This Year’s Theme

IN RETROSPECT - 100 Years of New York Art

Concept and Direction by Processional Arts Workshop
Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, artistic directors

Artists statement

– Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles, Processional Arts Workshop

In Retrospect looks back on how a century of New York artists, illustrators, artworks, and visual movements have shaped our image of where and how we live.

The core mission behind Morningside Lights has always been to empower people in our community to distill complex ideas and experiences into simply evocative illuminated forms. Each year's procession literally holds up a mirror to our moment, a collective expression stitched together from diverse individual perspectives.  In these days, it is good to remember that artists in New York have been doing this for generations. At every contentious turning point, artists have given us a way to step back, take a breath, and navigate – or seek refuge from – the complexities of economic strife and migration, race and identity, mass-media and consumerism, health crises and struggles for social justice. Along the way they have helped us to crystallize our vision of ourselves and our city, celebrating the messy, beautiful, contentious complexity that makes a community.

This year we ask our community of lantern-makers, "What New York artist or artwork has shaped your vision of the city? What New York artwork has inspired you to evolve, learn, and move forward?"

In a week of collaborative workshops we will transform representative fragments from 100 years of art and artists into an illuminated retrospective of New York's rich and radical visual culture. In Retrospect is an open call to share and celebrate the eye-opening, life-changing works of art that have shaped our vision. So bring on your WPA murals and grafitti walls, your serene abstractions and subversive comics! Give us your Pop Art and Punk zines, your Hip-Hop and Harlem Renaissance, your moody urban realists and post-modern provocateurs, prominent public installations and underground outsider arts! Though the culminating procession may not capture the whole of New York's artistic legacy, the highlights we celebrate will remind us how myriad ways of seeing can cohabit and enrich one singular space.