New York Historical prepares to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday

To mark the 250th birthday of the United States next year, The New York Historical will be presenting six new exhibits starting this fall with “Declaring the Revolution: America’s Printed Path to Independence,” featuring prints from the David M. Rubenstein Americana Collection and even testimony from Benjamin Franklin on the Stamp Act. The exhibit at the museum, located along Central Park West in Manhattan, also will display political essays from John Adams, a 1733 engraving of the Magna Carta and Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.”

Also this fall, the museum will present “Arriving in America: Portraits of Immigrants from The New York Historical Collections,” featuring images from its collections of photos depicting the “immigrant experience,” according to its website.

The new year will usher in an exhibit about “Revolutionary Women” and in the spring, “Old Masters of New Amsterdam,” which tells the story of the people of the Dutch Golden Age through 60 Dutch Old Masters paintings, including works by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Jan Lievens and Jan Steen. The summer will bring “Democracy Matters,” featuring objects from the museum and library collections, in particular works by contemporary artists from New York City, and “You Should be Dancing”: New York, 1976, a photo collection of how the city survived a moment in crisis.

The museum’s celebration of the nation’s birthday comes at a time of great transition with the Trump administration back in the White House. City & State caught up with Louise Mirrer, The New York Historical’s president and CEO, for a quick tour of the museum, to discuss the upcoming exhibits and what can be learned from them during this historic time. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You pointed out a statue of Thomas Jefferson that once stood in the New York City Council chamber that was removed during the Black Lives Matter movement. How did it end up here?

It still belongs to the city, and we’re babysitting it. I think we will likely have the statue for a good long time, and it probably is going to make its way into one of the exhibitions (centered around) the 250th, which is inaugurating our new Tang Wing for American Democracy.

Your upcoming exhibits celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday include “Arriving in America: Portraits of Immigrants from The New York Historical Collections.” Would you say it’s perfect timing with what’s happening with immigration in this country at this moment?

New York has always thrived on newcomers. That’s been the story of this city from really the very beginning. Think of Alexander Hamilton … most of his important papers are here, and we record his story. He came here as a young immigrant from the Caribbean, like so many people do today, and really found his way here in New York. So it’s an important story for us, but I think it reminds us of the consequence of immigrants, not just to New York, of course, but to the nation writ large. And we celebrate that here.

Next, please talk about the Dutch Old Masters exhibit that’s coming.

So we’re doing an exhibition (on) New Amsterdam and its 400th anniversary. Who were those people? We actually don’t know a huge amount about them, and we don’t have depictions of them. There was no photography back then. So we’re doing an exhibition of Dutch Old Masters – Rembrandt and others – who showed what people in Amsterdam looked like, ordinary people. And the exhibition, apart from being amazing … most of these works have never been on view in New York City before. It’ll be kind of an astonishing array of paintings, but it will also give us a sense of those Dutch seeds.

You know how we see ourselves as a city that is welcoming? Our colleague, (Russell Shorto, director of the New Amsterdam Project), is certain it’s because of the Dutch influence. (And) when the English took over New York, they had the wisdom to not throw it away, but to embrace it.

You also will be showcasing a familiar subject for the museum, the women of the Revolutionary War, right?

We have our Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery, which is on the fourth floor, which we use as a gallery to showcase women’s important role in history. And we’re doing an exhibition on women of the American Revolution, which is the subject we’ve looked at before in many dimensions, but this will be a real focus.

Isn’t that the type of focus and specificity that makes The New York Historical one of the city’s most unique museums? And it’s the oldest one too, right?

You’ve hit the nail on the head. Across the hall, we have the Picasso tapestry that sat at the Four Seasons restaurant for 50-plus years. New York is a tear down and build up place. It isn’t a place that really likes to commemorate physical spaces. So, it’s great that we have an institution that, since its founding in 1804, is New York’s first museum and has been preserving and really disseminating to the public that history and the effects of that history.

Your museum exists in a town where oftentimes history is lost to the wrecking ball, right? For example, the only historic elements left on the Upper West Side’s Metro Theater are its art deco exterior. The interior was gutted and almost converted into a gym at one point.

My ancestors on both sides came to New York between 1875 and 1880 and I often think, because my great grandfather lived until his 90s, if (people like him) could see New York today, how would they feel? And I think on balance, they (might) feel really good because the 19th century certainly had a lot of things not to be proud of. And I think to see New York really rising the way it has, and surviving so much, 9/11 for example, and economic crisis after economic crisis, I think on balance, they might feel like the city made the right choices. And we all live here and not in Charleston, South Carolina, for example, where they preserved everything, because of the ways we are always building up, always seeing the future. So, you can look at it in both directions. I do think we’re lucky to live in the city that we live in, and that physical manifestation of how we are as New Yorkers.