A recent visit to the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition Lost New York brought to mind this observation by the novelist Colson Whitehead: “You are a New Yorker when what was here before is more real than what is here now.” The show—photographs and testimonials about vanished city landmarks from the Crystal Palace (destroyed by fire in 1858) and the original Penn Station (demolished in 1963) to Keith Haring’s Pop Shop (closed in 2005)—is drawing enough enthusiastic visitors to confirm Whitehead’s observation . . . and yet this New Yorker is inclined to see things differently. What I find most real in New York is not its vanished past but the ongoing drama of survival. Even such symbolic structures of modernity as the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, and the Chrysler Building must now contend with a supersized skyline as they struggle to look like anything more than tourist souvenirs.
Yes, this is the city where all that is solid melts into air, but the push and pull of preserving what is precious has always struck me as what is most real about it. That, along with its exhilarating moments of resilience and regeneration, one of which I discovered when I went upstairs at the NYHS, invited by the museum’s former director Margi Hofer and Rebecca Klassen, curator of material culture. They introduced me to an exhibition by the museum’s artist-in-residence, Beatrice Glow: When Our Rivers Meet.
Glow, who is of Taiwanese descent, spent a great deal of time exploring the historical society’s collections for material related to New York’s Dutch colonial history. The four hundredth anniversary of the Dutch settlement in lower Manhattan was very much on her mind, as was the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebration commemorating Henry Hudson’s voyage up the Hudson on behalf of the Dutch East India Company in 1609 and Robert Fulton’s journey up the same river two centuries later. She found no lack of material in the archives, and yet there was a hidden perspective, an invisible global history of colonialism that she was determined to rediscover, reimagine, and bring to life.
What Glow did in collaboration with other artists, many of them indigenous, and historians whose ancestors were affected by the Dutch colonial enterprise surprised this visitor. Using the twenty-first-century techniques of 3-D printing, AI, and virtual reality, they have recast the city’s seal, its commemorative medals, the parade floats for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, as well as maps and such domestic objects as a baby rattle and a pair of sugar and spice bowls. In each case the objects echo their distinctive historic forms while their content is reworked to reflect on the underside of the Dutch colonial empire—the hidden legacy of death, destruction, and suffering.
And yet, because the objects on view are so exquisite, so carefully detailed, the overall tone of the display is more revelatory than hectoring, and at times leavened by wit. In one of the parade floats by Glow and Raul Balai, an artist based in Amsterdam, history has been recast to celebrate the largely unknown multiracial founding fathers Anthony Van Salee (c. 1607–1676) and Juan Rodriguez, “the first settler for the Dutch in Manhattan in 1613,” according to the wall label. In a delightful anachronism, the children on this float have been equipped with VR headsets to signify, Glow says, the importance of a “360 view of history.” Amen.
Another work, Riding with My Ancestors While We Spill the Tea, couples the family history of Teresa Vega, a genealogist, with Glow’s VR-sculpted photopolymer 3-D print of a rollicking stagecoach carrying several generations of Vega’s family—enslaved, indigenous, and free—as they share their stories with Vega. It’s an improbably joyous piece.
What, I wondered, as I scrutinized the tiny maquettes, would Simon Schama, the eminent historian of Dutch culture make of all this? His 1987 book, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, is justly celebrated as one of the finest cultural histories ever written, and yet it suddenly looked a bit different to me from heretofore. Schama is not unaware that the “golden century” owed much to mayhem and oppression abroad, but that is not his subject. And yet, this tiny exhibition’s sidelong glance at history made me wonder, why not?
Beatrice Glow: When Our Rivers Meet has received the appreciative endorsement and support of Ahmed Dadou, Consul General of the Netherlands in New York, and may even travel to the Netherlands. It is on display until August 18, and it is well worth immersing yourself in its displays. Consult the QR codes and be entranced by it all because there is much to delight in and even more to consider in this undertow to settler history.
As I left the museum I cast a sidelong glance at Lost New York, reflecting that, taken together with Beatrice Glow: When Our Rivers Meet, they fit my sense of what is best and most real about New York, our perpetual struggle to protect, preserve, and understand . . . so that, as my late friend, the political/cultural historian Marshal Berman, once observed, we can continue to “fight back the tears, and step on the gas.” Yes.
