Exhibitions

From the Collection: Prints by Lucia Minervini

On view through April

Lucia Minervini's creation of a suite of solar plate etchings, utilizing Voelker-Orth family photos from the Museum’s archive, highlights her innovative approach to art-making and historical representation. Solar plate etching, as a medium, offers a contemporary twist to traditional printmaking techniques. It allows for greater detail and nuance in reproducing archival photographs.

The prints explore the hopes and aspirations, particularly of the women, who resided in the house before it became a museum. Ms. Minervini’s work invites visitors to pause to sense a place and time, and to reflect upon a family’s dreams and experiences.

Weeds in the Voelker Orth Garden:
Watercolors by Cindy De la Cruz

Opening May 2024

Each summer the Museum works with a talented group of interns. Cindy De la Cruz was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2016 when she painted this series of plants. The common garden weeds may not have been welcomed by the Museum’s gardener, but Cindy captured their natural beauty nonetheless. The watercolor images also illustrate a pamphlet produced by the Museum with instructions on how to best remove each plant when they grow where not wanted.

Cindy De la Cruz went on to work as a children's books designer for Nancy Paulsen Books and Putnam Young Readers at Penguin Young Readers.

Online exhibition:

Finding the Family: A Look into the Lives and Times of the Voelker-Orth Family

Finding the Family explores the lives of the Voelker Orth family through the local and historical happenings they experienced. The online exhibition highlights moments in the lives of Conrad, Theresa, and Elisabetha as we follow three generations of the family through the early 20th century.

The exhibition is organized by Carine Norvez, a tour guide at the Museum. She developed the exhibition while she was a CUNY Culture Corps intern studying items in our archive last year. Ms. Norvez has located period news articles and materials from a variety of sources to create a context for the papers and images left to the Museum. An audio text version accompanies the print.

Click here to see Finding the Family