Unknown artists are featured alongside living legends like Jamel Shabazz and Richard Renaldi at “New York Now: Home,” a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.
The exhibit, which has been in the works for over two years, is the first installment of a planned triennial celebrating local photography, and the first exhibit to kick off the museum’s centennial anniversary celebrations this year. It features collections of photos exploring the many facets of what “home” can mean to New Yorkers.
Among the artists included in the show is documentary photographer Xyza Cruz Bacani, who was a migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong before she came to New York in 2015 to create art about the struggles of other migrant workers. She soon met Farah, a Filipina survivor of labor trafficking living in Queens, at a meeting of Gabriela, an organization of women activists who fight for Filipino women's rights.
“I never call her my subject because I'm not the queen of England, I don't have a subject,” said Bacani. “I call it a collaboration, because she clearly shared her intimate life with me.”
For the last seven years, Bacani has taken photos of Farah as she chased the American dream. Farah worked as a nanny, housekeeper and babysitter to pay off her debts, graduated from school, got married, and finally achieved her dream of becoming a teacher. A series of Bacani’s gritty black-and-white photos of Farah’s everyday life — which show her shopping, going to Mosque, and waiting for the subway — are on display at Museum of the City of New York (MCNY).
Bacani, who moved to NYC full time in 2021, now turns to Farah for advice as she adapts to life here. Looking back at the photo series, she sees their struggles as intertwined.
“Farrah and I mirror each other,” she said. “It's not just her journey, but also mine. It's kind of dope to be part of this, you know, especially [because] I just officially moved here. Now we’re both making New York as our new home.”
"Liberty," from the series "We Are Like Air: NYC"
"Farah at the Subway Platform in Brooklyn," from the series "We Are Like Air: NYC"
To choose the works for the exhibit, co-curators Thea Quiray Tagle and Sean Corcoran worked with a panel of experts, received nominations from local photography organizations, and had an open call for submissions. They whittled down over 1,000 submissions to select 33 artists whose work was made in the last decade and reflects a concept of home.
“The idea is to explore the ways New Yorkers live, obviously within the four walls they might call home, but we also wanted to be a bit more expansive and consider our extended homes, like public spaces,” said Corcoran, who is MCNY's senior curator of prints and photographs. “We wanted to talk about the unhoused, and we also wanted to explore the idea of chosen families and chosen homes.”
The exhibit, located on the second floor of the museum, includes a couch and reading area, and is organized into four sections. There’s Home Crosses Borders, which explores the experiences of immigrant and refugee communities in the city; Home Is Chosen, about queer kinship and found families; Home Is a Haven, which presents diverse class and race expressions of home as a site of protection; and Home Is The Body, which focuses on artists who use portraiture to grapple with intergenerational trauma and social histories of places.
Dean Majd, a self-taught fine-art photographer from Queens, has work featured in the Home Is The Body section. This marks his first major showing — he was nominated by nonprofit photography foundation Aperture, who wrote about his ongoing series “Hard Feelings” at the height of the pandemic.
Majd’s photos are primarily intimate portraits of his close male friends within the skating and graffiti scene in Queens. One of the photos in the exhibit is “bohemian rhapsody,” which shows four men piled into a bathtub. Although they were wearing some clothing in real life, the blurriness of the image and the movement of the water makes it look like they’re nude.
"bohemian rhapsody" and "dallas (phoenix ash)" from the series "Hard Feelings"
“When I put it out, people had such a visceral reaction to it, and I couldn't understand that because I hadn't realized at the time that people perceived it as complete nudity,” he said. “I don't think a lot of people are used to seeing men so vulnerable. I just thought everyone had really close friends like this, like so close that we had almost no boundaries. It made me really appreciate what I had in my life.”
In another photo, “dallas (phoenix ash)”, Majd’s cousin stares into a mirror during what Majd describes as a “very dark moment in both our lives.” He said he's grateful for the trust given to him by his friends and family.
“I used to joke around with my friends and I would say, ‘Hey, I'm gonna put us in museums one day,’” he said. “I've never seen people like us, our stories be told, and I was so determined to show the world how special we were and to tell our story and build a legacy.”
Majd says he’s especially proud to take part in the exhibit because it shows the diverse fabric of New York as it is now: “It's like so many people of color, so many queer people, so many migrant people. So many people with so many age ranges and levels in photography.”
“New York Now: Home” is on display now at the Museum of the City of New York. Get ticket info here.
