2018 Exhibition Catalogs

"Dance for a City" Revisited

Garafola, Lynn

Labels, wall texts, and reflections on the exhibition "Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet," curated by Lynn Garafola, New-York Historical Society, April 20 - August 15, 1999.

The labels, wall texts, and reflections included here are intended to complement the volume "Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet," edited by Lynn Garafola, with Eric Foner, and published by Columbia University Press in 1999, with essays by Thomas Bender, Sally Banes, Charles M. Joseph, Richard Sennett, Jonathan Weinberg, and Nancy Reynolds. In revisiting this material, I wanted to evoke the experience of walking through six large galleries on the ground floor of the New-York Historical Society, with the reader enjoying by suggestion and as an act of imagination the numerous objects on display tracing the long history of the New York City Ballet. I remain deeply grateful to the exhibition designer, Stephen Saitas, for his guidance and for creating an installation of haunting beauty.