NEW YORK — Beginning this Friday, the Museum of the City of New York presents the first edition of what will be a triennial of photography and works of art in which some 30 contemporary artists will participate, displaying an understanding complex of their concept of home in the Big Apple’s five counties.
The “New York Now: Home” exhibition is inspired by the museum’s landmark presentation under the same name in 2000 and will be held every three years with a different theme, the institution said in a statement. With this exhibition, the museum begins the program with which it celebrates its centenary.
“Home” can mean different things to different people, and in its most practical form it refers to the literal places where you live, but it can also mean the family or the communities you choose to be part of, the museum notes.
Selected works by 33 artists, including some Latinos, cover a variety of perspectives, as diverse as the city itself, and are presented in a variety of approaches, from social documentary to conceptual. The exhibition celebrates the diversity of what home, family, kinship and community are – and can be – in New York City.
The museum recalls that the city has struggled in recent years to take into account not only the current dynamics of economic and racial inequality, but also the enormous challenges triggered by the COVID-19 crisis.
“This exhibit includes photography and video works made over the past few years that creatively document and interpret this changing urban landscape and the disparate responses and experiences of New Yorkers, among the city’s stories before, during and after the pandemic,” he said. Also the statement.
The artists’ work is divided into sections: the ways in which houses cross geographical boundaries; how homes are refuges for some but not for all; the fact that homes are chosen as much as they are inherited and, finally, the home represented by our body.
“The exhibit offers a contemporary look at life in New York and how photographers and artists see the city,” said the museum’s acting director, Sarah H. Henry.
“As the storyteller of New York for a century, the Museum of the City of New York has collected and exhibited the best of this work since its founding in 1923. We are thrilled to kick off our centennial celebrations with New York Now: Home he claimed.