The City Reliquary’s new exhibit, Wonder Women: NYC’s Heroes of Heterodoxy spans topics of feminism, equality, and community—all subjects that we at the museum hold dear and are determined to highlight and uplift.
In the spirit of Wonder Women everywhere, we have teamed up with some amazing community members to educate, inspire, and entertain you!
Get tickets to all events here, at our Withfriends events page. Museum Members may reserve free tickets through the same page.
Friday, June 24th Opening Reception
– Open house, museum tours, informative talks, and some surprise performances –
Saturday, June 25th Cartoon Carnival
– Vintage33mm film cartoon showing with the theme: Wonderful Women –
Thursday, June 30th Carousel
– A comics reading and performances focusing on Women in Comics –
Thursday, July 14th Bare Book Club
– Women who love to read naked will be reading excerpts from articles, books, slash fiction, and more celebrating the world of comics –
Thursday, July 28th Superhero Burlesque
– A sexy show where all kinds of superheroes take it all off in the name of comics –
Zine accompanying the exhibition. Cover art by R. Sikoryak
For over a century, all across New York City, the women behind the fascinating evolution of Wonder Woman have rejected social norms and fought tirelessly to break the chains of orthodoxy in its many forms. Beginning with the suffrage movement in Greenwich Village and the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, the character’s unique history grew to span a polyamorous triad at Columbia University, a mental health clinic in Harlem, a Lower East Side bohemian boutique, the United Nations Building, and Black Lives Matter protests throughout the city. Explore the remarkable women who inspired the triumphant and troubling journey of America’s favorite female superhero in the City Reliquary Museum’s exhibit: Wonder Women: NYC’s Heroes of Heterodoxy.
The exhibition and accompanying limited-edition zine address additional themes integral to the Wonder Woman comics and their surrounding NYC history including:
Early 20th century birth control pioneers
Underground and Gay Comix
1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-generation feminists
BIPOC representations in comic art
NYC protest activities including women’s suffrage parades, pride parades, the BLM movement
Women’s, Transgender, and Queer liberation.
Contributors to the museum exhibit and limited edition comic book include:
Trina Robbins; artist and author, The Legend of Wonder Woman, and It Ain’t Me Babe
R. Sikoryak; artist, The Unquotable Trump, and Constitution Illustrated
Robyn Smith; artist, Nubia: Real One, and Wash Day Diaries
Tim Hanley: author, Wonder Woman Unbound, and Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale
Noah Berlatsky: author, Wonder Woman, Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948
Karen Green; Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University
Andy Mangels; author, editor; Gay Comix, founder/curator; Wonder Woman Museum
Wonder Women: NYC’s Heroes of Heterodoxy will be on view through the end of 2022.
BIRD SHOW documents the ways humans & birds notice, help, and threaten each other. Like all New Yorkers, wild birds are jostling for space and rubbing shoulders with others as they go about their day. Sometimes those interactions are with humans, sometimes with other wildlife; often these interactions are to the detriment of birds, sometimes, to the detriment of humans, and sometimes, to the benefit of both.
Curated by our own Board Member and Designer About Town Jacob Ford, BIRD SHOW exhibits art and artifacts illustrating these human-bird interactions and asks how we can better adapt to our fellow creatures and create a better habitat for us all.
Taxonomized incorrectly as science fair, fairly as art gallery, but most specifically as museum exhibition, BIRD SHOW looks at humans watching birds, and the birds staring back.
Wonder Woman-inspired illustration by Leslie Lanxinger
The City Reliquary Museum, in collaboration with Desert Island, is conducting a call for submissions of artwork and creative or academic writing related to or inspired by the popular icon, Wonder Woman.
Submissions will be considered for inclusion in a 32-page comic book, edition of 2000 titled “Wonder Women: NYC’s Heroes of Heterodoxy.” Edited by Desert Island founder, Gabe Fowler and City Reliquary founder, Dave Herman; it will serve as a companion piece to the museum exhibition of the same name on view at the City Reliquary Museum beginning in June 2022. The comic book will be distributed free to supporters of the City Reliquary and Desert Island, and to select comic book dealers throughout NYC. Selected contributors will receive 10 free copies of the publication.
Other contributors to the museum exhibit and limited edition comic book include:
Trina Robbins; artist and author, The Legend of Wonder Woman, and It Ain’t Me Babe
R. Sikoryak; artist, The Unquotable Trump, and Constitution Illustrated
Robyn Smith; artist, Nubia: Real One, and Wash Day Diaries
Tim Hanley: author, Wonder Woman Unbound, and Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale
Noah Berlatsky: author, Wonder Woman, Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics 1941-1948
Karen Green; Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University
Andy Mangels; author, editor; Gay Comix, founder/curator; Wonder Woman Museum
The publication and exhibition will address additional themes integral to the Wonder Woman comics and their surrounding NYC history including:
Early 20th century birth control pioneers
Underground and Gay Comix
1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-generation feminists
BIPOC representations in comic art
NYC protest activities including women’s suffrage parades, pride parades, the BLM movement
Women’s, Transgender, and Queer liberation.
More about the museum exhibition:
For over a century, all across New York City, the women behind the fascinating evolution of Wonder Woman have rejected social norms and fought tirelessly to break the chains of orthodoxy in its many forms. Beginning with the suffrage movement in Greenwich Village and the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, the character’s unique history grew to span a polyamorous triad at Columbia University, a mental health clinic in Harlem, a Lower East Side bohemian boutique, the United Nations Building, and Black Lives Matter protests throughout the city. Explore the remarkable women who inspired the triumphant and troubling journey of America’s favorite female superhero in the City Reliquary Museum’s exhibit: Wonder Women: NYC’s Heroes of Heterodoxy.
Submissions should be received by Friday, April 18th 2022.
Hello there! Interested in visiting the City Reliquary? The Museum is open on Saturdays and Sundays from 12-6 p.m. Visitors have two different options:
Make a reservation for a 45-minute time slot, during which you and your party will have the Museum to yourselves. These time slots begin at 12:00, 12:45, 3:00, and 3:45 each Saturday and Sunday. One person will pay for admission in advance and additional members of the group will pay at the door.
Come to the Museum without a reservation during our first-come, first-served open hours. These are from 1:30 to 3:00 and 4:30 to 6:00 each Saturday and Sunday.
Following current NYC guidelines, ALL VISITORS to the Museum ages 12 and older must show proof that they have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine authorized for emergency use by the FDA or WHO. We also ask that visitors to the Museum ages 2 and older wear a mask indoors.
Site where the vaccine was administered, or name of the person who administered it
In the spirit of civic solidarity, we want visiting the Museum to be a safe experience for all our visitors and volunteers. Thank you for your cooperation in this endeavor.
Last night, our supporters proved that there IS a future for the City Reliquary Museum on Metropolitan Avenue! With the help of hundreds of sustainable memberships, we were able to reach our goal, securing a new path forward for our beloved community-built organization.
This has not been simply an “end-of-the-year” fund drive, or a way to help a small business survive a global health tragedy. This is a new model for our long-term viability that will last us as long as our members are by our side.
If you became a member over the past two months, you didn’t simply get us over a hurdle, you established a new road ahead. You committed to helping us see beyond the current challenges and provided us with a backbone that will help us thrive.
Having met our most basic needs for survival in the storefront space, we are now working to rebuild our coffers to support the programming and exhibitions we will once again be able to deliver in our Williamsburgh home.
As more memberships continue to push us past our basic goal, we are able to start thinking about what more we can do beyond simply paying the storefront rent.
Additional memberships and donations will help us; rehire our one part-time administrative staff position, resume efforts to catalog our collections and make them accessible to remote visitors, and resume planning for the public exhibitions we’ve put on hold since the summer.
Just weeks ago, we had to consider the very real thought that this would be the end of the road for the museum as we knew it. Now we see that it is the end of what we once knew, but for the better. Rather than packing and relocating countless city relics, we can once again plan on delivering the unique blend of art, history, and civic pride that made us a part of this community.
The work has not ended; your support has just made it possible to begin once again.
With most civic gratitude, Dave Herman Founder, City Reliquary Museum & Civic Organization
Dave Herman and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz at the ribbon cutting for the City Reliquary storefront in 2006
Dear Friends of the Reliquary,
We’ve made it to the FINAL 24 HOURS of our Sustainability Drive with the help and encouragement of so many friends both old and new. Each day we see new sustainable memberships coming in, inching us closer to our very-real goal of $3,000/month of recurring funds needed. We have now received more than 90% of our goal!
We’re very very close, but it is not quite “in the bag.” We need to secure renewing memberships from ALL of our friends who have NOT YET SIGNED UP, and who still believe our Williamsburgh home should, can, and WILL SURVIVE!
During the nearly 20 years of our existence, I’ve heard two questions over and over, year after year: “What is this place?!?” and “How does this exist?!?” Much to my dismay, the answer to the latter has often been, “As if by magic.” For years, the City Reliquary has survived on good will, copious amounts of volunteer efforts, and repeated pleas for donations to help keep the whole operation afloat. For years, we’ve tried one creative approach after another, trying to invent a new sustainable model for an alternative, small-town museum to exist in the biggest of cities.
In recent years, we had become more reliant on what thankfully seemed to be a steady source of income; museum admissions by international and domestic tourists. Many larger museums would be proud of the impressive percentage of funding that we received from patrons walking in our front door. We ARE very proud of this fact, but no single source of revenue can truly sustain any organization. And, in the wake of a worldwide pandemic, we are left brutally aware of this.
So, two months ago we put out the call to our fans. We acknowledged that admissions, events, and one-time donations had been enough to get us this far, but NOT ENOUGH to secure a stable future in our Metropolitan Avenue location. The only way to keep on our current path would be through a large number of small and steady monthly and annual contributions. With our friends at (ironically) WithFriends, we set up this new model of sustainable support. Over the past 9 weeks, we’ve been given a new hope for survival by hundreds of friends; some we’ve known since the Reliquary was a tiny window display on Grand Street, and some fans we never knew we had until now.
What’s most promising about this moment, is the new optimism we’ve seen in recent weeks giving hope for a stronger City Reliquary community; not only for keeping the rent paid, but for breathing new life into a creative and unique space that can support the art, history, diversity, and civic pride that our city needs.
Robin Nagle is the Department of Sanitation of New York’s anthropologist-in-residence. Michael Miscione served as the Manhattan Borough Historian from 2006 to 2019.
Michael: Hey, Robin.
Robin: Hey, Mike – good to see you!
M: Like so many New Yorkers, we both love the City Reliquary. But it is hurting these days and it needs more than just love to get by. So I thought we should tell people why we think the Reliquary deserves their financial support. But first, what’s your attachment to the Reliquary?
R: The City Reliquary is a touchstone for me whenever I’m teaching or speaking or writing about New York’s history and its unique dynamic. I’ve seen the diverse exhibits, creative outreach, and gorgeously unique public programs inspire everyone lucky enough to experience them. And the Reliquary’s street-level focus and down-to-earth attitude is a model for the eventual Museum of Sanitation. How about you, Mike?
M: Well, I learned about the Reliquary when it was still just a glorified window display attached to Dave Herman’s street level apartment. I fell in love with the concept instantly and wanted to help out. I gave them a piece of the City Hall building for their collection.
R: Wait, what??
M: Don’t worry, I didn’t vandalize the place. It was a discarded scrap from when they renovated the roof about twenty years ago. Then I did a Jeopardy!-style quiz show for them — this was years before the Panorama Challenge. We did it out on the street and kept score with M&Ms in plastic cups. Speaking of the Panorama Challenge, I am honored that every year the Reliquary invites me to be a celebrity judge for that annual fund-raiser.
The Reliquary is such a special institution, don’t you agree?
R: The City Reliquary represents what I think of as the real New York. It celebrates the city’s authentic quirkiness, it’s overlooked histories, and its unfamous but fascinating people. In doing that, it guards against the forces of gentrification and corporatization that threaten to consume more and more of our urban dynamic.
M: Whenever I describe the Reliquary in one sentence I use the term “New Yorky.” But in a way that’s wrong. The reliquary is quintessentially American in a way that is entirely un-New York.
R: How so?
M: Whenever I take a vacation I never go to other big cities; I take road-trips through small-town and rural America. These little places all have their local homespun museums — and they all look like the Reliquary, not the Met! Here’s a rusty old tractor; there’s a display of pills and test tubes from the drug store before they tore it down; there’s an Indian blanket from the pioneer days. They are a hodgepodge of things that give that place an identity in the American tapestry. That’s what the Reliquary does, I think. It places “small town” New York City in the context of the rest of America.
R: An excellent point. The Reliquary shines a bright, loving light on objects and ephemera that are so easy to take for granted but that reflect the lived experience of so many New Yorkers, now and in the past. A subway turnstile, a phone booth — remember those? — a sign from the original 2nd Avenue Deli, a genuine wooden newsstand – those are just a few examples of the riches it holds. And it’s the only museum in New York that recognizes the enormous importance of Dead Horse Bay artifacts – treasures that deserve formal attention and conservation but that have been neglected by every other potentially relevant institution.
M: Oh, Robin, I know how much you love your Dead Horse Bay artifacts!
R: Absolutely! And here’s the thing about the City Reliquary – it’s not a high-end museum with a gajillion-dollar budget. It doesn’t attract huge corporate sponsors or deep-pocket donors. It survives because of us – just folks who care about preserving New York narratives and artifacts and histories that are too easily overlooked, and thus too easily forgotten.
The City Reliquary has always found a way to hold on – but the challenges of this year have been particularly daunting. It’s common to hear fundraisers claim that any dollar amount can make a big difference. For the City Reliquary, that’s never been more true than now.
M: Yes, we must keep the City Reliquary going. It’s irreplaceable. When I needed a place to celebrate Alligator in the Sewer Day — February 9th, by the way — they said, “Let’s do it here!” The same with the exhibition you helped organize about the city’s trash. Would the New-York Historical Society have been so welcoming? I doubt it.
Thank you, Mike and Robin, for your support and your encouraging words! You can join them as a Member of the City Reliquary at this link.
Author, educator, and closet archaeologist Miriam Sicherman
I first visited City Reliquary during the Open House New York weekend in October 2016. I’d heard about this little museum many times, but had never made my way to Williamsburg to see it. As soon as I set foot through the turnstile I knew I had entered a space that I could relate to. From the seltzer bottles to the geological specimens to the pencil sharpeners, everything on exhibit showed an attention to how ordinary things, things that most of us take for granted or completely ignore, can actually be objects of fascination and of great value.
Installation view of the Closet Archaeology exhibit at the City Reliquary
This mindset fit exactly with an unexpected project my elementary students had been working on for months. A curious kid, looking for old coins, had begun excavating lost items from underneath the floorboards of the student coat closet. When other kids joined in, it didn’t take long before a 1912 baseball card was found (Charles E. “Gabby” Street of the New York Americans, who became famous for catching a baseball dropped from the Washington Monument), not to mention an endless stream of candy wrappers from bygone brands, schoolwork, stamps, buttons, puzzle pieces, jewelry, bits of newspaper, and even cigarette boxes. These items swept us back to the life of our East Village neighborhood and its children over the course of more than a century. My students all caught the archaeological bug as we peered under the floorboards of more and more closets throughout our 1913 building. We loved finding, looking at, and researching these artifacts, from the cardboard caps of glass milk bottles to the scrawled 1950s spelling tests. And we wanted others to see them, too!
Photo by Seze Devres for Ace Hotel New York
Obviously, the City Reliquary was a perfect place for an exhibit. I spoke with the person working at the front desk that day and the wheels began turning. Working together with me and my students, the Reliquary staff created a beautiful exhibit in the summer of 2017, artfully displaying these bits of detritus from generations of schoolchildren. My own students were thrilled to be taken seriously as junior archaeologists and couldn’t believe it when they learned that more than a thousand people had come to see their exhibit. The lives of schoolchildren past become real to us know through these objects in a way that the written word or even a photo could never approach.
Photo by Seze Devres for Ace Hotel New York
The items that the Reliquary exhibits with such care and reverence are exactly the ones we might not otherwise notice. Who cares about an old World’s Fair souvenir or a model of the Statue of Liberty? Well, actually, we all SHOULD care. These are the artifacts that teach us about our past, the past that we’re all a product of, even newcomers to New York. By bringing these objects out into the open and focusing our attention on them, the Reliquary gives us back the collective past of our daily life and situates us in history. We can find out what people of the past loved and tolerated and lived with. By extension, it gives us a fresh perspective on the ordinary objects of our own lives, which someday will be historical artifacts as well.
The Gentleman Matt Levy (Photo: Jennifer MacFarlane)
Civic-minded New Yorkers, Americans and Citizens of the World. What a wondrous day it is to be alive. To feel the power of democracy shut the door to the maddening intimations of tyranny. How the true power of the people was able to tell a bigot and a despot that Hell No, We Don’t Want Four Mo’ Years. I can’t think of a more apt description of civic mindedness – the true power and pride in a city, any city, and its citizens. And at least here, in Brooklyn USA, there is one magnificent epicenter of civic-minded democracy, one IRL location that is by the people, for the people, and established to the people. I speak, of course, of the City Reliquary.
The first time I noticed the City Reliquary I was riding my bicycle through the streets of Williamsburg, probably on a gorgeous spring afternoon. As I was barrelling towards Grand street at the corner of Havemeyer, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye that was enough to make me think. . . what is this? I slowed down to inspect the curiosity – it was an art installation, displayed in a glass vitrine on the street-facing walls of a non-descript residential two story apartment building. But no, it was a series of DIY historical markers that the creator had lovingly detailed with Victorian-style lettering. But no, it was a personal collection of Statuettes of Liberties, with no overarching educational purposes at all – it was just some weirdo’s arty collection. But no, it was a Cabinet of Curiosities, focusing on NYC history and ephemera. Cool I thought, this is weird. . . and off I went.
A few months later, or maybe years later, honestly time is relative, I was riding my trusty bicycle once more when I passed what seemed to be a bodega, done up in the same aesthetic as a weird, wonderful, DIY exhibition, occupying an actual storefront space on Metropolitan, around the corner from that humble little windowbox display. Some maniacs had decided to open up an honest-to-goodness museum, without asking the art world, or the historical world, or the museum world, or anybody, really, for permission. It was wild and renegade and dorky and NYC-know-it-all-nerdtastic. I was absolutely hooked from day one.
I introduced myself to the President and VP and they asked what my skill set was. I replied “Well, I’m a NYC tour guide, and a native Brooklynite, and a performance poet, and I’m loud and I have a funny moustache and I like to throw events.” They said “Fantastic! Would you like to be the Event Director?” Which is how I got involved with the City Reliquary. I also didn’t have any permission or information behind what I was doing, in life, in art, in education, in anything really. I just threw myself into whatever passion was at hand and I took it to wherever it would take me.
Which is the entire aesthetic behind this “Collection of collections of NYC stuff.” It’s thrown together by passionate people who love the old New York, the new New York, the forever New York, and want to preserve the intangible and tangible parts of the city that are being gentrified away, or corporatized away, or sanitized away, or normalized away. And it’s people like you, friends of the CR, members of the CR, passers-by of the CR who are to thank for its continued existence. It’s also people like you who are the ones we turn to in times of financial straits. Passion can only get us so far. We need the support of the people to get us the rest of the way.
You can donate as little or as much as you’d like – gifts include blah blah blah – but without your generosity, the CR’s magical passion-fueled place in the heart of a changing Brooklyn will cease to be. And we won’t let that happen. Because passionate NYers like me, like you are what truly make New York New York. And we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
He says: I chose these cocktail donation level titles because all of them were (ostensibly) invented in NYC and each of them is a delicious, transportative historical lesson in what NYC used to be, and what fueled the imbibers of the day as they caroused, sang, danced, enjoyed life and participated in the great civic lesson of our time – being a citizen of New York City.
