Community Archiving Day + Family Day

Please join Queens Museum for Community Archiving Day on May 23, 2026, 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm. This event is hosted in collaboration with their current exhibition, “About Us: The American Imaginary.” This event will take place alongside Queens Museum’s May Family Day. Family Day includes a multitude of free workshops for children, seniors, and teens.

Through photographs from the Queens Museum’s collection, “About Us” asked three curators from Queens to reflect upon the question, “what is American about American Art?” The exhibition suggests that a multitude of histories, cultures, myths, and ideals combine to create the contemporary American experience, and thus the interpretation of American Art. In this city of immigrants, you can learn about global culture by getting to know neighbors. Every person is an archive worthy of exploration.

Community Archiving Day is an opportunity to learn from New Yorkers undertaking archival work, preserving the memory, resilience, and beauty of various demographics and cultures across the five boroughs. Varying in size and scope, participants include oral history projects, digital archives, and institutional repositories. The organizations and initiatives on-site for this special event will offer insight into their physical materials via displays and workshops, and discuss opportunities for donations, research, and collaboration. They welcome visitors from all walks of life who want to learn about archival practice, or are curious about preservation efforts taking place across NYC.

Participants include:
- Socrates Sculpture Park, “The Point Archive” project
- Rikers Public Memory Project
- StoryCorps, offering a listening station and a recording station to document your own oral history
- Louis Armstrong House Museum
- Black Heritage Reference Center at the Langston Hughes Library and Cultural Center
- The Black Beauty Archive
- The Black Memory Workers
- Lewis Latimer House
- Cinco Estrellas Honduran Archive, complementary scanning of wallet photographs
- My Baryo Project
- CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, “Dominican Music in the U.S.” project
- NYC’s Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), “Neighborhood Stories” project
- NYC Trans Oral History Archive
- NY Sign Museum
- XFR Collective, demonstrating the conservation and scanning of VHS videotapes
- Franklin Furnace, complementary digitization of 35mm negatives
- CENTRO, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College
- Hemispheric Institute, New York University
- Queens Historical Society

Screenings, Theater
12:00pm-1:15pm
Corona Collection : An Oral History Project, Louis Armstrong House Museum
The Corona Collection spotlights the voices, memories, and legacies of the Corona and East Elmhurst communities that shaped Lucille and Louis Armstrong throughout their lives.These narratives bring Louis and Lucille Armstrong’s story to life through the voices of neighbors who knew them personally. These oral histories offer an intimate portrait of the life they built within the community. The screening of select oral history short documentaries (total running time: 40 minutes), will be followed by a discussion with Charanya Ramakrishnan, Project Director of the Corona Collection.

3:30pm-4:30pm:
My Baryo Project (2015-2016), by Claro de los Reyes
Oral histories that document the Filipino-American experience in Queens

Workshops, QM’s Atrium
12:00-2:00pm
Queens Monuments, a workshop led by Queens Memory Project with Meral Agish
Join Queens Memory Project to make suggestions for future monuments of Queens. Coloring pages of street signs and landmarks from the borough will engage civic and community memory to archive your neighborhoods. Materials will be provided.

1:30pm-3:30pm
Neighborhood Memories: Collaging Our Collective Home, a collage workshop inspired by the archive-based collage art of Louis Armstrong
Facilitated by artist and educator, Charanya Ramakrishnan from the Louis Armstrong House Museum, this workshop offers a moment to reflect on ideas of home and a collective vision for the neighborhoods you hope to build and live in. Materials will be provided. Participants are also welcome to bring personal archival materials to create their own collages.

Curator-led Exhibition tour, “About Us: The American Imaginary”
2:00-3:30pm

(FREE EVENT, no tickets or RSVP required)