NEW YORK, NY (February 2023) – There’s no place like home…home is where the heart is…home, sweet home…feeling at home. There are many evocative and iconic expressions about the concept, but what does home in New York City look like today? Opening March 10th, New York Now: Home – the inaugural edition of the Museum of the City of New York’s new contemporary photography triennial – considers the literal places we dwell and the homes we choose to make, exploring the many facets of contemporary homemaking in and around New York’s five boroughs. Inspired by the Museum’s landmark presentation of the same name in 2000, New York Now will occur every three years with different themes. Co-curated by Thea Quiray Tagle, Ph.D., associate curator of the Brown Arts Institute and the Bell Gallery at Brown University, and Sean Corcoran, MCNY’s senior curator of prints and photographs, New York Now kicks off the Museum’s centennial year programming.
“New York City is the world center of photography and has been a source of inspiration for generations of image-makers going back to the advent of the medium itself,” says Sarah M. Henry, Ph.D., Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe Chief Curator and Interim Director, Museum of the City of New York. “As New York’s storyteller for a century, Museum of the City of New York has collected and exhibited the best of this work since its founding in 1923. We are excited to launch our centennial celebrations with New York Now, our new series of photography exhibitions that will engage themes and issues of the contemporary city.”
“Lens-based work has an immediacy, an intimacy, and the power to build a connection between the artist, the subject, and the viewer that is unlike other media,” says Sean Corcoran. “With this, and future installations of New York Now, we have the opportunity to reflect and promote a range of perspectives and to highlight both established and emerging talents focusing on themes of relevance to New York, New Yorkers, and the experience of urban life.”
New York Now: Home is organized in four sections:
- Home Crosses Borders explores the experiences of working, finding community, and making home for immigrant and refugee communities in New York City – with works by image-makers including Cynthia Santos-Briones, Alan Chin, and Diana Guerra.
- Home Is Chosen highlights queer kinship and the power of creating family formations bound together by choice rather than blood. Featuring images by artists including Richard Renaldi, Laila Annmarie Stevens, and Joana Toro.
- Home Is a Havenpresents diverse class and race expressions of home, family, and community, with images that challenge the ideal of home as a site of safety and protection from the outside world. Featuring works by image-makers such as Ariana Faye Allensworth and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP); Sara Bennett;and Chantal Heijnen & Lou van Melik.
- Home Is The Bodyshares images by artists including Nona Faustine, Cheryl Mukherji, and Dean Majd, who use their bodies –and portraiture– to grapple with intergenerational trauma and social histories of place.
“One of the things that makes New York Now: Home’s images distinctive is, in large part, the photographers’ gaze,” says Thea Quiray Tagle, Ph.D., co-curator of the exhibition. “The image-makers featured in the exhibition are engaged with their subjects, often working collaboratively with them to share their powerful stories. The results are unique and often underexposed perspectives of making home in New York that we may not see via mainstream media or in contemporary art representations.”
Featuring 33 image-makers whose work ranges from social documentary to conceptual, the exhibition celebrates the diversity of what home, family, kinship, and community are – and can be – in New York, now.
The artists featured in New York Now: Home are:
- Ariana Faye Allensworth
- Xyza Cruz Bacani
- Roy Baizan
- Laylah Amatullah Barrayn
- Sara Bennett
- Amarise Carreras
- Cinthya Santos-Briones
- Alan Chin
- Sally Davies
- Maureen Drennan
- Nona Faustine
- Naima Green
- Diana Guerra
- Gail Albert Halaban
- Chantal Heijnen & Lou van Melik
- Ramona Jingru Wang
- Anders Jones
- Jamel Shabazz
- Neil Kramer
- Dean Majd
- Alan Michelson
- Paul Moakley
- Cheryl Mukherji
- Ian Reid
- Richard Renaldi
- Irina Rozovsky
- Geralyn Shukwit
- Laila Annmarie Stevens
- The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project
- Joana Toro
- Linda Troeller
- Nolan Trowe
- Elias Williams
New York Now: Home is the result of the intense curatorial labor of sifting through submissions from more than 1,000 artists who answered a public call for images, as well as nominations for consideration made by the curators, the advisory committee—Michael Famighetti (Editor of Aperture magazine); Nicole Fleetwood (curator, writer, 2021 MacArthur Fellow, and Weldon Johnson Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University); Kris Graves (artist and founder of Monolith Editions); Kristen Lubben (curator, writer, and Executive Director of Magnum Foundation); and Brian Wallis (director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock and former chief curator of the International Center for Photography)—as well as institutional partners such as Aperture, The Bronx Documentary Center, CityLore, Penumbra, Photoville, and Queens Museum of Art.
An eponymous catalogue, published by KPG | Monolith Editions will be available in March 2023. There will also be programs and talks accompanying the exhibition including, among others:
Wednesday, March 15, 6:30 PM
In-person
Join New York Now: Home exhibiting artists Naima Green, Nona Faustine, and Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for a conversation about photography as a creative apparatus for shifting dominant narratives, historical representations, and contemporary discourses about Black women, femme and queer folks, families, and communities in New York and beyond. This discussion about the power of critical Black feminist and queer gazes is moderated by Dr. Tanisha C. Ford, Professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center and author of Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (2019).
- New York Now – a discussion
Sunday, April 2 at AIPAD, time TBD
In-person
Curators Sean Corcoran and Thea Quiray Tagle sit down with moderator Kristen Lubben (Magnum Foundation and advisory council member) to discuss practices of home-making in New York and its representation in contemporary photography.
