VILLAGE VOICES: A New Interactive Art and History Exhibit
Village Preservation is pleased to announce the launch of VILLAGE VOICES, an outdoor exhibition celebrating people, places, and moments from our neighborhoods’ history.
VILLAGE VOICES will be an engaging installation of exhibit boxes displayed throughout our neighborhoods featuring photographs, artifacts, and recorded narration that will provide entertaining and illuminating insight into our momentous heritage. We are creating VILLAGE VOICES as a tribute to our community and its rich heritage of artistic, cultural, and social innovation and progress.
Our new interactive art and history experience will be open to the public from September 13th, 2021 through October 13th, 2021. Using the streets of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and NoHo as our stage, we will tie the past with the present via an array of interactive shadowbox exhibits that highlight the history of the trailblazing people and places of our neighborhoods. We are focusing our lens on the artistic, social, cultural, and political movements that began and/or made great leaps forward here and the people who made them happen. The exhibition will be complemented by public programming throughout the run and deeper digital content on our website.
The twenty-one art installations include ones dedicated to writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, jazz singer Billie Holiday, Café Society (a club created to showcase African-American talent and the first racially integrated nightclub in the U.S.), and Jane Jacobs, a journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics, and whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that “urban renewal did not respect the needs of city dwellers.” Other sites and locations include Berenice Abbott, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Blackwell, Margaret Wise Brown, E. E. Cummings, John W. Draper, Bob Dylan, Martha Graham, Lorraine Hansberry, Larry Kramer, Joan Mitchell, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Oliver Sacks, John Sloan, Patti Smith, and the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
Installations will be accompanied by digital content accessed through QR codes on each exhibit with narrations recorded by a variety of Village residents, including John Leguizamo, Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, and Edward Norton, among others.
Sunday, September 12th will be the opening day of the exhibit. This ticketed event which will benefit Village Preservation will include an exclusive tour and preview of the exhibition sites with printed catalogues, audio guides, and live performances followed by an outdoor Gala event at Jefferson Market Garden.
To purchase tickets for the Opening Day Benefit, please visit https://www.villagepreservation.org/events/village-voices-benefit/.
Following the opening day, a map of the sites will be published on Village Preservation’s website. An announcement and a link to the map will be sent to all of our members and friends via eblast on September 13th.
We are deeply grateful for the support of our many Founders and supporters, with special thanks to:
Benefactor Craig Newmark Philanthropies; Visionaries James Bourlet Art Logistics, Douglas Elliman Real Estate, and MADE Design/Build