Museum of the City of New York Announces List of Artists Selected For "New York Now: Home"

New York, NY, Jan. 10, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Museum of the City of New York, NYC’s storyteller for nearly 100 years, today announced the list of 33 image-makers whose work will be included in the inaugural presentation of New York Now: Home - a photography triennial. Opening on March 10, 2023, the first installation focuses on the theme of “Home” and features photographs and artworks by artists that reveal a complex understanding of home in New York’s five boroughs.  With works ranging from social documentary to conceptual, the artists in New York Now: Home explore the ways that homes cross geographic borders; how homes are havens of safety for some but not all; the fact that homes are chosen as much as they are inherited; and the experience of homes that is made in our bodies. Together, the work celebrates the diversity of what home, family, kinship, and community are and can be in New York, now.

“New York Now offers a contemporary look at life in New York and the way in which photographers and artists are seeing the city,” says Sean Corcoran, senior curator of prints and photography at Museum of the City of New York and co-curator of the exhibition. “The exhibition dovetails with our collecting strategy at the Museum, which focuses on artists and image-makers whose work reflects the diversity and multi-faceted ways people live in the city today.”

Corcoran and co-curator Thea Quiray Tagle collaborated with an advisory team of industry luminaries – Michael Famighetti (Editor of Aperture magazine); Brian Wallis (director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock and former chief curator of the International Center for Photography); Kris Graves (artist and founder of Monolith Editions); Nicole Fleetwood (curator, writer, 2021 MacArthur Fellow, and Weldon Johnson Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University); and Kristen Lubben (curator, writer, and Executive Director of Magnum Foundation)—as well as institutional partners such as Aperture, The Bronx Documentary Center, CityLore, Penumbra, Photoville, and Queens Museum of Art to identify the artists and works included in the inaugural New York Now exhibition.

“In considering which artists to curate into the exhibition, we used an expansive rubric of what home and family are and could be. It was important to us to select image-makers with unique and underexposed perspectives, who pictured experiences of making home in New York that we may not see via mainstream media or contemporary art representations,” says Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD, scholar, writer, and co-curator of the exhibition.

The artists featured in New York Now: Home include:

• 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 was inspired by the Museum’s landmark presentation of the same name in 2000 and will occur every three years with different themes.  Additional information about the artists included in the inaugural presentation of the triennial, as well as related programming and other events will be updated in the new year at mcny.org.

About the Curators

Sean Corcoran is the Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, where he has served since 2006. He previously served as Assistant Curator of Photography at George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY, and as an adjunct professor at Ryerson University. Over the years, He has organized a wide range of exhibitions including City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection; Hip Hop Revolution: Photographs by Janette Beckman, Joe Conzo and Martha Cooper; and currently on view, Celebrating The City: Recent Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something. Sean’s work has been featured in a range of media outlets and he has been tapped as juror for high profile photography events and awards. He has written extensively on photography including essays for Elliott Erwitt: At Home and Around the World (Aperture), Stanley Kubrick: Through a Different Lens (Taschen), and Brooklyn: The City Within. Photographs by Alex and Rebecca Norris Webb (Aperture).

Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD is a scholar, writer, and Associate Curator of the Brown Arts Institute and David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University.  Her research broadly investigates socially engaged art and site-specific performance, photographic histories of violence and survivance, and speculative futures in and across the Pacific. Her writing can be found in publications including ASAP/J, American Quarterly, BOMB Magazine, and Hyperallergic. As a practitioner, Thea specializes in curating contemporary art and performances by Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer, and diasporic artists working in installation, photography, new media, and film. She has curated projects exhibited at venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), The Alice Gallery (Seattle), Berkeley Art Center, and the Vachon Gallery at Seattle University.

About Museum of the City of New York’s Photographs Collection

The photographs collection at the Museum of the City of New York consists of more than 400,000 prints and negatives that document New York City and its inhabitants from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Some of New York's earliest photographic views are represented in the waxed-paper negatives of Victor Prevost, and the proliferation of the medium is exemplified by the Byron Collection of more than 22,000 images chronicling New York life from 1892 through 1942.  The collection is a major repository of several noted photographers, including Jacob Riis, whose photographs reveal the Lower East Side's poverty and squalor in the late nineteenth century; Jessie Tarbox Beals’s depictions of turn-of-the century bohemian life in Greenwich Village; and Berenice Abbott's stunning Changing New York, a WPA photographic project that documents New York City in the 1930s.  Additionally, the Museum's voluminous holdings incorporates the LOOK Magazine photographic archives featuring photographers such as Stanley Kubrick, John Vachon, and Arthur Rothstein; hundreds of images recently gifted by the Joy of Giving Something Foundation, and includes the work of commercial photographic firms such as Irving Underhill, the Wurts Brothers, Gottscho-Schleisner, and photographic work commissioned by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White. Other contemporary holdings include work that examines the city’s built environment since the 1950s, including more than 60 photographs from Danny Lyon’s Destruction of Lower Manhattan series from the late 1960s, a collection of city views by Camilo Jose Vergara, and more 1,000 architectural views of New York by Edmund Gillon during the 1970s and 80s. The lives of New Yorkers on the city streets are documented through the eyes of photographers such as Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Martha Cooper, Robert Frank, Leonard Freed, Ed Grazda, Andre Kertez, Helen Levitt, and Jeff Mermelstein.

About the Museum of the City of New York

The Museum of the City of New York fosters understanding of the distinctive nature of urban life in the world’s most influential metropolis. Winner of "Best Museum" in Time Out New York's "Best of the City 2021" and multiple American Alliance of Museums (AAM) awards, MCNY engages visitors by celebrating, documenting, and interpreting the city’s past, present, and future. To connect with the Museum’s award-winning digital content, visit www.mcny.org; or follow us on Instagram and Twitter at @MuseumofCityNY and on Facebook at Facebook.com/MuseumofCityNY.

Meryl Cooper
Museum of the City of New York
917-974-0022
[email protected]