Marking the sixty-year anniversary of the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair (NYWF), A Billion Dollar Dream revisits the Fair through an environmental, social, and political lens. This exhibition takes a fresh look at the Fair’s legacy and impact on American culture by placing materials from the Queens Museum’s collection in dialogue with the context of concurrent domestic issues, international politics, and cultural events.

In advertising the Fair to potential investors, Robert Moses, president of the NYWF Corporation, called it a “magnificent spectacle, significant marketplace.” The Fair delivered on this promise. Through dazzling demonstrations and printed materials, exhibitors vigorously promoted car culture, the evolution of labor, and American interventionism. This exhibition reassesses the ways in which ideas of “progress,” nationhood, and representation were advertised and distributed by examining archival photographs, documents, postcards, posters, uniforms, and other ephemera. Together these objects reveal that the Fair was not neutral ground, fluctuating between the promise of a techno-utopia and “the good old days.” 

By considering the impact of the Fair as both a market-driven and socio-cultural propagandistic tool, this show reframes the impact of the Fair by placing its often-discussed imaginative innovation within a larger historical framework. American interventionism abroad was reflected at the Fair: many of the international pavilions were presenting as independent nations for the first time, revamping the heavy histories that resulted from American geopolitical decision-making. Civil Rights advocates and members of the women’s liberation movement were on high-alert at the Fair, protesting labor practices and timeworn notions of femininity. After a nationally-broadcast civil rights protest on the Fair’s opening day, the anti-discrimination Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law months later. Despite Moses’s desire to create a utopian playground free from the “seething world,” the world found its way in. 

A Billion Dollar Dream is a snapshot, not a comprehensive overview, of the Fair’s contents and its context. Sixty years ago, the NYWF forever changed the landscape of American culture, marking the hearts and minds of over 50 million visitors. This anniversary is a critical juncture to pause, remember, and reconsider, placing the Fair within its historical context.