Metro Cross-Reference Coalition | Fall 2025
Thursdays 3:30 to 6:00pm

Shannon Mattern | smattern@metro.org

New York City has historically drawn those figures and incubated those fancies that simply don’t fit anywhere else. This inaugural offering from METRO’s Cross-Reference Coalition celebrates our geographic anomalies, pushes against automation’s flattening fakery, and addresses the erasure of difference and the prioritization of profitable utility in our current political climate, by examining and appreciating The Misfit. We’ll explore collection items that simply won’t fit on shelves or in boxes, objects and identities that defy classification, storage formats that condense and compress (as well as the things that leak outside!), and institutions that deliberately defy professional standards. We’ll engage with texts from archival studies, art history, and anthropology to media studies, material science, and electrical engineering. We’ll visit virtuoso boxmakers and imagine speculative deaccessioning policies and unpack compression protocols and, ultimately, work together to create a patchworked and prismatic publication of mutualistic mis-fit parts.

We’ve got a fantastic cohort for this first class: 17 participants representing a range of organizations: the After Violence Project, the Brooklyn Public Library, the CUNY Grad Center, the New York City College of Technology, the New York City Department of Records, the New York City Department of Transportation, New York City Public Schools, New York University, the Parsons School of Design, Poets House, the Pratt Institute, the Prime Produce Apprentice Cooperative, the Queens Public Library, and a range of arts and design organizations.

The Cross-Reference Coalition (website coming soon!) is an experimental school tracing exuberantly interdisciplinary links among New York City's libraries, archives, and other knowledge institutions. Hosted through the Metropolitan New York Library Council — a state-founded, member-supported non-profit serving the region's libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions — the CRC gathers knowledge workers and graduate students from our member institutions, along with local artists and designers, to discover what new knowledges and creative practices might emerge through integrative thinking, interdisciplinary collaborations, and inter-institutional partnerships. Each cohort will create an open-access publication documenting its work and featuring the breadth of cultural resources available across New York City.