“Raise Your Voice,” MCNY’s Latest Permanent Exhibition, Connects Past with Present

(Credit: Brynn Shaffer)

Walking through the Museum of the City of New York’s latest exhibition, “Raise Your Voice: New York Activism,” feels like stepping inside a time capsule. Viewers embark on a voyage through New York history and the many movements that have shaped the city. Except, rather than being suspended in time, viewers are propelled forward — prompted to consider the current relevance of the struggles and gains of the past.

The new permanent gallery, which opened in September and builds upon the museum’s former wing, “Activist New York,” pays homage to the generations of New Yorkers who have driven change in the city by documenting over 250 years of local activism. In the three weeks following its debut, more than 10,000 visitors passed through the exhibition and overall museum attendance was up 30% compared to the same period last year, according to MCNY.

The exhibition “connects past and present,” said Sarah Seidman, the Puffin Foundation Curator of Social Activism and lead curator of the wing. “Unlike the previous exhibitions, it really focuses on how and why New Yorkers have mobilized around issues they believe in.”

“Raise Your Voice” features roughly 200 objects, set to rotate twice a year. Its light pink and orange walls are decked from floor to ceiling with evidence of the various tactics that activists have deployed over time, represented in four distinct sections: demonstrations, organizing, art and media, and direct action.

At the center is a film montage that plays continuous bits of documentary footage from Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the Peoples Climate March, anti-Vietnam War protests and more. The project, titled “City of Movement,” is “my love song to the waves of unrest, organizing and protest that have rocked New York from the earliest days of film recording to the beginning of the first Trump presidency,” wrote its director and editor Robin Blotnick in his artist’s statement. “Inspired by early 20th century ‘city symphonies,’ I wanted to highlight the practices that appear again and again in the service of ever-changing goals.”

(Credit: Brynn Shaffer)

But beyond the dozens of photographs and tapes that capture New Yorkers in various acts of resistance, the most striking feature of “Raise Your Voice” is the multitude of primary artifacts displayed.

Among these items is a Commes Des Garcons blue and white polka-dot dress that hangs on a headless mannequin. At first glance, the dress appears vintage, perhaps from the 1940s with its practical silhouette and grey raglan short sleeves. But a look at the accompanying placard reveals that the dress belonged to a woman who stood in front of a U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement armored vehicle during a protest in Chinatown last year. The dress was auctioned to raise funds for the New York Immigration Coalition before the purchaser donated it to MCNY.

Nearby, a postcard dated June 21, 1964 rests inside a glass vitrine. Addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Goodman,” it is from their son, Andrew Goodman, a white Jewish Queens College student who traveled to Mississippi for the landmark civil rights voter registration project, Freedom Summer. The handwritten note assures his parents that he has landed safely in the South and that his group was received warmly — signed, “All my love, Andy.” It’s not until reading the description that viewers unfamiliar with his name learn that the very evening Goodman mailed his letter, he was murdered by the Klu Klux Klan, alongside fellow activists James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.

Danny Tortelli, who visited the museum from Chicago, responded to the intentional juxtaposition of historical relics and contemporary items. “It’s all part of a heritage of pushing back from very brave people, but also reminding us that the work doesn’t end, and that the pushback has to continue because the forces that are pushing against us will not stop,” he said.

Other artifacts include a gorilla mask worn by the famous Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of female artist-activists devoted to exposing sexism, racism and corruption within the art world; condom cases designed by Keith Haring to destigmatize safe sex during the height of the 1980s-90s AIDS crisis; Gloria Steinem’s preserved leather address book; and a Nikon FG film camera that belonged to Hiram Maristany, longtime East Harlem resident and photographer revered for his documentation of the New York chapter of the Young Lords in the 1960s and 70s.

Many of the themes depicted in “Raise Your Voice” remain active topics of contention, from immigration and border security to abortion and reproductive rights.

“These are still existential crises, and people all over the country are still fighting for these causes every day,” said Thai Jones, a professor of history at Columbia University specializing in radical social activism. “Just because history can be encompassed in a museum doesn’t mean that we consider it to be a safe or domesticated story.”

But despite the exhibition’s contemporary resonance, Stephen Duncombe, a professor of art and media at NYU, as well as the cofounder and research director of the Center for Artistic Activism, warned that art can lose its political effectiveness when confined to the walls of a museum.

“Art can work as a sort of pressure release valve for feelings so they get kind of aroused and then dispersed,” he said.

Duncombe referenced a point made by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, noting that once displayed in an exhibit, “what could be an object for political mobilization becomes instead an object for contemplation. That’s the danger always with political art, that it aestheticizes politics and turns it into an object of contemplation rather than a site of transformation.”

The final section of the exhibition, “Your City, Your Move,” does more than invite reflection; it encourages visitors to take action. Here, they can register to vote through an on-site kiosk or design their own protest graphic at a digital poster-making station. Most importantly, Seidman said, MCNY wants to empower museum-goers of all ages to feel like they can get involved in their communities. “How they do that,” she said, “is a question that we want visitors to decide.”