On view starting today, timed with the return of fall, as well as the centenary of the 1918 flu epidemic, is the Museum of the City of New York exhibition "Germ City." More than a historical account of disease, Germ City looks at the subject through the lens of the metropolis, mixing history and artifacts with contemporary art to viscerally show how diseases have affected people and the urban environment.
Sarah M. Henry, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Museum of the City of New York said at a press event on Thursday, “New York has always been a crossroads of people, goods and ideas, and also of germs.” Dr. Simon Chaplin, Director of Wellcome, the London museum and library that provided lead support for the exhibition, provided an apt analogy: “Microbes inhabit us, like we inhabit cities.” Germ City certainly builds on the Museum’s permanent exhibition, New York at its Core, which Henry also curated. Germ City is curated in partnership with the New York Academy of Medicine and additional assistance from the Tenement Museum, New York Public Library, the Graduate Center at CUNY and the Brooklyn Historical Society.
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