Description

To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the founding of New Amsterdam, the New-York Historical Society will present a year-long project, New Amsterdam 400 , to provide scholars, students, and the public, the opportunity to consider New York City’s origins and the Dutch contributions to America’s ideals and its historic burdens–including the African slave trade and oppression of Indigenous peoples. New Amsterdam 400 will include a trio of exhibitions: “New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam,” featuring a seminal 1660 map of the settlement (on loan from Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence);  “Beatrice Glow: When Our Rivers Meet,” based in the artist’s research in the N-YHS collections and her creation of alternative monuments that illuminate Indigenous dispossession, enslavement, and extractive trade networks; and “John Quidor: New York Stories,” showcasing a selection of the painter’s work which animated the Dutch-New-York-focused fiction of Washington Irving and caricatured the Dutch and British colonial histories that haunted antebellum New York. While the grant is made in support of the entire project, Luce funds will be applied to the Quidor exhibition and the accompanying publication, which will be the first on the artist since the 1970s.