"Circus and the City" at Bard Graduate Center Galleries Collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Tibbals Collection May Wirth (1894-1978) was billed as "the world's greatest female bareback rider." Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, direct your gaze to this thin circlet of elephant tusk from 1885. Its spidery inscription reads "Jumbo King of Elephants." It is a relic of both the 13-foot-tall Jumbo and a lost golden age, when the circus was New York City's most popular entertainment. Scholars of the arts in New York have long ignored the circus in favor of the city's theatrical, musical and literary histories. But an ambitious new exhibition aims to fill that void. "Circus and the City: New York 1793-2010," opening on Friday at the Bard Graduate Center Galleries, chronicles the rise, triumph and ultimate fragmentation of the circus through the lens of the city, making the case that the circus transformed entertainment, media and advertising and that the city itself played an important role in the evolution of the American circus. "Circus has primarily been thought of as a global and national phenomenon," said Matthew Wittmann, curator of the show. But New York City was an incubator for circus since it first arrived in America. Geography mattered. "A lot of circus people and animals first came through the port of New York," said Susan Weber, the founder and director of the Bard Center, who helped assemble the exhibition. And many of the features associated with the American circus were developed or adapted in New York. Those include, according to Dr. Wittmann, the American debut of the flying trapeze; the proliferation of thrill acts involving cannons and bicycles; the advent of the three-ring circus; and, in 1796, the introduction of the first elephant to America. The $250,000 exhibition advances its thesis in formidable detail. There are 222 props, prints, costumes, paintings, sculptures, photographs, posters and other artifacts in a 3,000-square-foot gallery space arrayed over three floors. The three-year effort to mount the show has also produced two colorful books: a massive, 472-page history, "The American Circus" (Yale University Press, $65), and a 208-page exhibition catalog. Circus buffs and fan magazines have kept big-top lore alive, but until recently many museums and historical societies did not deem the itinerant, ephemeral circus worthy of documenting or preserving. "We know much about the development of the arts in New York City, but we know very little about the development of the circus," said LaVahn G. Hoh, a circus historian who is professor of drama at the University of Virginia (and is not connected to the exhibition). Step right up, then, to the exhibition's dizzying highlight reel of fanfares. New York's love affair with circus began when a horse wrangler from London, John Bill Ricketts, established the first true circus in the city on Aug. 7, 1793. The crowd gave it "a general huzzah," according to reports at the time. Ricketts was so notable that Gilbert Stuart painted him. The portrait, unfinished, of course, with a sadly incomplete depiction of Ricketts's wonder horse Cornplanter, is on loan for the exhibition from the National Gallery of Art. Historians have long debated whether Dan Rice, the first great American clown (born Daniel McLaren in the Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan in 1823), was an inspiration for the classic personification of Uncle Sam. They can now seek clues at the show from Rice's red-and-white-striped silk satin pants with velvet trim from 1860. At the heart of the exhibition, it is no surprise, is Phineas Taylor Barnum, the master entrepreneur and colossal hoaxster. Barnum began operating the venerable Scudder's American Museum of oddities and relics in 1842, transforming it into an eccentric exhibition hall, theater, lecture center and freak show named, naturally, for himself. It was the same year he met Charles Sherwood Stratton, the perfectly formed and perfectly talented dwarf who became the entertainment mainstay Gen. Tom Thumb. The exhibition presents a black silk velvet suit from 1840 worn by the General, as well as his teensy boots and Lilliputian 1845 violin. "Circus and the City: New York 1793-2010" runs through Feb. 3 at the Bard Graduate Center Galleries, 18 West 86th Street, Manhattan; (212) 501-3023, bgc.bard.edu/gallery.