The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), a Manhattan institution dedicated to preserving and celebrating New York City's rich history, today announced a wide variety of special events for November 2022. The Museum is serving up a fun range of exhibitions and events this month, including food-inspired festivities, engaging exhibitions, and online experiences for all ages. There’s something here for everyone:
Awards Celebration
2022 Louis Auchincloss Prize Honoring Anna Deavere Smith
Monday, November 14, 2022, 6:00 p.m.
Tickets: Start at $100
Format: In-person
The Museum is thrilled to present the 2022 Louis Auchincloss Prize to Anna Deavere Smith in honor of her contributions to New York City’s cultural and performing arts landscape. Anna’s impactful work as an actor, playwright, author, professor, and activist encompasses precisely what the Louis Auchincloss Prize seeks to salute each. Glenn D. Lowry, the David Rockefeller Director of the Museum of Modern Art, will present the award to Ms. Smith; the evening will include a cocktail reception and discussion with Kate D. Levin, principal at Bloomberg Associates.
Special Winter Holiday Installation
Gingerbread NYC: The Great Borough Bake-Off
Opens November 11
Press Preview: November 9, 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Top bakeries and amateur bakers from across the city were invited to apply for entry to Gingerbread NYC: The Great Borough Bake-Off—our first-ever celebration of communities and neighborhoods in each of the five boroughs as represented in gingerbread. Those selected will be on view as part of our Winter installation giving New Yorkers and tourists an opportunity to celebrate the city and experience a sweet holiday season.
Public Programs
The Activist's Media Handbook with David Fenton and Jamal Joseph
Wednesday, November 2, 2022, 6:30 p.m.
Tickets: $15
Format: In-person
On the eve of the November midterm elections, join us for a conversation with two lifelong activists and native New Yorkers about the power and limits of activism today. Progressive PR leader David Fenton and filmmaker, professor, and former Black Panther Jamal Joseph will explore how activists past and present have confronted topics such as the rising specter of authoritarianism and longstanding voting rights efforts, economic and social injustice, violence and war, and the rapid destruction of our planet due to global warming — and what the relationship is between activism and electoral politics. How can we draw on the lessons of grassroots activism over the last 50 years to tackle the enormous challenges of our time? What are the tools activists can draw on, from film and communications strategies to other tactics, in order to win major victories for truth, freedom, democracy, the people, and the planet?
This conversation will draw on Fenton’s new book The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator (November 1, 2022 / Earth Aware Editions). The book delves into some of the most important and history-making PR campaigns of the last 50 years, from the No-Nukes concerts and the campaigns to free Nelson Mandela and end apartheid, to banning fracking in New York and alerting the public to the climate crisis.
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Moonlight & Movies | The Automat
Wednesday, November 9, 2022, 6:00 p.m.
Tickets: $15
Format: In-person
Join us for a screening of The Automat (Lisa Hurwitz, 2021), the award-winning documentary that recounts the lost history of the iconic restaurant chain Horn & Hardart, which served affordable-priced quality food to millions of New Yorkers and Philadelphians for more than a century. Horn & Hardart’s technology captured the public’s imagination like nothing else in the 1900s—the customer put nickels into slots and little windows opened to reveal the customer’s pick, be it a slice of pie, macaroni and cheese, or a Salisbury steak. The gleaming glass and stainless-steel windows looked “sanitary” and like nothing else in existence. Featuring appearances by Mel Brooks and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, The Automat illustrates how the company both served the public with great food and at the same time treated its employees with fairness and integrity. The film's director, Lisa Hurwitz, will introduce the screening.
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Halal and the City — Part of our “Eat Your Heart Out” series, co-presented with the Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD)
Thursday, November 17, 6:30 p.m.
Tickets: $40
Format: In-person
Where does halal food fit into the context of New York City dining? And how do issues of religion, class, and bureaucracy impact the halal food that’s available and who is able to sell it?
In an evening led by Krishnendu Ray, author of The Migrant’s Table and The Ethnic Restaurateur, we’ll learn the answers to questions such as these and more as we hear from a New York City halal food street vendor, and Mohamed Attia, director of the Street Vendor Project. Additionally, we’ll go beyond the street cart with Sameen Choudhry of Muslim Foodies, an NYC halal restaurant blog run by three women who are seeking to bridge the gap between mainstream restaurants and halal restaurants.
After the discussion, we’ll taste halal chicken over rice and falafel over rice, two of the classic halal dishes you’ll find sold by New York City’s halal food street vending community.
Education and Family Programs
Election Day PD: We Are What We Eat – Food and Culture in NYC
Tuesday, November 8, 2022, 9:00 a.m.
Tickets: Free with advance registration required
Format: In-person
From family meals to reunions and holidays, food is often at the center of New Yorkers’ most important life events. But how does the food we eat get to our plates? And who gets it there?
Join us for a nourishing full-day workshop for educators as we celebrate autumn by examining the history of New York city’s rich food traditions, learning about the people behind the city’s complex networks of food distribution, and discussing the current efforts to find solutions for more equitable access to food. Discover our newest interactive exhibition, Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate, and gain a deeper understanding of the environmental impact of our food choices and how activists are developing solutions to meet the challenges in our food systems.
This day will include engaging guided tours of the Museum’s galleries, guest speakers, and hands-on workshops. We will learn more about food and labor in the history of New York and how to bring an understanding of how we get what we eat back to your classroom. Be ready to whet your learner’s appetite! The Museum is CTLE-certified. Participation in this program provides 5 hours of CTLE credit.
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Movies for Minis: Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
Saturday, November 19, 2022, 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.
Tickets: $5
In-person
Starring Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, and Daniel Stern, this holiday movie follows the hijinks of 10-year-old Kevin McCallister alone in the Big Apple after losing track of his family on their way to a Florida vacation. While in New York City, he discovers his old rivals, a pair of thieves called the Sticky Bandits, are plotting a robbery. But not on Kevin’s watch! Inspired by the ingenuity of the tricks and traps Kevin comes up with to stop the Stick Bandits, we will also host STEAM workshops and activities to be announced. Tickets include an all-day entrance to the museum (10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.).
Exhibitions on View
City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space – OPENING NOVEMBER 18
City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space looks under the surface of New York’s image as a secular city and maps the complex and often surprising relationships that connect religion to public space. The exhibition focuses our attention on how religion engages the city at a public level—in “secular” streets and sidewalks, waterfronts, and other liminal spaces. Focusing on South Asian-American and other communities who have faced religious profiling and surveillance—particularly after 9/11—the exhibition critically examines the nature of secularism in the city, how it has historically favored Protestantism while rendering other communities hyper-visible, and how these latter communities assert their right to the city through transformative art and collective action.
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Food In New York: Bigger Than the Plate – JUST OPENED
Food is a powerful social network binding New Yorkers to each other and countless others across the globe. The city's raucous restaurant scene; its ubiquitous street food; the current activist efforts to source food locally; the world's largest food market in Hunts Point; and the artists, thinkers, and designers who are imagining new sustainable ways to relate to food are all a part of Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate. First developed at London's Victoria and Albert Museum and now adapted and updated to look at eating and food systems in the Big Apple, the exhibition is an invitation to feast for a more equitable and exciting future.
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Analog City: NYC B.C. (Before Computers) – CLOSING DECEMBER 31
Analog City: NYC B.C. (Before Computers) will uncover the array of tools, technologies, and lost professions that supported New York City as it exploded into a global metropolis in the pre-digital era. Focusing on the period between the 1870s and the 1970s, Analog City will examine the technologies that enabled the city to reach its position as the “capital of the world” in an age before the speed and capacity of today’s digital technologies. Set against a contemporary backdrop of 24-hour news cycles and high-speed trading—in which questions about privacy, truth, and the impact of social media are increasingly pressing—the exhibition will uncover this bygone era of paper files and pneumatic tubes, of note cards and telephone directories, and examine how New York thrived as a center of finance, news, research, and real estate in an era before personal computers and the internet.
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Celebrating the City: Recent Photography Acquisitions from the Joy of Giving Something
Celebrating the City highlights a gift that has dramatically advanced the Museum’s already stellar photography collection. Juxtaposing striking recent images with work by some of the 20th century’s most important photographers, including the Museum’s first images by Robert Frank and William Klein, the exhibition is a moving celebration of the power of photography to capture New York and New Yorkers.
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Raise Your Voice: An Art Installation by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya
Raise Your Voice is an immersive installation by Brooklyn-based artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. The project mixes selections from the public art campaign “We Are More,” which depicted the resiliency of New York’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community, with original artwork of activists and allies Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X. Installed adjacent to the ongoing exhibition, Activist New York, Raise Your Voice poses a series of questions and invites audiences to engage their own powers of advocacy and activism.
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Activist New York
In a town renowned for its in-your-face persona, New Yorkers have banded together on issues as diverse as civil rights, wages, sexual orientation, and religious freedom. Now featuring a new section on the Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance.
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New York at Its Core
This exhibition captures the human energy that drove New York to become a city like no other, featuring the city’s “big personalities”—among them, Lenape Sachem Penhawitz, Alexander Hamilton, Elizabeth Jennings Graham, Walt Whitman, Emma Goldman, JP Morgan, Fiorello La Guardia, Jane Jacobs, and Jay-Z. Through almost 450 historic objects and images, many from the Museum’s rich collection, as well as contemporary video, photography, and interactive digital experiences, we welcome you to dive deep into the city’s past and create your own visions for its future.
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.
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