The Museum of the City of New York recently announced that next month Elisabeth Sherman will become the institution’s chief curator and deputy director. The museum is well beloved by locals for dynamic shows that manage to blend both art and history, like a new show that features the stunning photography of Jacob Riis to communicate the century-old problem of the rent being too damn high. Sherman comes to the museum from past gigs at the International Center of Photography and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Observer caught up with her to discuss her new job and her plans for the institution.
Congratulations on the new gig! First question: how do you interpret the mission of the Museum of the City of New York in the context of the rich landscape of New York institutions?
MCNY is unique among New York institutions, which is what has always drawn me to it as a visitor and now as a staff member. Not bound by any one exhibition category—art, history, popular and vernacular culture, new media, fashion—nor time period, the museum is singularly dedicated to representing the rich tapestry of this city and helping its audiences engage in what it might become. While MCNY has many incredible peer organizations in New York, this interdisciplinary and transhistorical approach is specific to the museum.
You come to the museum from distinguished curatorial roles at the ICP and the Whitney. How will curating for the Museum of the City of New York be different?
I’m excited to lead the curatorial work at the Museum of the City of New York because it allows me to engage with the city itself as both subject and storyteller, which is an exciting shift in my career. While I have long engaged with the city as a subject, the focus was often on art and artists in broader geographical or conceptual contexts. Here at MCNY, the focus is squarely on New York City: its people, its neighborhoods, its upheavals and its triumphs.
What’s thrilling is that art becomes a way of reading the city’s history. Visual culture, from photography and painting to graffiti and design, doesn’t just illustrate the past; it captures lived experience, historical moments and points of view. Through art, we can understand how New Yorkers have seen themselves and their city at different moments in time. My goal here is to use that art to build bridges between past and present—to help visitors see that the city’s history isn’t fixed or distant; it’s something alive and evolving, just like the city itself, as well as to reconnect art with the contexts in which art is made. One of the most rewarding aspects of working with living artists is getting a window into their worlds and being introduced to the things that fascinate them. At MCNY, we can connect those otherwise disparate dots for our visitors, which is something I have long been eager to do in my curatorial work.
What’s the exhibition that you’re proudest of in your career so far? Which one was really ahead of its time?
You’re asking me to choose my favorite child! On a nearly daily basis, I come back to the exhibition Jennie Goldstein and I co-curated at the Whitney, “Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1960-2019.” We were far from the first curators to speak to the importance of craft practices in contemporary art and to try to dissolve the constructed boundaries that often keep apart these ways of working, but we did so in a moment where visitors were eager to engage in that conversation. We often hear from artists how meaningful the exhibition was to them, and we can see in museum and gallery exhibitions around the city and country how far we’ve come in a few short years in taking seriously the practices that we often call “craft.” Personally, working on that exhibition allowed me for the first time to bring my interest in making—something passed down to me from many members of my family, just like so many of the artists who use these materials—into my professional practice.
The museum boasts a collection of 750,000 objects. How do you begin to tackle that quantity, as a curator?
To quote Stephen Sondheim, one of the greats of New York: “bit by bit, putting it together.” Just like learning any vast subject, getting to know a collection is a combination of going deep and wide at the same time; selecting certain pockets of the holdings or individual objects and getting to know them and their provenance. Often, hearing the stories about how works entered the collection is as informative as understanding the objects themselves, as it gives you a texture of the institutional history and temperament across time and a better window into the varied whole. The staff at MCNY is exceptional and brings their own perspectives on the collection, which I look forward to learning from. And, as in everything we do in curatorial work, there will be a bit of intuition and heart, following what calls me and seeing where it leads and how it helps me to understand the vast stories that MCNY’s collection can tell.
What are some of your favorite shows that the museum has done in the past, ones that might serve as a guideline for your own ambitions?
I have been particularly moved by the ways in which MCNY commits itself to engaging its audiences and inviting them into exhibitions through a variety of experiences, including making, moving and interacting. I’m always trying to find ways within the traditional methodology of art museums to invite the viewers in to make meaning themselves, and this is a deeply ingrained philosophy at MCNY. I intend to continue that work, foregrounding in our exhibitions that visitors are not just recipients of curatorial knowledge, but they are active participants in the creation of knowledge.
New York feels like it’s going through an identity crisis. What role does its history play in defining what it is today?
If anything is constant in New York, it’s the feeling that it’s going through an identity crisis. The city’s state of constant change, never standing still, is its beating heart and one of its greatest qualities, but that means that those of us who live here and love it never quite know where we’re going next. By looking into the past for stories that help us understand how we got where we are or give us new perspectives on where we might go, we can show how the past is constantly informing us and is an ever more relevant guide. But we also have to know when to put history aside and lean on the stories being told in the present and those imagining our future to keep us thinking as creatively and expansively as possible.
What’s your personal relationship with New York City? Where is your favorite non-museum place to hang out?
A suburban kid—who will never let anyone forget that she was born in Queens and her first home was in Union Square—New York City has always been the locus around which I orbited. Past generations of my family settled in the city when they emigrated from Eastern Europe, and many of the neighborhoods in which I’ve lived and worked carry family lore. With the exception of college and graduate school, I’ve lived here my whole adult life and built my family in the city. I’m proud to be raising my children as Brooklynites, following in the footsteps of their great-grandparents.
In my free time, outside of museums and theater, nothing beats a lazy day in Prospect Park, especially on the first warm days of the year. Not only can you truly get lost there and find respite from the grid of the city streets, but there is no joy like the joy of New Yorkers spreading themselves out after a long winter indoors. It’s one of those magical places where so many people share space and pause to be still in the midst of our vibrating, energetic city. There’s nothing else like it, although I’ll be rekindling my appreciation for its more storied sibling, Central Park, on my daily commute to MCNY!
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