NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge is pleased to announce that Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (UC Press 2016) has won the 2017 Brendan Gill Prize, awarded by the Municipal Arts Society (MAS). Nonstop Metropolis was edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro during their residence as Visiting Scholars at the IPK.

About the Brendan Gill Prize
The Brendan Gill prize was established in 1987 by fellow MAS board members Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Helen Tucker, and Margot Wellington to honor the creator of a building, book, essay, musical composition, play, film, painting, sculpture, choreographic work or landscape design, accomplished in the previous year that best captures, “the energy, vigor and verve of our incomparable city.” Previous recipients include the creators of Hamilton, Kara Walker for her A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, and Fredric Weisman for In Jackson Heights. This year the Nonstop Metropolis team shares the prize with Matthew “Levee” Chavez and his “Subway Therapy” project.

About Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas
Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts—from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists—amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through Manhattan’s playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City’s unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past. Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York’s buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more.

About Celebrating the City Awards
The 2017 Brendan Gill Prize will be presented at The Municipal Art Society’s Celebrating the City event, an evening of awards and conversation honoring arts, architecture, and activism on May 15, 2017 at El Museo del Barrio.