The Tools of Dissent, a New Activism Center on Museum Mile
The Museum of the City of New York opens a wing on how New Yorkers have always made themselves heard
Gloria Steinem's address book is behind glass on Fifth Avenue now. So is a suffrage sash, and a noisemaker carried during the Civil War draft riots. They sit in a renovated wing of the Museum of the City of New York, on Museum Mile in East Harlem.
The wing is the new Puffin Foundation Center for New York City Activism. Its anchor show, Raise Your Voice: New York Activism, previewed for the press on Tuesday, September 22, and opened to the public that Friday, according to the independent outlet Urgent Matter. It is a permanent exhibition, and it covers more than 250 years of New Yorkers organizing, marching, printing, and pushing.
The museum has been here before. Its earlier show, Activist New York, opened in 2012 and became the most popular school field trip the museum offered, NY1 reported. The Puffin Foundation has supported the museum since 2009. On May 18 the museum announced a new multimillion dollar gift from the foundation, the second largest in its history, to create this center.
"Every object on view was made, used or carried by someone responding to something right here in New York," Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, the museum's director and president, said at the preview, as Urgent Matter reported.
How, Not Just Why
The new show does something the old one did not. It is organized by tactic rather than by cause. There are four sections. Demonstrations. Organizing. Art and media. Direct action. The idea, as curator Sarah Seidman explained to Urgent Matter, is to look at the tools people use, which lets one gallery hold many movements from many eras at once.
"Protest is not new. It does just change form a little bit," Seidman told the outlet.
The demonstrations section runs down a hallway as a timeline split into five eras. There is the suffrage banner. There is a 1947 painting by Peter Hopkins of a clash between communists and police in Union Square. There are photographs from the first Pride march in 1970 and a wall of old protest flyers.
The organizing section is quieter and in some ways more revealing. It holds Steinem's address book, campaign buttons spanning more than 150 years, strike pledge cards from the longshoremen's union, and a sketchbook by the artist Molly Crabapple. An address book is not a slogan. It is the actual machinery of a movement, one phone number at a time.
An address book is not a slogan. It is the actual machinery of a movement, one phone number at a time.
In art and media, the walls carry posters and paintings by Ben Shahn, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, and Nicole Eisenman. There is a listening station for protest music from the twentieth century forward. The direct action section includes early twentieth century photographs of the Visiting Nurse Service at work, images of the 1964 school boycott, and Hiram Maristany's photographs of the Young Lords and their 1969 garbage offensive.
Seidman told Urgent Matter that she set material from across the political spectrum side by side on purpose. The show includes a photograph of counterprotesters physically clashing with Vietnam War protesters on Wall Street, material tied to an anti-abolitionist riot in 1834, a Staten Island secession sign, and copies of National Review, included to show that New York has also been a home for conservative thinkers. She singled out a humble silkscreen as a favorite object, because cheap, portable printing turns up again and again in grassroots work.
The show ends with a room called Your City, Your Move. Visitors can make a poster, use a digital tool on neighborhood problems, and register to vote if they are 18 or older.
We Are Still Here
The center opened with a second show beside the first. Halumii Ktapihna: Lenape Legacies and Futures was made with the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective and brings together more than 30 contemporary artists, according to Urgent Matter. The Lenape are the Indigenous people of the land that became New York City.
NY1 described a set of videos in which women from Lenape communities each hold a historic object and talk about their lives. In one, Kristin Jacobs, a language instructor from the Delaware Nation in Ontario, seems to stand in the gallery with visitors. She holds a wampum belt and explains what it is before switching to the Lenape language. Angel "Monxo" Lopez, the museum's curator of community histories, told NY1 it is "a show about the present" that reaches the past mostly through art and culture.
The title carries the point. Brent Stonefish, a co-founder of the collective, told NY1 that Halumii Ktapihna means "we are still here forever."
We wanted to show that we are still here.
That line comes from Stonefish too, and it could stand over the whole wing. Every object in these rooms was left behind by someone who wanted to be counted.
The City in Miniature
There is a second reason to go soon. On the museum's first floor, He Built This City, the scale model of all five boroughs by the Queens born truck driver Joe Macken, runs only through October 12, the Associated Press reported. He built it from balsa wood and foam board over more than two decades, and it holds more than 800,000 tiny structures. The museum sets out binoculars, and visitors use them to hunt for landmarks and old neighborhoods.
The activism center asks the same question in a different way. Where are you in this city, and what did you do about it? The Museum of the City has always been good at the long view. This fall it offers two of them, one in balsa and one in banners.
For more of the city's history finding new homes, read our story on the Bowery at the New Museum. The NY1 report on the new center has more from inside the Lenape galleries.
