Thursday, February 20 at 6:30 pm at the City Reliquary Museum
The City Reliquary and Glen Eden Einbinder invite you to an opening reception for our latest Community Collections exhibit of Glen Eden items! Glen’s eponymous collection (and potentially some extras) will be on view and Glen will be on hand to talk about the many and varied Glen Eden representations he has found from across the world. Light refreshments will be served. Admission is pay-what-you-wish, and all are welcome.
Opening Reception Friday, November 15 from 6-8 pm
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.
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.
The City Reliquary Proudly Presents:
Empire Skate: The Birthplace of Roller Disco
On view May 10, 2018 through October 14, 2018
Opening Reception: May 19th, 6 PM. RSVP on Facebook!
Admission: $5 general ; Free for City Reliquary Members
This new exhibit brings the world of Empire Roller Skating Center to life, exploring its role as a national icon and a focal point of the African American community in Brooklyn. Artifacts, archival materials, video, and first hand interviews come together to share the stories of the people who skated at Empire during the 70s and 80s, revealing the true origins of a world-wide cultural phenomenon.
Beverages generously sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery.
NYC Trash! Past, Present, & Future Sculpture Garden
April 7-29, 2018
Opening Reception Saturday, April 7th, from 12-3PM
Admission: $7 general/$5 members
The City Reliquary’s sculpture exhibition — in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibit, NYC Trash!: Past, Present, & Future — presents the work of ten local trash artists whose works will be on display in the Reliquary’s backyard garden. The opening reception will be on Saturday, April 7th, at 12pm.
The spirit of NYC Trash! reinforces the notion that trash can and should be reused. The sculptures on display are site-specific and fabricated from refuse and found objects.
Through the use of trash as art, NYC Trash!: Past, Present, & Future Sculpture Garden highlights the need for continued conversation about our waste problem — especially in a metropolis like New York City — and allows visitors to look at trash as more than ephemera.
During the April 7th opening, the Wildlife Conservation Corps (WCC) will screen 2 Lost Soles, a film about the urgency of conservation, and poet Jacqueline Ottman will read from her book “If Trash Could Talk.”
Artists include Bernard Klevickas (sculptures made from salvaged bicycle parts); Niki Lederer (colorful repurposed plastic turned into hanging pieces); Barbara Lubliner (Plastic Bottle Succulent Garden); Jeffrey Allen Price (making site-specific sculptures out of the by-products of art and life); Claudia Sbrissa (artwork inspired by landscapes); Tyrome Tripoli (sculpture representative of life journey and discovery); and Debbie Ullman (an urban intervention aimed at stimulating community engagement and interaction). An official DSNY garbage truck will be parked outside the museum to allow the public to get up close and personal with New York’s trash removal devices.
Closet Archaeology—an Accidental Time Capsule: Monday, March 5-Saturday, March 31A reception for the exhibition will be held on Thursday March 8 from 6-8p.
During the winter of 2015, an East Village fourth grader attending Children’s Workshop School peered into the dusty crevices beneath his classroom’s closet floorboards. He wondered what treasures might have fallen there in the 104 years since the building was constructed. His classmates took notice and joined in, poking and peeking under the boards.
Through this “closet archaeology,” an accidental time capsule —built over a century by generations of students— was excavated for the world to see. Led by their teacher, Miriam Sicherman, these junior archaeologists have unearthed love notes, spelling tests, caps from glass milk bottles, portraits of silent film stars, penny candy wrappers and more. They have evenlocated the former students, now adults, who lost these items across the decades.
The collection was first exhibited in 2017 at The City Reliquary, a not-for-profit museum and civic organization located at 370 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn. Through permanent displays of New York City artifacts, rotating exhibits, and annual cultural events, The City Reliquary connects visitors to both the past and present of New York.
Closet Archaeology will be on display from March 5-31.
The City Reliquary proudly presents the Community Collections display of images of the Virgin Mary from folklorist, artist, and Williamsburg resident Kay Turner. Turner has a long-term scholarly interest in representations of the Virgin and a consequent personal interest in images of the pop star Madonna. She is an expert in folk Catholic belief and has collected numerous images of the Virgin Mary in forms such as altar statues, planters, medallions, and even emblazoned on pillowcases and socks. Turner’s collection presents a powerful female figure beloved by believers and non-believers alike through the lenses of faith, art, fashion, and kitsch.
Turner will discuss her collection at the opening reception for this Community Collections display on Dec. 8 at 7 PM, the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Light refreshments will be served.
Kay Turner served as Folk Arts Director for the Brooklyn Arts Council from 2000 to 2014. Turner initiated numerous field research projects resulting in public programs such as Praise in the Park: Musical Expressions of Faith; Williamsburg Bridge 100th Anniversary Celebration; and Brooklyn Maqam: Arab Music Festival. Turner continues to teach as Adjunct Professor in the Performance Studies Graduate Program at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin. Among her publications are Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (Thames and Hudson); I Dream of Madonna: Women’s Dreams of the Goddess of Pop (Harper Collins); and Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (Wayne State University Press). Turner was recently elected President of the American Folklore Society (2016 – 2018). Turner, also a performer and musician, is currently at work on a book and performance project called What a Witch, a rethinking of the fairy tale witch in folklore and popular culture.
Not so long ago, a number of retro, sculptural shop signs lent a distinctive flavor to the area just east of the BQE in Williamsburg, among them a giant paintbrush, a diamond ring and the hammer that’s still outside Crest Hardware on Metropolitan Avenue. Neighborhood resident and writer Karen Hudes looks into the story behind the signs, about 75 of which were crafted 30 years ago by an artist named Stanley Wisniewolski.
At the exhibit, photos from the city’s Municipal Archives bring to light Williamsburg’s streetscape in the ’80s, which was rich in oversized coffee cups, handbags and cows’ heads made out of Styrofoam marking each storefront. See a collection of Wisniewolski’s original signs on display, find out why the smoke shop installation caused such a stir, and take in the vision of one of the neighborhood’s pioneering graphic designers (who certainly wouldn’t be the last).
Opening party at The City Reliquary
April THurd THursday: April 15th, 2010 @ 7 PM
$3 Brooklyn Brewery beers
Exhibit runs through mid-July.
Join Us Thursday May 10th from 7-10 PM for the
unveiling of two new exhibits:
The Bicycle Paintings of Taliah Lempert in our new Exhibition Hall
The Bicycle Builders’ Collection of Johnny Coast and Dave Perry in our Community Collections Window.
