The exhibit is up, and it looks terrific! It brings together student work from seven first year "Reading New York City" courses (Natural History of NYC, Nueva York, Photographic New York, Poet in New York, Psychology in a City of Immigrants, Scenes of Recognition: Philosophy in the City, and my own Religious Geography of New York), and three of us faculty assembled (curated!) it pretty much from scratch over 5 hours today. 
It came together beautifully, capturing the variety and interplay not only of courses and of the aspects of New York City explored in them, but of student perspectives - which, in a seminar college, is what it's all about. The most compelling piece in the exhibit is the table below - made wholly of material salvaged from the Meadowlands Park in New Jersey, whose hills are composed almost entirely of NYC garbage. The student, Zackary Lauth, wanted to find a way to capture the spirit of that place - its reeds had sustained a wicker furniture industry and its clay produced bricks in the 19th century - and so decided to carpenter a piece of furniture using only what he found there as raw materials. 
But he was struck also by the beauty of insouciant nature making a home in our waste (he showed the class a photo of a wild bird's eggs in a nest furnished of old plastic bags!), and so filled his table with a miniature Meadowlands, with bits of broken brick and marble (perhaps from the old Penn Station, whose rubble was dumped there?), oyster shells and worn glass - and seeds of grass and oregano.He dropped the table off in my office last week waterlogged from recent rain and smelling like freshly turned soil. Over the weekend, the grass sprouted. And just today tiny little leaves of oregano appeared.
Don't you want to come explore this city with students like these?
