- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
So often, walking around New York, I’ve got my head down, or my eyes on my destination ten blocks and walls-of-fast-moving-people ahead. Or I’ve got my fingers in my ears and my eyes squinting almost shut, drowning out the offensive screams of the city. If it’s not an ambulance siren (many decibels higher than is legal), then it’s the sound of a worker sitting astronomically high above, pounding metal on metal, or the starting of jackhammers constructing one more glassy, looming building to rise amid the skyline of this ever-evolving town. More people, more production. These vast, (fancy), sometimes eco-and-green, sometimes not-so-pretty constructions are the subject of Jennifer Williams’ New York: City of Tomorrow (2016), which is a brilliant and surprisingly peaceful companion piece to Queens Museum’s thrilling permanent vintage installation, the Panorama of the City of New York.
And in fact, I had a similar experience of unintended oblivion on visiting the Panorama recently: I stood on the ramps in the cool, low-lit room, taking in the entirety of New York’s five boroughs, thousands of bridges and under-appreciated waterways. My focus was on trying to identify where my apartment building is in the sprawling, genius, complex (especially for the geographically challenged) mass that is New York. I wasn’t really looking up but, as always, down. My friend, who isn’t so geographically disadvantaged, pointed out where the famous bungalows of the Rockaways lie and which bridge connects Staten Island to Manhattan and where Brooklyn becomes Queens and where nobody is quite sure. I was also very happily absorbing the quiet—art critic Jerry Saltz has said that the Panorama is “the only way to see the entire city all at once,”1 and it’s the only way to see it without your hands over your ears, or your sidewalk rage ready to trigger. And before the skyline began to continually outdo itself—the Panorama was created in the 1960s and was last updated in 1992.
It was a shadow of someone’s finger pointing over the 9,335-square-foot model made of “wood, plastic, fake shrubbery, Formica, and whatnot”2 that made my eyes flicker, and into view came one of the three outbursts of Williams’ printed photographic installation: The Queens artist has taken architecturally precise 3D photographs of many of the city’s new and rising buildings. She took them from a pedestrian-eye’s view. Imagine the artist, one woman and her camera, making her way around Long Island City, Brooklyn, and up and down Manhattan’s “Billionaires’ Row,” marveling at and documenting every new and inevitable construction that makes her and us ever smaller. Williams has taken photographs that sparkle and printed them without manipulation. They are now plastered in kaleidoscopic shapes on three strategic walls around the Panorama—at first, I thought I was seeing a plane fly in to JFK. Nope, it was a cascade of the new high-rises. Some with windows the color of the ocean, others concrete or brown brick, covered in industrial orange tarp and yellow police tape. Williams has curated jagged and triangular silhouettes; the buildings all pile up and shoot out from each other, blasting towards viewers on the ramps who can now behold the city then and now—the vintage city back in the relatively calm ’90s and what it’s moving rapidly toward in the frenetic new age.
The Panorama is a stunning historical piece that’s more fun to visit than it is to fly in on JetBlue, even. And Williams’ vision of this new urban landscape, moving toward the Panorama like a spaceship (and, more cynically, a fast-spreading rash), might make it a little more fun for us to trek around this chaotic, spreading urban landscape. Somehow, Williams’ contained yet theatrical vision might help us take back our own ever-shrinking perspective as pedestrians in this town.
1. Saltz, Jerry, “The Greatest Artwork A Pollock, a Penn, or a Warhol?,” New York Magazine, January 9, 2011.
2. Ibid.
Emma Pearse is an arts and travel writer and editor in NYC. She's written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Guardian, Smithsonian, Vogue, Elle, and more. She is currently at work on her second book. www.emmapearse.com