NEW YORK NOW: HOME – A NEW PHOTOGRAPHY TRIENNIAL

Featuring Lens-Based Work From 33 Contemporary Artists Including Xyza Cruz Bacani, Naima Green, Alan Michelson, Irina Rozovsky, and Jamel Shabazz

The First Installation of the Recurring Exhibition Kicks Off MCNY’s Centennial Year Programming

Opens March 10, 2023

Liberty, from the series "We Are Like Air: NYC", 2022. Xyza Cruz Bacani. — Liberty, from the series “We Are Like Air: NYC”, 2022. Xyza Cruz Bacani.

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Home. It’s where the heart is, where we feel safe and secure. And in New York City, home takes on a whole new meaning. The Museum of the City of New York is launching its new contemporary photography triennial, New York Now: Home, on March 10th. This inaugural exhibition explores the different ways in which we make homes in and around the five boroughs. Co-curated by Thea Quiray Tagle and Sean Corcoran, this event marks the beginning of the Museum’s centennial year programming.

As the world center of photography, New York City has inspired generations of image-makers. And as the storyteller of the city, the Museum of the City of New York has collected and exhibited the best of this work for a century. With New York Now, they’ll continue this tradition, engaging with themes and issues relevant to New York and the experience of urban life. Lens-based work has a unique power to connect the artist, subject, and viewer in a way that’s unlike any other medium. Through this and future installations of New York Now, the Museum will showcase both established and emerging talents, reflecting a range of perspectives.

Playing Eve, from the series “Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl” 2021, Courtesy of Cheryl Mukherji

“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:

Picturing Black Femme and Queer Communities in New York Now 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.

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