For latest news qchron.com Backthe to School & Fallvisit Guide 2021
QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, August 26, 2021 Page 14
C M BTS page 14 Y K
Art of all kinds is on full display by Deirdre Bardolf Chronicle Contributor
Exhibits on view around Queens shine a light on local talent and commemorate the culture and history of The World’s Borough. An upcoming exhibit at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center will be the largest ever held there and a revered public art installation honoring those lost on 9/11 will get a permanent home at the GodwinTernbach Museum this year. From the 1964 New York World’s Fair to classic illustrations from a Flushing native, visitors can explore the rich offerings of Queens in exhibits across the borough, in person and online. “My home borough of Queens is home to an amazingly diverse and vibrant collection of communities, and that is reflected in the extraordinary cultural organizations that are rooted here,” city Cultural Affairs Commissioner Gonzalo Casals told the Chronicle via email through a spokesperson. The range of cultural programming here reflects the way art “knits us together as New Yorkers, engages and uplifts audiences, and makes our communities strong,” he said. Mary Treacy and Rachel Davison spent a recent afternoon enjoying the tranquil gardens of The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City for the first time. “Friendship brought us out, but a love of Japan brought us here,” said Treacy, a Brooklyn native. They have friends in Japan and traveled there in the past and visiting the museum was always on their list. It was created by sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who spent his childhood in Japan, and contains examples of his life’s work. Currently exhibited in the museum’s sculpture garden is Christian Boltanski’s “Animitas,” consisting of 180 small bells on steel stems with ref lective plastic lures, capturing sound and light. The installation was one of the last by Boltanski before his
The artist Elisa Insua at the exhibit of her work at the Materials for the PHOTO COURTESY MFTA Arts gallery.
unexpected death in July and will only be up until Sept. 5. “It is like a portal to Japan,” said Amelia Grohman, communications and design director at the museum. “Noguchi: Useless Architecture” is an exhibition of about 50 pieces from the museum’s collection highlighting his desire to create sculptures that deviate from the “responsibilities of architecture.” “We’ve done a playful installation of those works, looking at Noguchi’s relationship with architecture,” said Grohman. It will be up until May 2022. The museum is also hosting an open call for emerging Queens-based Asian American and Pacific Islander artists to submit designs for the venue’s outdoor welcome banners. While exploring visual art in Long Island City, another stop is Socrates Sculpture Park, where Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Planeta Abuelx” will be up through Labor Day weekend, to be followed in October by “The 2021 Socrates Annual: Sanctuary,” which offered an open call to artists addressing the meaning of “sanctuary.” Socrates provides artists with financial support, materials, equipment and space to create works on-site. Materials for the Arts, a program from the Department of Cultural Affairs, also supplies artists, collecting over 1.5 million pounds of reusable items a year. Now on view at the Materials for the Arts gallery in LIC is “The Path of Least Resistance,” a solo exhibition of recycled materials by Argentinian artist Elisa Insua, which will be up through Oct. 12. The center also hosts artist residency programs, events and workshops. Before summer ends, outdoor art can also be enjoyed at the Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing, where a collaboration with the AnkhLave Arts Alliance, the AnkhLave Garden Project, is on view until Sept. 12. The annual fellowship produces “site specific art installations within the grounds of QBG,” by Queens-based BIPOC, or Black, indigenous and people of color, artists. On Sept. 17, a new exhibit, “Spirit Sees Red,” will feature art from M.E. Guadalupe Rubi, a New York-based fiber artist. Another museum nestled in lush gardens is the Queens Historical Society, which operates out of Kingsland Homestead, surrounded by Flushing’s Weeping Beech Park. The museum is currently offering a portrait of the past with an exhibit celebrating two prominent Queens photographers, Percy Loomis Sperr and Frederick J. Weber, who captured the changing borough during industrialization.
“Noguchi: Useless Architecture,” above, is on display at the sculptor’s eponymous museum in Long Island City, PHOTOS BY DEIRDRE BARDOLF recently visited by friends Rachel Davison, inset left, and Mary Treacy. Also at the Queens Historical by the museum’s “crown jewel” and Society is “Charles Dana Gibson: longstanding “Panorama of the City The American Trendsetter.” Gibson, of New York,” a model that was crewho grew up in Flushing, was an ated for the World’s Fair and given illustrator who created the “Gibson upgrades over the years. “It’s an Girl,” which set a standard for beauty interesting item,” said Her y te and fashion, and his drawings poked Tequame, assistant director of comfun at the upper class. Gibson was the munications and digital projects. highest-paid illustrator in America at “There are still the Twin Towers but t he re a re new the time, working things like the Citi for Life magazine Field stadium,” a n d C o l l i e r ’s she said. weekly. T h e Wo r l d The Queens Trade Center will Historical Society be commemorathas two books of ed permanently at Gibson’s art that the Godwin-Ternare “exceedingly Exhibits at major bach Museum in rare these days,” honor of the 20th said Jeran Halfand minor venues anniversary of its pap, coordinator collapse. Six at the societ y. months after the People would tear at tacks, t wo illustrated pages out of the books to frame or paper beams of light, known as the “Tribute in Light,” rose from Ground Zero, their walls back in the day. “I love the style and the humor becoming a public art installation that’s in a lot of them,” Halfpap said illuminated every year on Sept. 11. of the drawings. But Halfpap, a coin Photographs of the tribute, by artists collector, is excited for what will Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, replace the Gibson exhibition later were donated to the Godwin-Ternthis fall. A collection of silver will be bach Museum and will become part on display, including tableware, deco- of the permanent collection. The rative objects and coins, exploring museum, part of the Kupferberg Cenhow the metal was used as a status ter, is located on the Queens College campus in Flushing. symbol and currency. Last year, the Kupferberg HoloThe Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park is also high- caust Center launched an online verlighting Queens history with “Ambi- sion of the largest exhibition it had tious Slogans and Colorful Promises: ever done on concentration camps, The 1964-65 New York World’s “The Concentration Camps: Inside Fair.” It will be on view through Jan- the Nazi System of Incarceration and uary and new items are added every Genocide.” Now, the center, at the month. The exhibit is complemented Queensborough Community College
campus in Bayside, is in the process of creating an in-person installation. The opening has not been announced but the exhibit will be up for several years and, in the meantime, the website includes every aspect of the exhibition, including images and testimonials from local Holocaust survivors. The physical installation will feature wood, brick and iron gates. “It will absolutely transform our space,” said Dr. Laura B. Cohen, executive director of the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center. She said that the point of the exhibition is twofold: to understand the system of incarceration as well as the different groups that were persecuted, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, the LGBTQ+ community, political prisoners and people with disabilities. “We’re really excited about this exhibition. We’ve never had one nearly as extensive online and in, what will ultimately be, a physical component,” said Cohen. “We are always looking for ways to connect the past to the present.” For the month of September, museum-goers can visit the Garage Art Center, a nonprofit community space in Bayside, to see Amy Supton’s “Wildflowers: An Exhibit of Clay & Fiber,” celebrating female identity, and take her workshop to create a textile ornament. For cinephiles, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria will have “Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey” through September, “An Act of Seeing: Barry Jenkins’s The Gaze” until October and the ongoing Jim Henson exhibit, an Q attraction for all ages.
