This week, I went to the Museum of the City of New York. Firstly, I spent a lot of time around this neighborhood, so I was a bit baffled that I didn’t know of the museum’s location. I immediately noticed the intricacy of the architectural design of the building and the ivory color in contrast with the its background (being next to Central Park). This year, the museum’s concept was deeply focused on the appreciation of labor in New York City, the demographic of the city and the impact of New York City and indigenous people. A few things about the museum I appreciated was the unremarkable aesthetic of the museum, and how easy it was to maneuver from one exhibit to the next. Lastly, I feel like the placement in which this museum is located it significant as well. It is located in the middle of Spanish Harlem which I feel is important because of the amount of schools that are in that neighborhood. I feel like the easy access to this exam, especially for students is important because young students will be able to visit a museum that is close to or in their neighborhood and get to understand the history of the city they live in.
The first exhibit the me and the class began with was “Who We Are: Visualizing NYC by the Numbers”. This room was one of the most interesting rooms to me because it dove deeper into something I wondered most about–the demographic of New York City. I stepped first to the main attraction of the room and noticed that on the table was an exhibit called “Dive Into the Numbers”. This exhibit included an interactive way to see all of New York City based on people by their race, and how many of which race lived in specific neighborhoods. The color scheme that was used in the second image work together well because they are all different tones of the same color of orange. I also noticed that only sans serif type font was used for the whole exhibition piece. This was interesting to me because this is something I have always wondered about. With the experience of living in two different boroughs, I am able to see that the demographic of New York is constantly changing. It was intriguing to me to see all of the data I’ve wondered about right in front of me.
Next, I moved down onto the second floor of the museum. I was impelled to go to a small part of the museum called “Urban Indian: Native New York Now”. This part of the museum conveyed the treatment and recognition of indigenous people in New York City. The picture that captured my interest the most was the commentary on the diorama of the colonization of native people during the Lenape-Dutch encounter in 1939. This diorama has been criticized many times because of its depiction of the situation between the native people and the colonists. Firstly, in the diorama, it looks as if the native people are willingly submitting to the colonists. Secondly, the appearance of the native people is also stereotypically introduced. Hence the many complaints and backlash the Museum of Natural History received from this, instead of rearranging the diorama they put text to clarify more clearly what the setting was supposed to have been in the scene. Although the Museum of Natural History received a lot of criticism from this diorama, from a designer’s point of view, the text was well placed in a way that it did not take away from the original diorama.
After seeing the rest of the exhibit, I decided to take a trip back up to the third floor of the museum. Here is where I discovered the “Pride” exhibition of the museum and for this exhibit there wasn’t a piece I liked in particular; it was more the setup of the room. The lights in the room were set with specific RGB colors to exhibit the colors of the pride flag. In the back of the room had colorful sticky notes for people to write about their lives as LGBTQA people. Those papers as well were set in the room to be arranged into colors of the rainbow, or the pride flag colors.
The Museum of the City of New York is a museum I would go to again, especially as a designer. As a designer, I was able to really appreciate the amount of thought that went into the color scheme of some of the exhibition rooms as well as the composition of rearranging text, like the walls in the third room in the Who We Are exhibition. I would love to visit this museum again and cannot wait for their next exhibition.
