Arthur, Rego Park/Tajikistan.
Amy with Picture of Daughter, Flushing/China
Photographs copyright Warren Lehrer 2003.
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Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America is a multi-media project by documentary artists Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan that portrays the lives of new immigrants and refugees who live in Queens, New York — the most ethnically diverse locality in the United States today. The project began with storytelling workshops in libraries, high schools and community centers throughout Queens. Lehrer/Sloan’s three-year journey around the world via their home borough included extended interviews in bodegas, family-owned restaurants, places of worship, public housing projects, apartments, and private homes. The result is documented in an extraordinary new book of photographs and stories (W.W. Norton), an audio CD, a series of public radio documentaries, a reading/performance tour, a website, and this premier exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art on view in the Unisphere Gallery through March 28, 2004.
The main body of the exhibition features Warren Lehrer’s large-scale photographic compositions made up of strikingly direct portraits of over seventy Crossing the BLVD participants. As a photographic series, these images document an astonishingly diverse community focusing on individuals and families who arrived in the U.S. after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act mandated an end to discriminatory immigration policies that favored white Western Europeans. Some subjects are portrayed as they appear in a variety of settings, revealing the cultural hybridization experienced daily by new immigrants. Sometimes portraits are juxtaposed with others to form group portraits of neighborhoods, teammates, classmates, fellow exiles or band members. Lehrer’s portraits are not monochromatic images of the downtrodden immigrant. His photos portray the proud, colorful humanity, beauty and struggle of individuals who have crossed (sometimes for their lives) borders, oceans, and cultural divides, in pursuit of a better future.
Photographs are paired with short narrative excerpts, map overlays, landscapes of Queens’ neighborhoods and objects and images Crossing participants have brought with them from home to home. Audio sound stations include text/audio compositions by Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer, Crossing the BLVD radio documentaries, original music by composer Scott Johnson, and music of some of the Crossing the BLVD participants.
Visitors will be able to interact with the Crossing the BLVD Mobile Story/Photo Booth, designed in collaboration with dotsperinch artists Mark Shepard and Carlos Tejada. The Mobile Story/Photo Booth serves as an interactive kiosk for the website (www.crossingtheblvd.org) and allows visitors to contribute their crossing story and photograph to the Crossing the BLVD repository of migration stories. The design of the Booth draws on a variety of references common to the immigration experience including passport photo booths, call center booths, airport and customs checkpoints. The Booth will be on site at the Queens Museum for one year. During that time, the Museum will facilitate temporary sitings at shopping malls, schools and community centers in Queens.
Crossing the BLVD Performances and Events:
Sunday, December 14, 3 -6 pm
Public opening reception for Joan Jonas: Five Works, Crossing the BLVD, and works by Yung Shu Chao and Monika Goetz. Performances by Crossing the BLVD participants: Nepalese Tantric Dancer Prajwal Ratna Vajracharya, Nigerian-Gospel Singer Kingsley Ogunde, and Romanian-American singer Christine Ghezzo. Book signing by Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer.
Sunday, January 25, 3 pm
Crossing the BLVD artist tour with Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer. Performances by Bukharan Jewish Dancers and Musicians Malika Kalontorova and Iskhak Gulkarov.
Sunday, February 15, 2 pm and 4 pm
Judith Sloan directs a multi-ethnic cast of actors reading stories from Crossing the BLVD.
Sunday February 29, 3 pm
Tour of Crossing the BLVD with Sloan and Lehrer, followed by a dialogue on immigration and “old” and “new” Queens moderated by Amy Goodman, host of Democracy NOW.
Sunday, March 7, 3 pm
Festival of performances featuring high school students from EarSay's Cross-Cultural Dialogue Through the Arts project at the Queens International High School and other youth performance projects in NYC.
Saturday, March 13, 3 pm:
Tour of Crossing the BLVD with Sloan and Lehrer, followed by an acoustic concert with members of NYC’s gypsy-punk-cabaret band Gogol Bordello. Call (718) 592-9700 x 222.
Biographies:
Warren Lehrer is an award-winning photographer, book artist, and writer whose books include: The Portrait Series: a quartet of men; GRRRHHH; i mean you know; versations and FRENCH FRIES. He has won numerous grants and fellowships: NEA, New York State Council and Foundation for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, etc; and awards including The International Book Design award, three American Institute of Graphic Arts book awards, etc. Lehrer is an Associate Professor of Art at the School of Art and Design at SUNY Purchase, and a member of the graduate faculty at the School of Visual Arts.
Judith Sloan is an actress, oral historian, and audio artist, whose multi-character solo performances combine humor, pathos and a love of the absurd. She’s received grants from the New York Foundation on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, etc. Sloan teaches Theatre Arts, Oral History and documentary community projects at the Gallatin School at NYU, and is the director of Cross-Cultural Dialogue Through the Arts, an arts mentorship and training program creating collaborations between disparate communities.
Lehrer and Sloan are co-founders of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to public art projects that document and portray lives of the uncelebrated.
Funding:
The exhibition Crossing the BLVD is made possible by the Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Queens Council on the Arts.
Recognition for Crossing the BLVD:
Lehrer and Sloan and the Crossing the BLVD project won the 2003 Award for Innovative Use of an
Archive from the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York. The book and audio CD was chosen by the Utne Reader as one of the best of independent artist books and CDs for their INID CULTUR 2004 publication. The book and CD was featured on the PRI/BBC program The World as a Global Hit.
The Crossing the BLVD project was supported in part by grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, a Futhermore publishing grant; a program of the J.M. Kaplan fund, the Puffin Foundation, a V-Day Award and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Challenge Grant and the Queens Council on the Arts.
Media Contact:
Carolyn Bane
Director of Public Relations
Queens Museum of Art
cbane@queensmuseum.org
(718) 592-9700 ext. 147
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