The Museum of the City of New York has just opened a permanent exhibition that represents “New York at Its Core.” It tells the story, in space, of how New York came to be New York. ... Dense with objects, images, and interactive experiences, “New York at Its Core” was creatively designed by Studio Joseph, Local Projects, and Pentagram, with resources only a moneyed major city could marshal. We talked with historian Sarah M. Henry, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the museum, about the new exhibition and how a look at the city’s history can invite a rethinking of its future.

UO: “New York at Its Core” is an exhibit that is meant to sum up the city: 8.5 million people, 400-plus years of history, all in about 6500 square feet of exhibition space altogether. It’s an incredibly ambitious undertaking — what prompted it?

Sarah Henry: We’ve always felt that it is incumbent upon us as the Museum of the City of New York to undertake this project. On some level it’s an utterly impossible thing to do; on the other hand we knew going into it that it would be impossible, and unnecessary, to try to take an encyclopedic approach. Even if one were to achieve it, it would be ineffective because it would confuse and overwhelm people. With all of our temporary shows, we avoid doing a show about a topic, instead we present an argument or a question. So we brought the same intellectual practice to bear on this. Which is not to say that this is everything that ever happened to New York — that would be impossible and not that interesting probably. But this is to answer a question: What is it that makes New York, New York?

What precedents did you reflect on, or what peer institutions did you look to, when you started this endeavor?

One great counterpoint for us is the Chicago History Museum, which used to be called The Chicago Historical Society. It has a similar relationship to its subject. The Museum of London and the Amsterdam Museum are both institutions based in cities with which we share history, so it’s interesting that there is a direct connection as well as a parallel.

Both of them to some degree are fostering this kind of conversation about citizenship, but I think we’ve taken it to a different place than other museums have. In “New York at Its Core”, we devote more than a third of the space, our largest gallery, to the future. While we’ve seen other places that engage with the future, I’m not aware of another, within the context of a city museum, making such a bold and affirmative move to say that the future is not just the epilogue to what we are presenting, but it’s actually independently or equally important.

What’s an object that you are particularly keen on for its storytelling ability?

I think one of the most eloquent examples is the slave shackle, in the section on New York’s English period. It’s a very simple looking object; it has obviously suffered from being buried underground and there is kind of an austerity to its presence in the case, where its violent history comes across more clearly — you can imagine a person’s leg in there because there is room around it.

In the section about New York’s funky creativity in the 1970s we really wanted to put in Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street in his garbage can, but he just wasn’t going to fit. We also considered a beautiful artist’s drawing of Oscar, but in the end we went with a video of Sesame Street. I think that video, treated as an artifact, is a really powerful tool to use in a 20th century exhibition.

A lot of the information in the exhibit is relayed through data, and displayed on screens, which you would think could be experienced anywhere. At the same time, the exhibit accomplishes so much through the design and the atmospherics of the gallery. Space does matter! But having amassed and curated this trove of material and information, how does the space of the gallery relate to the world beyond? What can people take home with them?

We made a conscious decision to concentrate on what we would provide our visitors while they are here. There was a close collaboration between the physical and media designers, which made the material of the digital media as important as the materiality of a conventional artifactual piece. They worked together to create a totality of an environment.

But we know there is tremendously more than people can absorb in one visit. While we want everyone to come back multiple times, we also know that there are a lot of opportunities ahead of us to make this material more consumable after or before the visit. We just launched a beautiful new website which enables us to do different types of storytelling online.

The question of how this relates to the world outside is particularly exciting and challenging for a city museum. A place like the Metropolitan Museum of Art relates to the world beyond it — the entire world of all human art — but that world is not right outside its door. But we are a part of our topic, we are physically embedded in and immersed in the context that we curate, which is the city. There are really wonderful and enviable opportunities there, but we also have to be selective because if we put tentacles out into everything outside our door, that is as impossible as bringing everything inside.