Alex Poots, artistic director and CEO of the Shed, announced today that the 200,000-square-foot cultural center, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, lead architect, and Rockwell Group, collaborating architect, will launch its opening season on April 5, 2019. Beginning that day, Poots said, “The Shed’s community of neighbors, New Yorkers, and visitors from around the world will come together to experience the widest range of art forms in spaces that can accommodate artists’ most inventive and ambitious ideas.”

Located on the West Side of Manhattan, the eight-level building notably includes a moveable covered outer shell that, when extended over the adjacent plaza, doubles the structure’s footprint to create a 17,000-square-foot space with light, sound, and temperature controls.

The Bloomberg Building, as the Shed’s primary structure is now named, also contains two large, column-free galleries comprising 25,000 square feet; a 500-seat theater; and two top-floor spaces for events, rehearsals, and experimentation, newly dubbed the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Skylights and the Tisch Lab.

Poots also announced four new artistic commissions for the first half of the Shed’s opening season: POWERPLAY (hip hop, spoken word, dance, and moving images by multimedia artist Latasha Alcindor, May 18 & 19), Beatriz González: Cinta Amarilla (a new film directed by Yanina Valdivieso and Vanessa Bergonzoli, and produced by Display None, June 19 – August 25); Tony Cokes and Oscar Murillo (an exhibition exploring the relationship between art and the politics of space, June 19 – August 25); and Maze (a new production from street dance pioneer Reggie ‘Regg Roc’ Gray, co-directed by Kaneza Schaal, July 23 – August 17).

Tickets for the first half of the opening season will go on sale to the public on February 6, 2019.