Fifty years after two sisters started selling wildly colored hair dye out of a scrappy East Village storefront, their personal archives are now filling the walls of a small museum in Brooklyn. The City Reliquary is presenting “Still Manic After All These Years: 50 Years Of Manic Panic,” an exhibition built from the private collections of Tish and Snooky Bellomo, the founders of the punk-born hair color brand that has long since gone global.
According to the City Reliquary, the show traces Manic Panic from what it calls America's first punk rock boutique on St. Marks Place to the international hair-color business it became. The exhibit includes artifacts and ephemera from the sisters' early days as punk rockers in the East Village, when they regularly played at CBGB alongside bands like Blondie, the museum notes. Manic Panic opened its original shop at 33 St. Marks Place in 1977, as reported by Atlas Obscura.
Back then, the shop was about far more than hair dye. Tish and Snooky Bellomo told NY1 the store sold hair color alongside Tish's original clothing designs, Snooky's knitted sweaters, records, posters and fanzines. The storefront doubled as a central hangout spot for the downtown scene as much as it functioned as a retail business, per the seed reporting from amNewYork.
Platform Shoes, Punk Postcards and a Mother's Letter
The exhibit, curated by Lee Berman, pulls from items the Bellomo sisters saved for more than 50 years, according to amNewYork's reporting. Berman reportedly got the idea for the show after reading a New York Times article about Tish and Snooky, the outlet notes. Among the artifacts on display are Debbie Harry's platform shoes, which NY1 confirms are part of the exhibit, along with early Manic Panic business cards and flyers documented by amNewYork.
The archives also include more personal ephemera: a postcard from Stiv Bators and Cheetah Chrome of the Dead Boys, a letter from Joey Ramone's mother, and a 1982 letter from the Bellomo sisters' lawyer, per amNewYork's account. There's also a stage prop from the Sic F*cks and residual checks from the sisters' extra work on Law & Order, the outlet reports. The Bellomos have long been collectors and thrift shoppers, which helps explain how so much ephemera survived intact over five decades, according to the same reporting.
NY1 adds further texture to the collection, describing photographs from before the shop opened as well as materials documenting the sisters' various bands and famous friends. “There are photos from before they opened up the shop, all the different moves they've done, all the different bands they played in, their famous friends,” NY1 reports. AmNewYork reports the archives remain under review, and more items may be added during the exhibit's run.
From a Rented Storefront to a Long Island City Warehouse
Tish and Snooky closed the St. Marks Place store in 1989 as rents climbed, according to Village Preservation. But the Manic Panic brand didn't disappear — it has been headquartered since 1999 in a warehouse-like building along Newtown Creek in Long Island City, Atlas Obscura reports. Today, the hair dye line sells more than 50 different colors internationally, according to NY1, and is still run by Tish and Snooky Bellomo, per amNewYork's reporting.
The brand has also ridden a wave of renewed mainstream interest as pop stars including Rihanna and Katy Perry adopted brightly colored hair, Atlas Obscura notes. NY1 has separately reported that rainbow hair shades have grown in popularity well beyond punk rockers and performers in recent years. That broader cultural shift helps explain why a shop that once catered to a scrappy downtown scene now ships color worldwide.
A Museum Built From Flea Markets and Family Attics
The City Reliquary itself has a scrappy origin story that pairs naturally with Manic Panic's. Dave Herman founded the museum in 2002, and its broader collection includes items pulled from Herman's own family, estate sales, thrift stores, flea markets and even dumpster dives, according to amNewYork. The museum's mission, per that reporting, is to tell New York history from a local, street-level perspective rather than an institutional one.
That approach extended to the Manic Panic show's launch. The exhibit held an invite-only opening on a Friday, followed by a public opening the next day that amNewYork reports drew the largest crowd the museum had ever seen, according to Herman. Tish Bellomo said the finished exhibit seemed perfectly done and evoked 1977, per the same account.
Sources differ on exactly when the show closes. The City Reliquary's own listing states the exhibition runs through March 7, 2027, while NY1 reports it continues through March 28 without specifying a year. Either way, there's time for East Village nostalgists and curious newcomers alike to see how a punk hair-dye shop born out of a rented St. Marks Place storefront turned into a five-decade institution.
