On view in the front window of the City Reliquary Museum through January 2020
The City Reliquary Museum proudly presents a new window exhibit, Chocolate Milk! A photo documentary series by Mo Pepin, this display follows the extraordinary perseverance of a small carton of chocolate milk on the top of a phone booth on 1st Avenue and 21st Street.
Mo first spotted the carton on March 8, 2017 on her commute and kept an eye on it in the following weeks, watching it expand in the heat and then slowly shrink. Four months later, the carton remained untouched on the phone booth, and from this point Mo kept a closer eye on this marvel, photographing it about once a month. Through snow, rain, 45-mph winds, and other vagaries of the NYC streets, the chocolate milk carton remained atop the phone booth for 405 days, through April 2018.
Chocolate Milk is a story of endurance and decay, emblematic of the persistence necessary to survive in the city on a day-to-day basis and also of the lapses in our infrastructure that feed growing inequality. It is an example of an everyday object becoming iconic, an ephemeral item gaining unexpected permanence. We are the chocolate milk carton, yet we also call for the elimination of the conditions that allow the chocolate milk cartons to exist.
The City Reliquary’s Fall event series, Cinema City, continues on Saturday, November 16! Presented by Screen Slate contributor and NYC trivia expert (part of the reigning Panorama Challenge championship team!) Cosmo Bjorkenheim, each Cinema City program will explore New York City’s many and varied depictions in film through clips and discussion. From early Edison experiments to recent blockbusters, studio standards to cult favorites, you’ll see New York in a whole new light!
Our third Cinema City program examines cinematic errors in NYC’s geography. Nothing gets New Yorkers’ goats quite like filmmakers (especially non-New Yorker filmmakers) disrespecting the physical reality of our beloved city, like placing the Guggenheim around the corner from Penn Station or putting waiters in Katz’s Deli. Movies with egregious errors (ahem, Ghostbusters II) have the power to infuriate us proportional to the power of accurate NYC geography (as in the original Ghostbusters) to delight us. Prepare to boo the worst of the worst with us on Saturday, November 16 at 6:30 pm!
Once again, your $20 ticket includes unique program-themed snacks from Forest Dinners’ Lucia Jazayeri and Anna Gelb and a beer from Brooklyn Brewery! Lucia is the Creative Director for Clover Food Lab. Anna is the Director of Events for Outstanding in the Field.
On a now-vanished island in Jamaica Bay, a community of new immigrants and African-Americans transformed the city’s waste into industrial products and built a neighborhood from scratch. In her bookBrooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History, author Miriam Sicherman (of Closet Archaeology fame) traces the development of this oft-forgotten community from the 1850s to 1936, when they were evicted to create New York City’s first municipal airport.
We will celebrate the release of Brooklyn’s Barren Island with a talk and book signing by Miriam Sicherman at the City Reliquary Museum on Thursday, November 21 at 7 pm! Join us to learn more about this fascinating fragment of NYC history.
Join us on Thursday, October 24 from 6:30-8:30 pm to celebrate our new exhibition P.S. NYC: Artifacts from NYC Public Schools 1850-1970! Marty Raskin, the inspiration for this show and longtime collector of Board of Education memorabilia, will be on hand to discuss his time attending and working in NYC’s public schools and how he has come to amass this wide-ranging archive. Light refreshments will be available. You can RSVP for the reception on Facebook.
Come and experience a retro-tech time-travel experience unlike any other! Immerse yourself in the 1950s through incredible Midcentury 3-D photographs — taken mostly by amateurs with the Stereo Realist Camera system. Emmy-winning writer and comedian Eric Drysdale has been collecting the amazing images produced by this largely-forgotten technology for 25 years and will share them with you in your own (for the night) high-quality restored vintage stereo viewer. New York City will be highlighted, but all of America is the star. Don’t miss this intimate yet spectacular trip to the past!
There are only 12 tickets available for this evening, so we highly recommend purchasing in advance to guarantee your seat (and stereo-viewer)!
On Sunday, October 27, the City Reliquary will host an October art party experience unlike any other! Produced by Jacquelyn Shannon and Omer Gal of Cookie Tongue, the evening will feature music, performance art, puppetry, film, ritual, dance, and more. Expect the eerie and uncanny, haunting images that appear only in the corner of your eye, sounds that linger on the wind.
The City Reliquary’s Fall event series, Cinema City, continues on Friday, October 25! Presented by Screen Slate contributor and NYC trivia expert (part of the reigning Panorama Challenge championship team!) Cosmo Bjorkenheim, each Cinema City program will explore New York City’s many and varied depictions in film through clips and discussion. From early Edison experiments to recent blockbusters, studio standards to cult favorites, you’ll see New York in a whole new light!
Our second Cinema City program, in Halloween-adjacent fashion, collects instances of other cities in unconvincing New York City costumes. Some film productions have cut costs by filming in Toronto or Cincinnati and dressing up the set to resemble our fair city. While often every effort is taken to create a convincing faux New York, sometimes this aspect of design is completely neglected (like the distinctive Vancouver SkyTrain posing as the NYC subway in Jason Takes Manhattan, or Melbourne’s checkered squad cars standing in for NYPD cruisers in Knowing). This program will explore these and other egregious examples of Not New York as well as appearances of places that have become permanent New York City sets, like the neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati which frequently stands in for 1950s NYC.
Your ticket includes a specially designed menu of themed snacks created by Lucia Jazayeri and Anna Gelb, a.k.a. Forest Dinners! Lucia is the Creative Director for Clover Food Lab. Anna is the Director of Events for Outstanding in the Field. You’ll also receive a drink from our friends at Brooklyn Brewery! (Non-alcoholic beverages will also be available.)
The City Reliquary is pleased to announce our Fall event series, Cinema City! Presented by Screen Slate contributor and NYC trivia expert (part of the reigning Panorama Challenge championship team!) Cosmo Bjorkenheim, each Cinema City program will explore New York City’s many and varied depictions in film through clips and discussion. From early Edison experiments to recent blockbusters, studio standards to cult favorites, you’ll see New York in a whole new light!
On Saturday, October 5, 2019, Cinema City kicks off with an exploration of Coney Island on film! Coney Island’s thrill rides and colorful entertainment have made it a popular on-screen destination for more than 100 years. As its fortunes have changed, so too has its depiction on film. Cosmo will trace the history of America’s playground from dream destination to Darren Aronofsky fever dream in this hour-long program. You’ll have plenty of time to explore the City Reliquary’s collection afterward!
It wouldn’t be a film screening – or, indeed, a trip to Coney Island – without refreshments! Included in your ticket is an array of unique Coney Island-themed snacks from culinary creatives Lucia Jazayeri and Anna Gelb, a.k.a. Forest Dinners. Lucia is the Creative Director for Clover Food Lab. Anna is the Director of Events for Outstanding in the Field. You’ll also receive a drink from our friends at Brooklyn Brewery! (Non-alcoholic beverages will also be available.)
See you in the Cyclone line! Get your tickets here!
It’s King Pizza Records’ 4th Annual end-of-summer bash! Once again, the country’s finest punk, rock, metal, sludge, psych, and undefinable bands take over the City Reliquary’s backyard. Wear your best Hawaiian shirt and dancing shoes, because this is a packed lineup and you’ll want to stay all day!
The City Reliquary Museum is home to New York’s many histories, the multiple, interweaving narratives that make up this city we call home. This summer we are partnering with Argentinian artist Joaquin Torres Zavaleta to create a mural in our backyard, celebrating some of the NYC plants and birds that came from other countries. As these species made their homes here they transformed the urban environment. Some even became local icons, like the ever-present pigeon. Joaquin’s mural asks us to think about migration, settlement, and the ways that cultural exchange is embedded in our cityscapes. We are excited to welcome these birds to our backyard and to highlight how immigration continues to enrich and strengthen our city.
