Very cute little spot, and a fun way to while away the time when you're in the area. Entry is like…read more$15 for adults, so a skosh less than you'd pay at a bigger museum, but just a bit more than I'd personally pay for the size of this place. If you have like a senior or kid's discount, or a student (?) discount, it would be worth it though. Museum is 2 floors, and fully jam packed with stuff to look at. Every room you go into has either posters from various eras, and/or explanations of the context for those posters, so you're not just appreciating the art in a vacuum. What I liked is that even on a Saturday afternoon, the place was relatively quiet and empty, so we were able to wander around and look at all the cool stuff mostly undisturbed. Bathrooms are spotlessly clean. Cafe is cute and has lots of little chairs to sit on and take a load off before you go exploring further. As of right now, they have a retrospective on black cinema, from the silent films to the black and white films to the technicolor films. There are posters for minstrel shows, posters for "All colored" (AKA, all black and brown people in the cast, so that unwitting racists don't wander in there and clutch their pearls over seeing brown and black folks not playing the parts of servants) casts, and even a couple of displays of paraphernalia from the era, such as blackface pancake makeup/greasepaint used on stage and film.
The entrance to the space has these posters from the Czechoslovakia tourism board to come visit their country at the dawning of their founding. These were gorgeous posters, some of which mentioned the 60 2/3 % discount off the return journey ticket. I have no clue what the significance of that amount is. They were facing the gift shop, so while that person or persons you came with go look at tchotchkes , bric-a-brac, and curios long past when they should realize that they can buy most of the stuff online and not have to lug it around the city, you have some more stuff to look at. Mind you, the prints, postcards, and other reproductions of the posters are not something you can easily buy online. That's worth the trip to the gift shop if you like that sort of thing as decoration. The prints are on good quality paper, and the colors are crisp and well laid down. They're absolutely beautiful. At $1.50 per post card, you're paying a bit of money, but these are really beautiful and worthy of display.
In the basement level, there's a large exhibition of war propaganda posters encouraging folks to donate books to the boys overseas (or "over there" as they called it repeatedly). Several soldiers would read in their spare time when they had long bouts of hurry up and wait. This was especially true of the navy people. They'd have long stretches of quiet where they'd read to pass the time. Again, the breadth and variety of the posters (some even from German sources, who were also asking the same) was impressive.
Then there was the special exhibit of the AIDS epidemic posters from the early 1990s. If you'd not lived through that era, where the fear was all over the place, and the news had several stories of folks dying of AIDS left and right, having that curated collection of posters and adverts was an important reminder of where we were just 30 years ago. In the 1990s, you'd see news stories of random people dying of AIDS. One girl caught it from her dentist, and was all over the news (Kimberly Bengalis). Others caught it from parents. It ran rampant all over the world, and struck down people from all walks of life, regardless of race or sexuality. Watching the posters that were plastered up on the NYC walls during the epidemic, calling to question the inaction of people in power, asking for folks to contribute money, and several pleas to practice safer sex was a chilling reminder of what HIV/AIDS was for many many years. This was a well curated collection, and I'm glad I got a chance to see it.
I'd say that the time I spent in the museum was well worth it.
