forthcoming A.I. art museum in Los Angeles spearheaded by Refik Anadol. Other artist-themed immersive offerings—from Immersive Van Gogh to Monet: The Immersive Experience—continue to roll on.

The people of Canyon. Photo: Daniel Terna.

Canyon, then, is landing in a crowded but thriving field. And it plans to deliver the goods. Rosenkranz has already arrayed a staff of heavy hitters: among them conservator and new media expert Cass Fino-Radin as the museum’s director of art and technology, and curator and writer Sam Ozer as curator-at-large. Rhizome, Electronic Arts Intermix, and the Archive of Contemporary Music have already signed on as partners.

Plans are also in development for Canyon’s inaugural shows, as part of its strategy to stage three major exhibition cycles per year.

Ryoji Ikeda, data-verse 1/2/3 (2019–20). Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Photo: Anu Ansu / Estonian National Museum.

First up is a major retrospective of Ryoji Ikeda, the Japanese new media artist whose installations and projections have long fused light, sound, data (his first U.S. museum exhibition is currently on view at High Museum of Art in Atlanta). The museum also plans to host “Worldbuilding,” curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s sprawling show that traces the ongoing dialogue between art, gaming, and digital technologies (the latest iteration unpacks the impact of A.I. and interactivity on the fields).

“Ikeda is a much performer, composer, as visual artist, and Canyon hopes to be a good host to work that has a foot in both the performative space, and visual art. ‘Worldbuilding’ uses the tools and techniques and look and feel of one of the world’s most popular forms of communal engagement—gaming—to make art,” said Thompson. “I hope that might engage entirely new audiences.”

And what might keep those new audiences coming back to Canyon? “Good art, good food, good drinks…all at the same time, with family and friends,” said Thompson,”in a warm and welcoming setting, in one of the greatest creative neighborhoods in the world.”