♪♪ Rosoff: I feel very strongly that museums can't afford to be neutral places anymore.

The time of just showing objects as if they're dead and not connected to living people is long gone.

Johnson-Cunningham: "On Display" focuses on museums and other cultural institutions that are tackling a vast number of different issues, but looking through the lens of what changes can be made to improve upon our society and how can we make museums more relevant to our everyday experience?

♪♪ ♪♪ The Indigenous community's relationship with museums have been fraught for many years, still is in many ways, for very good reasons.

Last season, I didn't cover big encyclopedic museums like the Brooklyn Museum because of this fraught relationship that many communities have had with these types of institutions in the past and also presently.

I wanted to, however, cover climate in crises because I think it provides an opportunity for museums to really step up and step in in a real way and talk about the violence that occurs within the Native American community and specifically through the lens of climate change.

We are speaking a lot about climate change these days, but the Indigenous voice is largely missing within the media and I think this exhibition does a really good job in putting the Native American voice back into the center.

♪♪ So the main thesis of the exhibition is looking at how European and environmental colonialism is directly related to the current climate situation climate crisis that we're in.

Before Europeans arrived in the Americas in the 15th century, Indigenous people had a very profound and expansive relationship with the natural world, and with the conquest and colonization of the Americas, Europeans brought a way of exploiting the natural resources that directly conflicted with Indigenous views on the world around them.

For indigenous people, they viewed the human beings, animals, plants, and the land as integral to one another and co-equal.

That juxtaposed with the European mindset that privileged human beings at the cost of everything else, this is what created this conflict.

And this is why we're in this situation today with the rampant exploitation of the environment and destruction of the planet.

Rosoff: In this gallery, we are juxtaposing Terry Greaves' model teepee.

This is a contemporary work by the artist Terry Greaves, and we are showing this magnificent object in conversation with a photo taken by Tailyr Irvine of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

The Dakota Access Pipeline really raised the visibility of what these pipelines are doing to Indigenous communities.

Originally, when the pipeline was proposed to cross the Missouri River, it was supposed to cross at Bismarck.

But the governor was concerned that it could pollute North Dakota's capital's drinking water.

So they moved it downstream just off the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

Why was it important to have this image of the protest included in the exhibition?

What Terry Greaves' model teepee does -- Terry is talking about contemporary Kiowa life, and for Terry, the teepee is the home and heart of Plains communities.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe are from the Northern Plains.

So when they staked out in teepees in the protest camp, they're staking down their right to place.

This is their home.

This is their territory.

And native people are actively involved in their future.

They are protesting.

They are being arrested.

Their violence is being waged against them.

They're fighting for their lives.

And I really wanted to show that activism.

And even the protest signs are just very creative and showcase the community and also Indigenous art in a sense as well, which I think also adds to this work that you've put beside it as well.

What do you hope that this exhibition will accomplish?

I want people to be aware that the land seizures that are taking place, the out of control extractive industries that are occurring on our planet are not only impacting indigenous communities, but also affecting the world at large.

And these practices are affecting the droughts that we're having, the flooding, the wildfires that we're having in the United States.

And these environmental problems create social problems.

By learning about Indigenous understandings of the natural world, of the environment, it's the only way we can achieve environmental justice is by looking at what indigenous people have done in the past and what they're doing in the present.

The planet is warming, and we need to think more carefully about how we're going to live going forward.

♪♪ Johnson-Cunningham: I think if we think about museums and ways that museums can shift their practice, you know, it's really important for those of us like myself who are museum professionals to also become engaged with activism as well in ways that we can use our own experience and professional life to really invoke change in a real way.

Museums are changing.

Museums are shifting.

They aren't perfect, far from, many of them.

But having this exhibition, being able to immerse one's selves in this space and think about the indigenous community, putting their perspective as the central focus point I think is so critical.

♪♪ ♪♪ Today, I had the opportunity to sit down with Sarah Henry, chief curator of the Museum of the City of New York, and she's the person behind a lot of the creation of the exhibitions that we see in the museum.

And so she really provided a recap of the history of the Museum of the City of New York and also rising tides, how the changing landscape of New York City and the climate change that we experience here in the city and all across the country has really caused a crisis, and if we don't shape up, I've learned that things will look pretty different around here, that parts of New York may not one day exist, which is horrible to even imagine.

♪♪ Henry: The exhibition is called "Rising Tide: Visualizing the Human Cost of the Climate Crisis", and it's based on photography and video work done by a photographer named Kadir van Lohuizen, who's a Dutch documentary photographer who has actually traveled the whole world for years documenting the human effects of rising sea levels in many, many different countries, including the United States and here in New York City.

It is the issue of our age.

And if you think about what are the issues facing New York in the future, like every other place on Earth, but particularly every other coastal city, the changing challenges of living with the water are going to be the things that shape our future.

And we actually brought our 20th century gallery of New York at its core up to Hurricane Sandy, Superstorm Sandy, specifically because we felt that that was the thing that is going to be the pivot point to what we need to face in the 21st century.

But the exhibition also gets you to think about what can be done.

So there's a whole set of, for example, pledges that you can make about your own self or about how you're going to try to intersect with larger scale action.

This is not to minimize the issues around the climate crisis, but for us to think about simultaneously sustainability.

So trying to lessen the the impact of human activity on the climate, but also resiliency.

Like, what does it mean to plan for a city on a warming planet?

And that these decisions, these are the big infrastructure questions of our day.

This co-exists, of course, with all the other issues that we've talked about, issues of affordability and justice and inequality.

None of them is immune or isolated from the issue of climate.

So we, in this exhibition, want people to think about it so that they can understand that they cannot close their eyes to how human beings in other places are experiencing this now.

As an ethical issue, I mean, we can't -- you know, sometimes it's hard to look, but this gives you a way in that anybody can handle, and to just confront, you know, what's real, but also to think about, "Okay, what what do we do?"

So are we in trouble in New York City if we don't shape up?

[ Laughs ] We are no doubt in trouble.

There are areas of New York City that are flooding on blue sky days, they call them, so fair weather flooding already just from the rise and fall of the tides.

And then there are the issues of, you know, major surges that, as we saw from Superstorm Sandy, create catastrophic conditions.

And the combinations of those and the inevitability of further sea level rise means we're going to have to make some hard choices that we all need to be informed about and prepared to discuss.

And that's one of the roles that the Museum of the City of New York wants to play.

♪♪ Johnson-Cunningham: So the number one thing that Sarah says that she hopes that people who visit the institution, especially New Yorkers, leave with, is a better understanding of their place in the city and in the history of New York City.

And I thought that was really powerful.

And it had me thinking like, "What is my place in the city?

And how can I also change and help better this city as well?"

So I thought that was really, I think, thought provoking.

It is going to take a lot of action, individual actions to make sure that New York still exists in the future to come.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪