NYC Trash! Past, Present, and Future

The City Reliquary Museum

November 2, 2017 — April 29, 2018

In 2017, we contributed to the City Reliquary’s exhibit NYC Trash! Past, Present, and Future alongside friends and colleagues including DSNY anthropologist-in-residence Dr. Robin Nagle, DSNY artist-in-residence Mierle Laderman Ukeles, retired Sanitation Worker Nelson Molina, and Miriam Sicherman (author of Brooklyn’s Barren Island: A Forgotten History).

Selected objects from Molina’s Treasures in the Trash collection

This exhibition presents the stories behind New York’s solid waste, from “one man’s garbage is another man’s gold” to the inventive ways New Yorkers are reusing and recycling. It traces the trajectory of waste management in New York, from the squalid nineteenth-century tenements documented by Jacob A. Riis, to the Dead Horse Bay landfill and the beginnings of the NYC Department of Sanitation at the turn of the century. It also addresses the mid-century landfill of Fresh Kills on Staten Island and the ecological restoration project currently underway to convert this site into park space.