QMAil: February 2006

February is the shortest month yet we've packed a lot into these next four weeks. Highlights include two outstanding Saturday afternoon artists talks on February 4th and 11th, a Day of Solidarity with Muslim, Arab and South Asian Immigrants on the 18th, and a special Black History Month edition of Cinemarosa: Queens Only Queer Film Series on the 19th. Be sure to check out the call for artists for both our Queens International biennial exhibition and our Think Globally, Film Locally film program, and finally, if you haven't stopped in to see the recent acquisitions on view in The Gift, you have until the 26th. For those of you who plan your weekends more than a month in advance, mark down Sunday, March 12 Ð we'll be celebrating the opening of three new exhibitions that afternoon and everyone is invited. See you soon.

February masthead: Anonymous, “Aerial Beauties,” Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Circus, Atlanta, Georgia, Thursday, October 17 (detail), ca. 1940. Vintage gelatin silver print. Gift of Charles Schwartz.

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

The Gift: Building a Collection for the Queens Museum of Art

Final weeks — closing February 26

In three years the Queens Museum of Art will double in size. With the construction of a new pool and ice rink in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the rink that currently inhabits the south end of our building will depart and we will be presented with an additional 50,000 square feet for galleries, classrooms, art storage, special event space, Museum shop and café. This is an historic opportunity for the Museum in many ways. Working with a team of architects and engineers from Grimshaw and Amman & Whitney we are rethinking everything from how the Museum appears from the Park and the Parkway, to how the visitor experiences the entrance or gets a bite to eat. But most relevant to the exhibition at hand, The Gift, when the Museum expands we will at last have room to show our permanent collection of fine art. Until now, the only aspects of our collection that have been on view are the Panorama, World's Fair memorabilia, and a long-term loan from the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass. Indeed these will continue to be on view and central to our collection. The Panorama will be enhanced by the addition of a new model — a 1,200 square foot relief map of the New York watershed on long-term loan from the Department of Environmental Protection that is believed to have been built for our building for the 1939 World's Fair. Additionally, after the expansion, the Tiffany collection will have its own specially-designed gallery, and the World's Fair exhibition will be thoroughly redesigned and reinstalled in a large space.

Raymond Saá, Flores, 2005. Mixed media, 12 x 32 feet. Courtesy of the artist

However, the most radical difference between our current exhibitions and the reinstalled galleries is that the majority of the north end of the building — the galleries renovated in 1992 — will exhibit our permanent collection. The Gift offers a chance for us to begin to understand what we have acquired and how it will work within the confines of the “new” Queens Museum of Art. We are tremendously excited with this opportunity. As outlined in the exhibition introduction written by Valerie Smith, QMA Director of Exhibitions, we have acquired a group of artworks and collections over the last two years that truly have some great depth. But how do they look together? How much space should each collection take? How will the audiences respond to the works, and how can the Education Department use the works to teach on an ongoing basis? These are the important questions that we will begin to address with The Gift, and continue to explore on an ongoing basis.

This project is called The Gift because it embodies the generosity of the individuals and estates that have donated (or partially donated) the work in the show. We truly appreciate the fact that we have been entrusted with this valuable art and we can not wait to share it.

Thank you.

Tom Finkelpearl
Executive Director

Tamar Hirschl, Cultural Alarms, 2005. Mixed media and acrylic on vinyl. Courtesy of the artist.

Featuring work by: Richard Avedon, Felice Beato, Werner Bischof, Joseph Breitenbach, Esther Bubley, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chieng-Chi Chang, Sam Folk, Marietta Ganapin, Chitra Ganesh, Burt Glinn, Terence Gower, Bolek Greczynski, Ellen Harvey, Ken Heyman, Tamar Hirschl, Jenny Holzer, Eric Hongisto, Don Hunter, Masayuki Kawai, Shin il Kim, William Klein, Dorothea Lange, Abigail Lazkoz, Pia Lindman, Larry Litt, Nava Lubelski, Rita McBride and Discoteca Flaming Star, Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, John L. Moore, Inge Morath, Fred Morgan, John Morris, Yasushi Nagao, Yamini Nayar, New York Daily News, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, Arnold NewmanNils Norman, Ruth Orkin, Eung-Ho Park, Fernando Renes, Mark Riboud, Troy Richards, Arhur Rothstein, Theodore Rozumalski, Raymond Saá, David Seymour, William Sharp, SLAAAP!, John Sloan, W. Eugene Smith, K. Tamamura, Brian Tolle, Julian LaVerdiere, Javier Viver, Tom Warren, Louise Weinberg, WNYC New York Public Radio.

More information about The GIFT is available here.

SPECIAL EVENTS

Highlight on the Collection: Comic Inspiration — An Artist Talk with Chitra Ganesh, Jennifer Camper & Raul Enriquez

Saturday, February 4, 3 - 5 pm

Join QMA's Associate Curator, Hitomi Iwasaki, in a discussion with artists Chitra Ganesh, Raul Enriquez and Jessica Camper, three artists who utilize the comic book forms in their work. Chitra Ganesh's work, currently featured in The Gift, explores how memory and its repression shape moments of personal and social crisis. Through installation, photography, and drawing, her work integrates personal and postcolonial narratives, challenging dominant representations of the postcolonial subject. Ganesh's source materials include Greek and Hindu mythology, 19th century portraiture, Bollywood posters, comic books, and mainstream media. Trained as a composer, Raul Vincent Enriquez has, for some time, approached media arts through that practice. More recently, he thinks of moving image in “flip book” or “catalogue” terms. Raul's media work has been exhibited at diverse locations including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Performance Studies international, Scope London Art Fair, Cal Arts and NYU. The work of New York City cartoonist/graphic artist Jennifer Camper has appeared in The Village Voice, The Advocate, Out, Girlfriends, and Curve. Her art examines gender, race, sexuality and politics, especially from the viewpoint of a Lebanese-American gay woman. Camper is also the editor of, and a contributor to, Juicy Mother from Soft Skull Press, a comix anthology focusing on the work of women, people of color and queers.

Photos: Chitra Ganesh, Bed, 2004. Digital C print, 30 x 40 inches. Collection of the Queens Museum of Art. Gift of the artist.
Raul Vincent Enriquez, Buckfuddy, 2002 - ongoing. Animation. Courtesy of the artist.

Highlight on the Collection: Bolek & The Living Museum

Saturday, February 11, 2 - 4 pm

A Presentation by Dr. Janos Marton, director of the Living Museum and Reading by Living Museum writers

The Living Museum is a pioneering institution, having established the first collection of art of people with mental illness in the United States. Co-founded in 1983 by the late artist Bolek Greczynski whose work is part of the current exhibition The Gift, and the psychologist and artist, Dr. Janos Marton, the museum provides a space where individuals beset with mental illness can be accepted as artists and work among colleagues. The outcome of their collaboration is a stress free environment in which patients can redefine negative self-images, and establish their existence as artists who happen to have a psychiatric diagnosis. Dr. Marton will provide history and context about his collaborator and the development of the Living Museum, followed by a performance by Living Museum writers.

Day of Solidarity with Muslim, Arab and South Asian Immigrants

Saturday, February 18, 2 - 5 pm

Co-presented with 3rd i NY

Featuring screening of the feature film Yasmin (Kenny Glenaan, UK, 2004, 87mins). Scripted by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, The Darkest Light) after months of research and workshops with the Muslim community in the North of England, Yasmin's story explores what it means to be Asian, Muslim and British. Having rebelled against her Pakistani upbringing as a teenager, sparky, confident Yasmin (Archie Panjabi of Bend it Like Beckham) has grown adept at juggling her Westernised working and social life with her more traditional culture at home. But after the attacks of 9/11 she finds herself ostracised at work, and increasingly subject to overt Islamphobia. When her husband is snatched by the police and held without charge, she finds herself forced to re-evaluate her faith, her culture and her relationships. The harsh realities of prejudice and discrimination in a climate of poverty and fear are never trivialised, but are treated with a refreshing degree of humour, irony and understatement. Followed by discussion moderated by Pia Sawhney (Co-Director of the film Out of Status) with members of Families for Freedom, Disappeared in America, and Not in Our Name who advocate against the round ups, sweeps, and indefinite detentions of Muslims, Arabs and South Asians.

OPENING IN MARCH

ABCDF: Portraits of Mexico City

March 12 through September 17, 2006

Francisco Mata Rosas, Untitled (detail),1994. Ink on canvas, 145 x 216 inches.

Culled from more than 23 thousand submissions, 160 photographs converge to offer the ABCs of Mexico City, Distrito Federal, a great protagonist difficult to describe because of its size, yet endlessly astonishing. This exhibition combines the vision and sensitivity of the 50 or so artists whose work reflects the radiance of this city that inhabits all that have ever spent even a moment there.

Open Routines: Recent Projects by Pedro Lasch

March 12 through July 9, 2006

Pedro Lasch, Media Defacements, 2004. Video, 3 mins. Part of the series Naturalizations, 2002 - ongoing. Courtesy of the artist.

Mexico City-born and Queens-based artist, educator, activist and cultural organizer Pedro Lasch shares four of his most recent projects bridging the concerns of Latino immigrants in Queens with an awareness of international politics and contemporary art practices.

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: Habitat 7

March 12 through July 9, 2006

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, Iron Trangle, Flushing, 2004. Duratran, 40 x 96 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Winner of the 2005 New York Times Magazine Capture the Times photography contest, Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao: Habitat 7 is the Queens artist's first New York museum exhibition. Habitat 7 is a series of compelling large scale color panoramic photographs focusing on the unique communities that have developed along the spine of the IRT 7 train in Queens.

Special Opening Reception for all three exhibitions — Sunday, March 12, 3-6 pm

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The Queens Museum is housed in the New York City Building, which is owned by the City of New York.
With the assistance of the Queens Borough President Helen Marshall and the New York City Council, the Museum is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York City Department for the Aging and the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development.
Additional funding is provided by the New York State Legislature, the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Council on the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Institute for Museum and Library Services, friends and members.

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