A Snapshot of New York

MASS MOCA’S PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION CELEBRATES SOME OF MUSIC’S ICONIC MOMENTS IN THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS 

By Benjamin Lerner | July 24, 2025

New York State of Mind is the fifth and final chapter in a landmark show chronicling three decades of music through iconic photos taken from 1969 to 1999. From Woodstock in Upstate New York to all five Boroughs in the city, New York is seen through the eyes of the artists who lived it, the lens of the photographers who documented it, and the curators who now reframe it for a new generation. 

On view through August 2026 in the Robert W. Wilson Building, the exhibition draws from the collection of Michael Zilkha, an entrepreneur, collector, and co-founder of ZE Records. It showcases works by photographers Roberta Bayley, Victor Bockris, Stephanie Chernikowski, David Corio, George Dubose, Danny Fields, Lynn Goldsmith, David Godlis, Bob Gruen, Lily Hou, Elliott Landy, Laura Levine, Christopher Makos, Anton Perich, Marcia Resnick, Ebet Roberts, Joe Sia, Kate Simon, Allan Tannenbaum, and Mark Weiss. 

Equal parts historical archive and visual love letter, New York State of Mind frames New York as not only a backdrop, but as a key element of the photographs. Its venues, street corners, and subway cars vibrate with the same restlessness and radical potential as the artists who frequented its lively and electric stages.

First and Foremost, It’s About the People

Some might say that at the heart of the exhibition is Bob Gruen’s work. His photographs have become synonymous with some of the most indelible icons in music history. In speaking with Gruen, it’s clear to him that his work—and, in particular, his photos in the exhibition—are rooted in something deeply personal. In his world, the music icons who have defined generations are people first and foremost—and some of them are his dear friends. 

“I photograph the person, not the artist,” Gruen says, reflecting on a lifetime spent on stage without ever stepping into the spotlight himself. His lens has immortalized some of the most recognizable figures in modern music—John Lennon, David Bowie, the Beastie Boys, Marc Bolan, The Runaways—yet what defines his work is not celebrity, but connection. “You get to know these people by knowing when not to take the picture—by building trust,” he explains. 

That trust was earned over decades, not assignments. Gruen wasn’t a hired hand parachuting into rehearsals or photo calls—he was there, night after night, drink after drink, song after song. “I didn’t visit the scene like a journalist,” he says. “This was my life. These were my friends. This was my world.” That approach is nowhere more visible than in his now-iconic 1974 image of John Lennon in a sleeveless “New York City” T-shirt. On view in the MASS MoCA exhibition, the photo shows Lennon standing relaxed, arms folded, eyes half-shadowed behind dark sunglasses. It’s casual, composed, and endlessly mythic. But for Gruen, the myth was never the point. “He wore that shirt because he loved this place,” he remembers. “I just waited until he looked right through me.” 

Gruen’s access to Lennon was born not of press credentials, but of friendship. He became John and Yoko’s personal photographer after meeting them in New York in 1972. “John was very comfortable having his picture taken,” says Gruen. “By that time, he and Yoko were so public—they felt that what they were doing should be documented.” It helped that Lennon himself was a passionate amateur photographer. “He had every kind of camera made—Polaroids, film cameras, movie cameras, video. He was fascinated by all the different ways you could create and communicate. He wasn’t just the most photographed man in the world—he actually enjoyed the process. He appreciated it.” 

Gruen learned early on that sometimes it’s not about pressing the shutter. “You get more access not just by taking good pictures,” he says, “but by knowing when to put the camera down. People respected that. John did. Joe Strummer did.” Strummer, the late frontman of The Clash, was another of Gruen’s close friends—and one of his favorite subjects. “Joe was a real inspirational leader,” Gruen says with quiet reverence. “He never seemed to tire of talking to people, learning from them, teaching them. He had true compassion. He was the nicest and also the most fun-loving person I’ve known. My wife and I would go out to dinner with Joe, and we had a rule: bring sunglasses. Because if you were going out with Joe, you weren’t coming home until the sun was up.” Another artist who made a lasting impression was Tina Turner. Gruen credits her husband at the time, Ike Turner, with jumpstarting his career. “I met Ike and Tina at a club in Queens, took some photos of Tina, and Ike liked them so much he brought me on tour,” he recalls. 

Gruen’s photojournalistic instincts took him from Madison Square Garden to Max’s Kansas City, from the corporate polish of Led Zeppelin’s stadium concerts and jet planes to the damp basement grit of CBGB. The same artistic spirit guided every frame. “Whether I was shooting a major arena show or an unknown band at a club where the floor was covered in beer,” he says, “I was trying to capture a feeling.” 

The same philosophy is evident in his 1976 image of The Runaways, photographed at My Father’s Place in New York. Still teenagers, the all-girl band whose lineup featured future rock legend Joan Jett, radiates raw energy, unfiltered by the industry’s influence. “They were just figuring out how to be a band,” he recalls. “But the power was already there. You could feel it.” 

Gruen’s camera was often pointed at scenes no one thought to preserve. “At the time, nobody thought any of this was going to matter,” he admits. “There was no commercial potential in it. You were just trying to meet someone who’d buy you a beer. I’d finish shooting a show at the Garden and then go to CBGBs to hang out.” He’s quick to note that the bands weren’t always good—but they got better. “CBGB wasn’t full of great musicians. It was full of people who didn’t fit anywhere else. Most of them were pretty bad at first. But Hilly”—referring to Hilly Kristal, CBGB’s famously hands-off owner—“let them play anyway. If you brought a few friends who’d buy a couple of beers, you got a slot. That’s what made it beautiful.” 

Gruen remembers watching Blondie one night and realizing something was shifting. “It was packed. The energy was electric. And I thought, this is going to be bigger than this club. This is going to go global.” Despite the fame of his subjects, Gruen remains disarmingly humble. “There were bands I thought were going to be huge that never went anywhere. And others—like Madonna—who I didn’t think would make it. Shows what I know,” he says, chuckling. Still, when the time and the chemistry align, Gruen’s lens becomes something else—a mirror of a moment, an imprint of feeling. “Sometimes I see one of my photos, and I can still hear the music,” he says. “That’s what I want people to feel. Like they were there.” 

Now, with his work featured in New York State of Mind, Gruen looks back with both pride and curiosity. “It’s strange to see these photos taken so long ago, still living new lives," he says. “But I’m glad people are seeing them. These weren’t just musicians—they were people figuring things out in real time, just like the rest of us.”

The Collector’s Archive 

For Michael Zilkha, the journey that led to New York State of Mind began long before there was an archive to speak of. It started in the late 1970s, when New York’s downtown scene was still an open circuit—raw, unruly, and exhilaratingly undefined. Zilkha had just co-founded ZE Records, the now-legendary label whose early roster would come to represent the kaleidoscopic collision of punk, disco, funk, art rock, and downtown weirdness. It was a label that championed iconoclasts like Lydia Lunch, Cristina, James Chance and the Contortions, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. ZE became, in his words, “a house for outliers”—a place where experimental voices didn’t have to explain themselves. 

Zilkha was immersed in the nightlife, orbiting Max’s Kansas City and CBGB with the same restless curiosity that would later fuel his collecting instincts. But at the time, he wasn’t taking pictures. He was busy putting out records, publishing liner notes, and riding the electric pulse of a city in cultural freefall. “I was young and involved in it, but I didn’t think to preserve it,” he says. “I was living it.” 

It wasn’t until decades later—after ZE had shuttered, after Zilkha had moved to Houston and co-owned a highly successful energy company with his father—that the idea began to take shape. In the late 1990s, following the sale of his business, Zilkha kept up his visits to New York every other weekend, visiting his daughter and reconnecting with his roots. With more time and freedom as his daughter got older, he began seeking out the artists whose work had shaped his worldview—not on vinyl, but on film. 

“There weren’t many galleries selling music photography at that time,” he recalls. “If you wanted to find something meaningful, you had to go to the photographers themselves.” And so, he did. He began visiting the homes and studios of people he’d known or admired from afar—Roberta Bayley, Kate Simon, Lynn Goldsmith, Barry Feinstein, Bob Gruen—and asked to see their contact sheets. “I wasn’t looking for glossy, commercial images,” he explains. “I wanted intimate, unvarnished pieces of history. I’d sit with photographers, go through their archives, and ask them to show me what others might not ask for—the quiet moments, the eye contact.” 

He wasn’t collecting as a dealer, and he never intended to build a gallery business. For Zilkha, the photos were a way of remembering—of reclaiming a cultural lineage that had shaped him and too often gone overlooked. “Everything felt so free and possible then,” he says of New York in the 1970s. “It wasn’t polished. It was dangerous and alive. And these photos, they’re not just about the music. They’re about the city itself—its texture, its permission to reinvent yourself.” 

As the collection grew, he began hanging the images salon-style throughout his Houston office. “I had them on every wall,” he says. “They were just part of the atmosphere.” Visitors from across industries would stop and stare. Some recognized the subjects; others simply responded to the emotion on display. “They were a universal language,” Zilkha recalls. “Even if you didn’t know who you were looking at, you felt something.” 

The first formal exhibition from his collection came in 2006 at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston. Then the Portland Museum of Art presented Backstage Pass, a tightly curated survey of Zilkha’s archive. The show was a hit—so much so that it later traveled to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont. But Zilkha remained largely anonymous throughout. “I didn’t want it to be about me,” he says. “I wanted the photos to speak for themselves.” 

Several years later, as Zilkha prepared to close his Houston office, he was faced with a question: what to do with the collection? A longtime friend, Joe Thompson, the founding director of MASS MoCA, offered a solution. “Joe knew the collection and loved it,” Zilkha says. “He said, ‘Let’s bring it here. We have the space. We’ll do it right.’” 

And they eventually did. Denise Markonish, then Chief Curator at MASS MoCA, traveled to Houston to view the collection firsthand. “Denise came down and spent time with it,” Zilkha recalls. “She got to know the work. She understood what it was.” From those early conversations came the idea for a five-part exhibition series. 

The inaugural exhibition, The Bright and Hollow Sky, opened in 2019 and took its name from an Iggy Pop lyric. It focused on the private lives of public figures, peeling back the layers of rock iconography to reveal moments of tenderness, doubt, and joy. Next came How Does Your Horn Sound? (2020-2022), which explored the interplay between jazz musicians and visual artists in 1970s New York. Deep Water followed (2023-2024), curated by former MASS MoCA Curator Alexandra Foradas. It spotlighted the legacy of Black jazz and blues performers from the 1950s and ’60s. And Musicians on Musicians (2024-2025), curated by Wilco, invited artists to select the images that had most shaped their sense of musical lineage. 

With New York State of Mind, the series has entered its final chapter. “In many ways, it brings the whole project full circle,” Zilkha says. “It’s about the city that made all of this possible.” 

Though Zilkha downplays his role in the process, his curatorial fingerprint is unmistakable. The photographs in the exhibition were not chosen at random—they are the result of years of conversation, discernment, and deeply felt resonance. “I’ve never been interested in grand statements,” he says. “I care about the quiet moments—the glance, the intimacy, the authenticity. That’s what this is about.” 

When the MASS MoCA series concludes in August 2026, the collection will make its way to the Portland Museum of Art, where Zilkha plans to donate it. “They want to incorporate performance, video, or some more interactive elements,” he says. “I’m excited to see where it goes.”

The Exhibition’s Evolution

For Susan Cross, MASS MoCA’s Interim Director of Visual Arts, New York State of Mind is an exciting culmination to a remarkable exhibition series from Zilkha’s collection, exemplifying the museum’s multidisciplinary spirit. “This series of exhibitions reflects how we work with visual artists and musicians, both separately and together,” Cross says. “There’s this real artistic exchange between visual artists, performing artists, musicians and we want to give a platform to art in all its forms.” The exhibition builds on years of visual storytelling at the museum, and it does so with a distinctive rhythm and resonance. 

While each of the previous shows in the series had its own tonal range and thematic center, New York State of Mind distills them all into a singular, immersive chord. New York City pulses throughout the exhibition like a bassline. In the wall text that anchors the exhibition, a quote from Patti Smith sets the mood: 

New York is the thing that seduced me.

New York is the thing that formed me. 

New York is the thing that deformed me.

New York is the thing that perverted me.

New York is the thing that converted me. 

And New York is the thing that I love too. 

The show takes those words as both a thesis and an invitation. 

Walking through the exhibition, the viewer encounters the city in shifting registers. It’s there in the post-show camaraderie of Christmas Dinner at Max’s Kansas City (1975) by Gruen. It echoes in the grainy intimacy of David Godlis’s Richard Hell, Bowery Rainstorm (1977), and in the quiet clarity of Anton Perich’s Joan Baez at Max’s Kansas City (1970) —a portrait where her eyes speak volumes. In the photo Laura Levine took of Joey Ramone in 1982, the punk frontman is caught in a moment of tenderness, not performance. And in Marcia Resnick’s powerful image of Lydia Lunch and James Chance, the city’s underground scene and aesthetic ethos shines through directly and defiantly. In light of Resnick’s recent passing on June 18, the photograph holds special significance within the exhibition. 

New York State of Mind is especially resonant at MASS MoCA because of its commitment to live music performances, such as the FreshGrass Festival every September and the biennial Solid Sound Festival curated by Wilco. The museum’s galleries are built with sound in mind; its black box theaters often echo with rehearsals and genre-blurring commissions, and its courtyards routinely host performances that spill into the night. 

That sensibility made MASS MoCA a natural partner for Zilkha, whose career has always existed at the intersection of music, narrative, and aesthetic risk-taking. The five-part exhibition series that emerged from his archive chronicles not just the evolution of music photography, but also the changing ways that music interacts with memory, identity, and cultural legacy. It has been a beloved part of the museum’s program, the product of a unique partnership that spans nearly a decade. 

Each chapter has traced a distinct narrative arc; with New York State of Mind, the narrative narrows and expands all at once—zeroing in on the city that was both a crucible and catalyst for all the other movements the previous exhibitions touched upon. MASS MoCA’s sprawling campus, once a textile mill and now a constellation of galleries, performance spaces, and working studios, feels uniquely equipped to host a show like this. 

Silkscreened Memory

Beyond the photographic prints that line the walls of New York State of Mind, another creative layer unfolds just across the MASS MoCA campus. Tucked into the first floor of Building 13, Gary Lichtenstein Editions pulses with color, craftsmanship, and a spirit of reinvention. Here, some of Gruen’s most recognizable images are being reinterpreted, retextured, and reborn through the alchemical medium of silkscreen. 

Lichtenstein is not merely a printer. Over the course of a 45-year career, he has worked with a remarkable cross-section of artists—among them Marina Abramović, Robert Indiana, Roz Chast, and Cey Adams—bringing their visions to life through the demanding, analog discipline of hand-pulled silkscreen. His prints are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian, and beyond. At MASS MoCA, Lichtenstein not only operates a full-time studio and print shop, he also curates exhibitions, collaborates on fundraising initiatives, and hosts educational events that explore the evolving boundaries between fine art and popular culture. 

His partnership with Gruen began over a decade ago—an encounter born of creative kinship rather than commercial planning. “The opportunity to work with Bob was a no-brainer,” Lichtenstein recalls. “He’s a remarkable human being, photographer, and most importantly, a storyteller. He allows me the space to bring my own expertise to the table, so the work we make together isn’t just a reproduction. It becomes a new piece of art.” 

That mutual respect is the foundation of their collaboration, and it’s one that both take seriously. “I don’t usually like when people make artistic versions of my photos, but Gary is different,”says Gruen. “He’s so good at what he does. He’s subtle. He knows what to emphasize and what to let be. He enhances the photo without overdoing it. His work brings out details I never even knew were there.” 

The results speak for themselves. Their silkscreen of John Lennon in New York features subtle shifts in tone and texture that allow Lennon’s famously stoic sunglasses to reveal the eyes behind them. “That was the first thing Bob said to me: ‘Just remember to capture the eyes behind the sunglasses.’ And we did it,” says Gruen. “It’s not easy, getting that level of detail in a silkscreen requires layers and layers of ink and perfect registration, but it’s possible when you know how to blend and build.”

The Debbie Harry at Coney Island print is another standout. Originally shot in color, the image was reworked to give Debbie a larger-than-life presence. “Gary took out a lot of the color in the background and added this beautiful blue to the puddles on the sidewalk,” says Gruen. “It looked vintage, very ’70s, but alive again.” In some editions, they even experimented with diamond dust, creating shimmering effects that reflect both the glitz of the era and the physicality of the print itself. 

The technical process behind each piece is a marvel of precision and patience. Lichtenstein often creates 15 to 20 individual screens per image—each one hand-pulled, layered with its own mix of inks, finishes, and textures. “It’s not just CMYK,” he says. “We’re using gold in the belt buckle, adjusting blacks so that the texture in John’s jacket—his sweater, his scarf, his leather—each reads as a different material. Most people don’t notice those things consciously, but it changes the way the image feels.” 

Gruen, ever the exacting artist, appreciates the attention to nuance. “In the Zeppelin print we did, I wanted to see the landing gear behind the plane, not just a black blur. And Gary got it. He’s a master at making something subtle feel vital.” 

Their working relationship reflects the very spirit of New York State of Mind and MASS MoCA: a commitment to collaboration, reinvention, and craft. The fact that Lichtenstein’s studio is located on the MASS MoCA campus allows visitors to experience that process in real time. “It’s not just about hanging photos on the wall,” Lichtenstein says. “It’s about showing people how images evolve—how memory evolves.” 

Gruen sees the partnership as a natural extension of his own ethos. “I’m always trying to get a feeling in the picture. Not just the facts, but the emotion. Gary helps me do that in a new way.” And the fact that they’re doing it here, in the same place where the exhibit is on view, brings it all full circle. 

In many ways, that ongoing cultural dialogue is what unites all facets of New York State of Mind—the photographer’s vision, the collector’s memory, the museum’s curatorial voice. It’s an exhibition that reverberates far beyond the walls of the gallery, weaving into the soundscape of the Berkshires. As part of its summer programming, MASS MoCA continues to host boundary-defying performances, including recent appearances by multi-hyphenate artists like Saul Williams, whose own work fuses poetry, performance, and social commentary in ways that echo the spirit of the show. Gruen, for his part, sees the recognition as a welcome surprise. “I’ve lived long enough to watch the world catch up to these moments,” he says. “There were years when rock and roll was dismissed—just a phase, just noise. But it never died. Because at its core, rock and roll is freedom.”

New York State of Mind 

runs through August 2026 at 

MASS MoCA in North Adams. 

massmoca.org

https://www.berkshiremag.com/post/a-snapshot-of-new-york