Nestled up in East Harlem across from Central Park, The Museum Of The City Of New York (MCNY) has quietly become one of the best museums in the city, with a barrage of city-centric exhibits examining our urban landscape through census figures, rebellious women and everything in between. Along the way, they've amassed a huge collection of photos and artifacts documenting life here—and a new exhibit takes the best of those acquisitions and offers a sweeping view of the city throughout the 20th century.
Collecting New York's Stories: Stuyvesant to Sid Vicious, features highlights drawn from hundreds of additions to the Museum’s permanent collection over the past three years. The full exhibition, which opens on January 22nd, includes a gallery of historic and contemporary photographs as well as a companion gallery featuring drawings, garments, posters, decorative art objects, and other artifacts.
Lindsay Turley, Vice President of Collections at the museum, said the exhibit gives people the opportunity to see how New Yorkers have interacted with a city changing "physically, culturally, economically, and aesthetically over more than the past century." For the photographic part of the journey, "the works in the exhibition are grouped chronologically by photographer, and serve as representative examples from the major themes from each. The museum has been focusing on collecting work from the latter half of the 20th century up to the present, and the exhibition highlights that endeavor." Janette Beckman, Bruce Davidson, Martha Cooper, Helen Levitt, Richard Sandler, Gail Thacker, James Van DerZee, and Harvey Wang are among the photographers featured here.
[XXXstasy Peep World, 691 Eighth Avenue], 1998
Other highlights, some of which you can see up above, include a 1948 studio portrait of the Marx Brothers by Yousef Karsh; Allan Tannenbaum’s 1978 portrait of the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious leaving the Chelsea Hotel in handcuffs following the death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen; and Ruddy Roye’s contemporary color portraits of residents of Bed-Stuy.
In the second gallery, there are tons of artifacts of NY life, including several recently donated original drawings by long time New Yorker illustrator Saul Steinberg; a hat designed by the one-and-only Bill Cunningham (during his pre-photography days); one-of-a-kind posters from the 2017 Women’s March; material from the opening celebration of the Second Avenue subway; garments that belonged to sculptor Louise Nevelson and beauty entrepreneur Helena Rubenstein; a group of materials from the civil defense program during WWII; and more.
"Curators for this area of the exhibition turned their attention to the themes of what New Yorkers’ wear, use, and make; and also the items which illustrate change in the city, or record its history and selected objects which speak to those themes," said Turley.
"We also included the stories of these objects original owners or how they came to be in the Museum’s collection; it’s not just the nature of the object or the maker that contributes to the city’s narrative, but the person who originally used it," she added. "As a result, we have high-end objects such as designer garments worn by famous artists and early New York silverwork, to functional items that received daily use such as the cosmetology tool of a woman working in the mid-20th century to an emergency identification badge worn by a compressed air worker helping construct the city’s subway system in the early nineteen hundreds."
Check out a bunch of the objects and photos up above.
The Museum of the City of New York is located at 1220 5th Avenue, at 104th Street. You can get ticketing and special events details for the exhibit right here.
