Minerals of New York takes Halperin back to New York, her childhood home, through a ‘mineral biography of the city’ which takes shape across a range of media, including drawings, photographs, objects, and a 35mm slide show.
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Minerals of New York takes Halperin back to New York, her childhood home, through a ‘mineral biography of the city’ which takes shape across a range of media, including drawings, photographs, objects, and a 35mm slide show. The project began with an encounter with the Subway Garnet, a huge historic blood red mineral found on 35th Street and Broadway, led deep into the stores of the American Museum of Natural History, to the basement of a small bungalow in Queens to the personal mineral museum of a 96 year old man who began his collection as a boy as part of the Pick and Hammer Club with the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and back again to the Hall of Gems & Minerals. At the project’s heart is a piece of garnetiferous gneiss, excavated from beneath the street which Halperin grew up on – a point of connection between her biography, that of the modern city, and the deep geological time that shaped it. Dominic Paterson, curator of Minerals of New York, The Hunterian 2019