LocalProjects

In 2001, the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival displayed exhaustive curatorial research on New York City’s culture. However, to capture this vibrant living culture, it turned to Local Projects, who with Nancy Nowacek created a storytelling system to capture personal geographies. Memory Maps was a system of enormous borough maps of New York City that allowed visitors to share their stories of the city by pinning vellum sheets to specific locations. These written stories were then archived and enhanced with curated stories to create cityofmemory.org, a living archive of personal geographies.