NEW YORK (RNS) — In 2012, Erika Menendez shoved Sunando Sen, 46, onto the New York City subway tracks in front of an oncoming train. “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up,” she is quoted as having told police shortly after the fatal crime. Sen was born in India and raised Hindu.
In popular culture, New York City is often portrayed as distinctly secular. But “City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space,” a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, suggests that the city — and the public spaces, scents, acts of solidarity and, yes, the hate crimes therein — can’t be understood without religion.
“I think religion is a subtext in the various spaces and conversations where we imagined it to be absent,” the exhibition’s curator, Azra Dawood, told Religion News Service in a recent interview at the museum. “And I’m really hoping that the exhibition surfaces some of the ways in which religion is actually a part of the city.”
“City of Faith: Religion, Activism, and Urban Space” is a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. RNS photo by Kathryn Post
Photographs displayed throughout the exhibit highlight how minority religious communities refuse to be boxed in by stereotypes. Photographed portraits by MIPSTERZ, a Muslim arts and culture collective, show Muslims grinning and striking poses in New York’s public landscape to reclaim the space. Portra …
‘City of Faith’ exhibit celebrates South Asian religion in NYC
