The largest presentation of his work to date, the exhibition explores Commeraw’s multifaceted history as a craftsman, business owner, family man, and citizen through approximately 40 pieces of stoneware produced by Commeraw and his competitors between the late 1790s and 1819. Alongside these pieces are the primary documents that enabled historians to reconstruct the arc of his professional career and personal life, and through them convey a deeper understanding of free Black society in New York in the years between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Curated by Margi Hofer, vice president and Museum director; Mark Shapiro, researcher and potter; and Allison Robinson, Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in women’s history and public history

Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)
February 24   ̶  June 11, 2023
For over two decades, Kara Walker has created work that weaves together imagery from the antebellum South, the brutality of slavery, and racist stereotypes. Her works provoke controversy through their use of exaggerated caricatures that reflect long-standing racialized and gendered stereotypes and their lurid depictions of history. In her series of 15 prints, she responds to the two-volume anthology Harper’s Pictorial History of the Great Rebellion first published in 1866, exposing the omission of African Americans from the narrative and urging viewers to consider the continuing legacy of racial stereotyping and violence. To create her prints, Walker enlarged select illustrations from Harper’s and overlaid them with large, stenciled figures. The silhouettes visually disrupt the original scenes and suffuse them with the painful history left out of these illustrations. Traveling from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the exhibition has been contextualized by the Center for Women’s History at New-York Historical with images, objects, and documents from New-York Historical’s collections.

Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Coordinated at New-York Historical by Center for Women’s History fellows Allison Robinson, Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in women’s history and public history, and Ksenia M. Soboleva, Mellon Foundation gender and LGBTQ+ history fellow

Nature, Crisis, Consequence
March 31  ̶  July 16, 2023
Nature, Crisis, Consequence is a groundbreaking art exhibition that confronts the difficult issue of climate change and its social and cultural impact on different communities across America. Showcasing works drawn primarily from New-York Historical’s permanent collection, recent acquisitions, and loaned works, which collectively span the history of the United States, the exhibition explores subjects ranging from the proto-environmentalism of the Hudson River School to the razing of homes and churches to clear land for Central Park, the environmental and human tolls of the transcontinental railroad, and Indigenous artists’ calls to environmental action.

Exhibition highlights include the five-part series Course of Empire, Thomas Cole’s urgent warning against uncontrolled expansion into the natural world; an arresting seascape by Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee) overlaid by an abstract Pequot/Narragansett pattern which reclaims the present-day New England coast as Indigenous; and a woven ceramic basket by Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock) inspired by the mass fish die-off on Long Island caused by climate change. Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, senior curator of American Art at New-York Historical

Under Cover: J. C. Leyendecker and American Masculinity
May 5  ̶  August 13, 2023
The queer artist J. C. Leyendecker (1874–1951) helped shape American visual culture of the early 20th century through his countless illustrations for popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and advertisements for consumer goods. His trade character for Cluett Peabody & Company, the “Arrow Collar Man,” was a sex symbol for men and women alike. This exhibition takes a close look at the implications of Leyendecker’s queer gaze underlying the construction of masculinity for the mass market, analyzing his depictions of the male body and his images of male interactions, often of men sharing sexually charged looks.

Under Cover also offers counter-narratives to Leyendecker’s ideal of white, elite, and athletic male beauty, juxtaposing some of his paintings with artifacts, ephemera, and photographs that, for example, depict fashionable African American men during the Harlem Renaissance. Drawing from the National Museum of American Illustration’s extensive collection of Leyendecker materials, the exhibition features approximately 18 paintings as well as advertisements and magazine covers. Guest curated by Donald Albrecht and coordinated by Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture at New-York Historical

Women’s Work
July 2023  ̶  ongoing

What is “women’s work?” How have broad trends in American economic, legal, and political history encouraged women to take certain jobs and restricted them from “men’s work?” How have race, ethnicity, social class, legal status, sexual orientation, and gender presentation impacted these distinctions? In a new exhibition, the Center for Women’s History showcases approximately 45 objects from New-York Historical’s own Museum and Library collections to demonstrate how “women’s work” defies categorization. The items range from a 19th-century mahogany cradle to a 20th-century doctor’s dissection kit to a pinback button with the message “Shirley Chisholm for President.” The exhibition seeks to demonstrate that women’s work has been essential to American society and is inherently political: women’s work is everywhere. Curated by the Center for Women’s History curatorial staff and fellows

The Collection: New Conversations
August 2023  ̶  ongoing
What new stories can familiar works of art tell? This exhibition reimagines New-York Historical’s permanent collections through novel groupings that seek to complicate the more established meanings of individual objects.

The pairing of Betye Saar’s Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines (2017) with Fred Pansing’s New York Harbor (ca. 1900) takes celebratory narratives of American seafaring and uncovers the  trauma of the transatlantic slave trade. Martin Wong’s Canal Street (1992) and Oscar yi Hou’s Far Eastsiders, aka: Cowgirl Mama A.B & Son Wukong (2021) establish a longstanding lineage for queer Asian diasporic artists in New York City. And the juxtaposition of Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire with works by Josephine Walters and the contemporary Shinnecock artist Courtney M. Leonard calls attention to the racial and gender politics of the Hudson River School landscape tradition. As a whole, the groupings aim to center long-marginalized experiences and prompt a rethinking of both American art and the way museums tell history. Curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto, senior curator of American art

Opulent Imagination: The Objets d’Art of André Chervin and Carvin French Jewelers
September 8, 2023  ̶  January 28, 2024
World-renowned jeweler André Chervin (b. 1927) and his New York atelier, Carvin French, are recognized as masters of fine jewelry-making whose dazzling brooches, bracelets, necklaces, and earrings are sold by Tiffany & Co., Harry Winston, and Cartier. Unbeknownst to his many fans, Chervin has also been designing a personal collection of precious objets d’art over the past several decades. Expressive of his artistic imagination, passion for raw materials and bygone techniques, and fascination with the engineering of clockworks and other mechanisms, these secret treasures have never been shown to the public—until now.

Opulent Imagination introduces Chervin’s miniature masterpieces—one-of-a-kind lamps, clocks, figurines, boxes, personal accessories, and table decorations fashioned from gems such as rubies, diamonds, and sapphires and stones like amethyst, citrine, and quartz—in a dramatic display of approximately 50 jeweled confections made since the 1950s. Curated by Debra Schmidt Bach, curator of decorative arts and special exhibitions. 

Acts of Faith: Religion and the American West
September 22, 2023  ̶  February 25, 2024
The “American West,” as we know it today, emerged during the 1800s in the crucible of US expansion. But what did religion have to do with it? And how did expansion help create the diverse religious landscape of our country today? Investigating the convictions and beliefs that shaped westward expansion throughout the 19th century, Acts of Faith: Religion and the American West takes visitors beyond the mythologized “Wild West” of popular culture and presents a fuller and surprising picture: a West populated by preachers, pilgrims, and visionaries and home to sacred grounds and cathedrals that kindled spiritual feeling from the woodlands of New York all the way to the valleys of California.

The exhibition explores the experiences and traditions of people who, voluntarily or involuntarily, took part in this chaotic and transformative era—including diverse Native peoples, Protestant missionaries, Mormon settlers, Catholic communities, African American migrants, Jewish traders, and Chinese immigrant workers. Among the highlights on view are Robert Weir’s portrait of Sagoyewatha, or “Red Jacket”; a bulto (statue) of San Ysidro Labrador from 19th-century New Mexico on loan from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe; and an emigrant trunk labeled “From Basel to Salt Lake City, Utah” that belonged to a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on loan from the Utah Historical Society. Curated by Marci Reaven, vice president for history exhibitions and Lily Wong, associate curator