The Museum of the City of New York has traded its long-running rotating gallery for something permanent: a center dedicated entirely to the history and practice of protest. The Puffin Foundation Center for New York City Activism opens Friday on the museum's second floor, following an $8 million donation to fund its renovation and expansion and replacing the gallery known as Activist New York after 14 years on view, and it arrives paired with a second exhibit built around living Lenape voices rather than a purely historical lens.
A Permanent Home Replaces a 14-Year Gallery
Activist New York opened in 2012 and became, according to reporting from Spectrum News NY1, the museum's most popular field trip destination for school groups. The museum closed that exhibition on July 19 to make way for the new center, according to a Museum of the City of New York press release, clearing the second-floor south wing for what curators describe as an expansion and reimagining rather than a simple refresh. The new cornerstone exhibition, Raise Your Voice: New York Activism, covers more than 250 years of activism and organizes its content around demonstrations, organizing, art and media, and direct action.
Funding the transformation is a gift from the Puffin Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Perry Rosenstein that has partnered with the museum since 2009, per the same account. The foundation's multi-million dollar gift, described by the museum as the second-largest in its history, previously backed MCNY exhibitions on workers' rights, the women's suffrage movement, and Representative Shirley Chisholm, according to Hyperallergic. Sarah Seidman, the Puffin Foundation Curator of Social Activism, said the expanded gift enables the museum to expand exhibitions, programming, publications and collecting about activism, per Spectrum News NY1.
From Protest Posters to Voter Registration Tables
Raise Your Voice fills its galleries with art, flyers, historical artifacts and interactive activities meant to connect centuries-old tactics to present-day civic life. Historic pieces on view span from a noisemaker tied to the Civil War-era draft riots to a woman's suffrage banner and sash and a 1947 Peter Hopkins painting depicting clashes between communists and NYPD officers in Union Square, according to reporting from thecitylife.org. The exhibition's interactive Your City, Your Move section pairs a protest poster-making station and a digital neighborhood advocacy tool with on-site voter registration for visitors over 18, per the museum's own exhibition materials.
The center will also host a public program series including lectures, film screenings, book talks and family engagement events, according to Spectrum News NY1. Institutional leadership behind the effort includes Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, the museum's Ronay Menschel Director and President, and Seidman, who has worked on MCNY's activism exhibitions.
A Living Exhibit on Lenape Presence
Opening alongside Raise Your Voice is Halumii Ktapihna: Lenape Legacies and Futures, developed in partnership with the Éenda-Lŭnaapeewáhkiing Collective and community advisors and featuring original works from more than 30 contemporary Indigenous artists alongside archival objects and listening stations, according to the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition materials. The title translates to “we are still here forever,” and the show organizes its content into three sections — The Lunáapeew Today, Homelands, and Creating the Future — focused on Indigenous self-determination, language preservation, and land stewardship, per Manhattan Monday.
The museum worked with Lenape community members from the United States and Canada to build the exhibit, which features videos of Lenape women discussing their lives and the historic objects they hold, according to Spectrum News NY1's reporting. Kristin Jacobs, a language instructor from the Delaware Nation in Ontario, appears in one such video presented as if she is standing in the gallery alongside visitors. Speaking the language of the Lenape, she says: “I'm holding a wampum belt, and I'm here to tell you today about what a wampum belt is.” Brent Stonefish said the exhibit shows that Lenape people are still present, a point curator Angel Monxo Lopez, the museum's curator of community histories, echoed in describing how the show addresses the present through arts and culture while dealing with the past.
Ancestral Roots Predate the City by Millennia
The Lenape's history in Lenapehoking, the New York City area, spans more than 12,000 years, and the community was displaced. The exhibit's opening lands as the city marks 400 years since the founding of New Amsterdam, a backdrop that gives Halumii Ktapihna's focus on continuity and self-determination added weight for museum visitors walking between the two new galleries.
Together, the two exhibitions open after an $8 million gift funded the center's renovation and expansion and years of curatorial groundwork. Hoodline has previously covered other exhibitions at the museum, including a 50-foot NYC model exhibit, though this marks the first look at the Puffin Foundation Center for New York City Activism and its accompanying Lenape-curated show.
