QMAil : June 2009

CONTENTS:

EXHIBITIONS: Tarjama / Translation | Launch Pad Artist Residency: Johanna Unzueta Iron Folklore | Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center | Work in Progress: Dorothea Rockburne’s Homage to Colin Powell

EVENTS: Queens Arts Express – QMA Summer Open House | MetLife presents First Sundays for Families at QMA: Summer Solstice: A Day in the Park | Queens Arts Express presents Corona Diversity Festival | Jahajee Sisters Chapbook Launch | Opening Reception of Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center | Inti Raymi Andean Festival of the Sun | CINEMAROSA - Queens Only Queer Film Series : Queerin’ Queens ‘09 | Queens Seniors Festival | Staged Reading of The Journey an original gospel musical by Tiffane Henry | Central Asian Cinema Series presents Beshkempir - The Adopted Son | Latin American International Alliance Community Dinner | QMA Non-GALA

QMA INFORMATION: Permanent Exhibitions | Special Announcements

LEARNING PROGRAMS: Tours & Workshops | Senior Programs

Credits

June masthead: Esra Ersen, I am Turkish, I am Honest, I am Diligent...(video still), 2002. Video installation, 21:28 minutes, commissioned for Kwangju Biennial, Korea. Courtesy the artist.

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Tarjama / Translation

May 10 – September 27, 2009

Tarjama / Translation maps an influential subset of recent work from the Middle East and Central Asia and their diasporas as a complex and dynamic undertaking. Rather than providing a panoramic and fleeting exposure to contemporary “Middle Eastern” and “Central Asian” art, Tarjama / Translation provides focus on selected artistic processes of cultural and critical translation.

Contemporary artists are perhaps the greatest translators. Their work transforms experience, perception, and thought into acts and materials of communication by scrutinizing everything at hand--materiality, culture, society, and beliefs. In Tarjama / Translation, language and textuality remain salient, but the exhibition includes approaches of visual translation for engaging with the complexities of our present era. Tarjama / Translation addresses the work of translation as multivalent, from the specificities of textual and visual manoeuvres to the larger sense of revealing fissures of the self, community, site and temporality. It focuses on how contemporary artists negotiate the formation of history influenced by continued states of dislocation and track newer dilemmas engendered by a globalized world saturated with the hyper-commercialism of media and popular culture.

Featured Artists

Ayad Alkadhi, Iraq, b. 1972
Nazgol Ansarinia, Iran, b. 1979
Hamdi Attia, Egypt, b. 1964
Lara Baladi, Egypt, b. 1969
Yto Barrada, Morocco, b. 1971
Esra Ersen, Turkey, b. 1970
Khaled Hafez, Egypt, b. 1963
Emily Jacir, Palestine, b. 1970
Pouran Jinchi, Iran, b. 1959
John Jurayj, USA, b. 1968
Gülsün Karamustafa, Turkey, b. 1946
Bouchra Khalili, Morocco, b. 1975
Almagul Menlibayeva, Kazakhstan, b.1969
Farhad Moshiri, Iran, b. 1963
Rabih Mroué, Lebanon, b. 1967
Rahraw Omarzad, Afghanistan, b. 1964
Khalil Rabah, Palestine, b. 1961
Khaled Ramadan, Lebanon, b. 1964
Michael Rakowitz, USA, b. 1973
Solmaz Shahbazi, Iran, b. 1971
Wael Shawky, Egypt, b. 1971
Mitra Tabrizian, Iran
Alexander Ugay, Kazakhstan, b. 1978
Sharif Waked, Israel/Palestine, b. 1964
Dilek Winchester, Turkey, b. 1974
Yelena Vorobyeva & Viktor Vorobyev, Kazakhstan, b. 1959 & 1959
Akram Zaatari, Lebanon, b. 1966

Tarjama / Translation is organized by ArteEast, and curated by Leeza Ahmady and Iftikhar Dadi, with assistant curator Reem Fadda.

Major support for Tarjama / Translation has been provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and the A. M. Qattan Foundation.

IMAGE: Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev, Kasakhstan. Blue Period, 2002-2005. 18 color photographs (exhibition prints), each 19 x 29 inches. Courtesy the artists.

Launch Pad Artist Residency: Johanna Unzueta Iron Folklore

May 10 – September 27, 2009

Iron Folklore is an extensive site-specific installation work by Johanna Unzueta as part of the QMA's Launch Pad Artist Residency and Project program. Drawing from her recurrent interest in the history of labor, Unzueta creates sculptural and environmental installations often made exclusively of thick felt.

Iron Folklore occupies the museum’s elevator and the second floor balcony area with a subtle, yet powerful response to a socio-cultural narrative found in the gritty industrial area known as the “Iron Triangle” in Willets Point, within walking distance of the museum. The Iron Triangle, has been the home of auto repair shops, scrap yards, waste processing sites, and similar small businesses since the 1950s, but it’s rich, if not sordid, history is soon to end with a new urban renewal plan.

Transforming and connecting the spaces in the museum with shapes of industrial elements made of felt, Unzueta’s Iron Folklore addresses the contradictory notions of and the relationships between labor and culture in a local context.

Launch Pad is supported with grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, and Cowles Charitable Trust. Additional funding provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.

IMAGE: File photos of the Iron Triangle (November 2008). Courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York.

Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center

May 31 – September 27, 2009

Opening Celebration: Saturday, June 20, 3 - 7 pm

Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, a large-scale installation of models, drawings, photographs, and videos by artist-designer Damon Rich, melds Sesame Street graphics with do-it-yourself investigations into the intricacies of real estate finance. For Red Lines, Rich has collected the history and material culture behind the current economic crisis into an experimental site for reflection and learning. Explore the threatening spikes and troughs of interest rates in the form of a plywood construction 40 feet long and 14 feet tall; enter a ghostly looming bust of Frederick Babcock, pioneer of real estate appraisal; and walk through photographic panorama of houses in Detroit and its suburbs. Photographs and video interviews with players in the field—from community activists to investment bankers—transform abstract financial markets into networks of, if not humane, then clearly human positions.

Rich's project was initiated during a 2007 artist residency at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as part of a project of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), the Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization founded by the artist. Further developing the work as part of the Queens Museum's residency program, Rich will design new pieces for the famous Panorama of the City of New York and museum café. Rich, QMA, and CUP will organize a series of talks and screenings both on- and off-site, partnering with New York City community organizations to bring people together around urgent housing issues throughout the summer.

Today, against the backdrop of the Subprime Meltdown that has pushed people out of homes, ruined neighborhoods, bankrupted institutions, and contributed to a global economic crisis, Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center aims to broaden and enrich the urgent conversation about how our society finances its living environments.

Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center is presented in dialogue with The University of Trash, an exhibition by artists Nils Norman and Michael Cataldi on view at SculptureCenter May 10 – August 3, 2009. Norman and Cataldi propose a radical imagination and radically different space might look like coming out of this crisis. The two exhibitions will co-host public programs and each will include an installed element from the other.

IMAGE: Installation view of The University of Trash, 2009. Courtesy SculptureCenter.

Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center was created by Damon Rich as a project of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP).

Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center is funded by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Artists & Communities, a program of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, which is made possible by major funding from Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the JPMorgan Chase Foundation. A publication funded by The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts will be available during the exhibition. Additional support provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.

IMAGE: The Flow of Funds (spike and troughs), 2007-2008. Installation view, MIT Museum Compton Gallery.

Work in Progress: Dorothea Rockburne’s Homage to Colin Powell

June – August, 2009

In June 2009, Montreal-born American artist Dorothea Rockburne will begin work on a 40-foot mural in the Queens Museum’s Large Triangle Gallery. Destined for the U.S. Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica, this new work was commissioned by the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE) and honors General Colin Powell, whose parents were from Jamaica. Titled Homage to Colin Powell, it depicts the sky over Jamaica on the night he was born. Rockburne, in partnership with Evergreene Architectural Arts, Inc., will execute the mural between May 18 and early August, 2009. Following its completion, Homage will be on display at the Queens Museum until early September, and shipped to Jamaica and installed in the atrium of the embassy later this year. This marks the first time a FAPE project has been created in public view.

Dorothea Rockburne is a leading American abstract artist. Born in 1932, Rockburne draws inspiration primarily from a deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Since the late 1960s, she has aligned herself with the classical tradition, exploring geometry, equilibrium, and proportional relationships while using materials like cardboard and crude oil and, more recently, gold leaf and pure pigment. Through deliberate choices of color and composition, Rockburne brings together the human desire for transcendence and the mathematical structures that underlie all of nature. Her work has been seen in one-person exhibitions at numerous galleries and in museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Dorothea Rockburne Reading Room, located in the same gallery, is the latest in a series of reading rooms developed as part of QMA’s collaboration with the Queens Library. The Reading Room provides reference materials on subjects that inform the mural and how they relate to each other and to Queens residents. Some of the subjects included are astronomy, mural-making, and Colin Powell. The Reading Room also features a short documentary on the project by Ed Howard of the Checkerboard Film Foundation.

For the past 30 years, the third largest foreign-born population in New York City has been from Jamaica. Almost a fourth of the total Jamaican community lives in Queens, making the Queens Museum of Art a fitting location for the execution, interpretation, and unveiling of Rockburne’s artwork. This is a unique opportunity both to learn about how one artist works and to delve into the immigrant heritage of a widely admired American.

The Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE) is the leading non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the United States’ image abroad through American art. Founded as a public-private, non-partisan partnership in 1986, FAPE works with the U.S. Department of State to exhibit fine art in U.S. embassies around the world. FAPE’s donations include works by more than 145 preeminent American artists placed in over 70 countries. For more information, please visit www.fapeglobal.org.
This project is part of FAPE’s Art in New Embassies program and has been made possible by FAPE and Leonore Annenberg through the Annenberg Foundation with additional funds from the Cobb Family Foundation.

SPECIAL EVENTS

Queens Arts Express – QMA Summer Open House with Free Tours & Workshops

Sunday, June 7, 1 - 5 pm

1 pm & 3 pm: Join artist Damon Rich for a special tour of his exhibition Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center which uses design to make real estate finance more accessible to the public.

2 pm & 4 pm: Curators lead tours of the Translation / Tarjama exhibition of Middle Eastern and Central Asian contemporary art.

Part of Queens Arts Express a multi-day multi-venue art extravaganza that will take place on three weekends in Spring 2009 (May 29 – June 14, 2009) in the City’s most diverse borough. Queens Art Express is six days of exhibitions, performances, and special events clustered around the No. 7 train emphasizing each venue’s unique show and the accessibility of the venues by environmentally-friendly transportation.

presents First Sundays for Families at QMA: Summer Solstice: A Day in the Park

Sunday, June 7, 1 - 4:30 pm

Artist Dayan Silva will mark the season with a puppet show that will highlight the best of traditional summer activities. Following the show will be a puppet making workshop where participants can create their own summer-themed puppet. The day will culminate in a picnic right outside our doors in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and feature customary summer food and outdoor games.

Queens Arts Express presents Corona Diversity Festival (offsite)

Saturday, June 13, 1 - 5 pm

Join the Queens Museum of Art and Corona Community Action Network for an afternoon of music and folkloric dance that showcases the diversity of the neighborhood. Featured performers include Juarez Show Mariachi, Min Xiao Fen’s Blue Pipa Trio, and The Charlie Cajares Salsa Ensemble. Plus grab a complimentary copy of the Healthy Taste of Corona Cookbook featuring recipes from neighborhood restaurants and organizations, and then take advantage of special discounts at local ethnic eateries.
This OFFSITE EVENT takes place in Corona Plaza (at 103rd St. 7 train stop).

Jahajee Sisters Chapbook Launch

Friday, June 19, 6 - 9 pm

Jahajee Sisters Empowering Indo-Caribbean Women present an uplifting evening of poetry, music, dance and drama to celebrate the launch of our new poetry chapbook, published in partnership with Sakhi for South Asian Women. This is the first community-created collection of poetry and prose by an inter-generational group of women from New York, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Suriname and South Asia speaking on identity, empowerment and ending domestic violence.

Opening Reception of Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center

Saturday, June 20, 3 - 7 pm

3 - 5 pm: Film Screenings & Discussion
The Road to Better Living (A Jerry Fairbanks Production, 25 min., 1959)
A tribute to the mortgage banking industry and its role in building America's housing and industrial infrastructure.
Predatory Tales (Damon Rich, 20 min., 2007)
True stories of homebuying scams told by the people who lived them. Produced in partnership with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT@Lawrence, and Lawrence Community Works.
PRIMETIME (Jennifer Fasulo & Manauvaskar Kublall, 23 min., 2009)
This timely film takes the viewer behind the foreclosure statistics and into the homes and hearts of two NYC women who have been pummeled by the foreclosure tsunami. It breaks down the complex issues of the sub-prime mortgage industry into easy to understand language and reveals the systematic culpability of the financial institutions. PRIMETIME weaves individual stories into a collective narrative, bringing to light the disproportionate impact of the foreclosure crisis on communities of color. As the US government continues to bail out the financial industry, PRIMETIME is an urgent reminder of the on-the-ground struggles of people fighting to keep their homes.
*Followed by discussion with Damon Rich, filmmaker Manauvaskar Kublall, the subjects of PRIMETIME, and Lionel Ouellette of CHANGER, a homeowners justice organization*.

5 - 7 pm: Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony for Red Line Housing Crisis Learning Center with Artist Damon Rich and QMA Executive Director Tom Finkelpearl, followed by refreshments.

Inti Raymi Andean Festival of the Sun

Sunday, June 21, 3 - 8 pm

In conjunction with Kechua community organizers, the Queens Museum will host an Andean celebration of the longest day of the year and the harvest of corn. The program will include typical foods and drinks from the region, folkloric dance, representation of ancient rituals, a craft fair, and a cultural symposium. Join us for a cultural celebration of South American indigenous groups that reminds us of our connection to the Earth.

CINEMAROSA - Queens Only Queer Film Series : Queerin’ Queens ‘09

Sunday, June 21, 3 - 6 pm

Just As We Are / Tal Como Somos (Judith McCray, 70 min., 2007)
A look at the stigma of gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals in traditional Latino culture.
Carmen’s Place (Anna Wilking, 18 min., 2008)
A documentary about small shelter run by a faith community for homeless transgender and gay youth in Astoria, Queens.
*Followed by Q&A, and QMA’s annual Pride Month celebration featuring live music and performances, DJ Set, and complementary refreshments.*

  is a monthly independent LGBT film series created by New Media artist, Hector Canonge. Screenings are Every Third Sunday of the Month hosted by the Queens Museum of Art. For more information, visit CINEMAROSA.

Queens Seniors Festival

Thursday, June 25, 11:30 – 3:30 pm

Queens Seniors Festival is the culmination of a ten week senior initiative by MetroPlus and Queens Museum of Art that hosted a weekly health and social service workshop and Healthy Taste of Corona Cookbook demonstrations and giveaways at 10 senior centers in Corona, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights from April 30 to June 18. The Festival includes a Tai Chi Workshop, hands-on artmaking activities, healthy luncheon, live music, as well as Salsa, Tango and Merengue dance performances by local Senior Centers groups.

Staged Reading of The Journey an original gospel musical by Tiffane Henry

Friday &; Saturday, June 26 - 27, 7 - 9 pm

Explore a teenager's emotional struggle as she deals with the tragic death of her family members and the sudden uprooting from New York to the unknowns of North Carolina. The play charts her experiences as she decides whether to follow the spirit led guidance of her aunt or fall into a life of drugs and crime. The play was first mounted last February at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana, and the Queens-based playwright is bringing it back to her home community.

Central Asian Cinema Series presents Beshkempir - The Adopted Son

Saturday, June 27, 1 - 3 pm

On the last Saturday of each month from May 30 – September 27, we explore key feature films by prominent Central Asian directors. Selected films deal the development of a self-determined national culture in the immediate post-Soviet independence era of the 1990s. As with the concurrent visual art exhibition Tarjama / Translation, the films address how multiple identities and affiliations are created and challenged, how people and places are connected through economics or politics, and how different histories and traditions (including artistic) are interpreted. Films courtesy of the Open Society Institute.

Beshkempir - The Adopted Son (Aktan Abdykalykov, Kyrgyzstan, 1998, 78 min, Kyrgyz with English ST)
One of the most acclaimed films since independence, Beshkempir is a coming-of age film depicting the clash between modernity and Kyrgyzstan's traditional rural culture. In the film's opening scene, five old women perform an adoption ritual for an orphan taken in by a childless family; they name him Beshkempir (five old women) to protect him from the evil eye. The boy matures, carefree and full of energy, under his grandmother's loving and affectionate attention. When he finds out that he is adopted and his beloved grandmother dies, Beshkempir must develop a new sense of self.
Poetically filmed In black-and-white with occasional explosions of color, the film's documentary style mirrors the aesthetics of the traditional Kyrgyz patch-work felt rug, the tekemet.

Latin American International Alliance Community Dinner

Sunday, June 28, 6 - 9 pm

LAIA (Latin American International Alliance) will host their second annual community dinner celebrating third anniversary of the organization. Performances by musical dance group, Love Peace and Love, Malena, Mochi Parra with El Maestro Perico Diaz, Eleine do Brasil and Edgar Iniguez. There will be a special presentation by LAIA Belly Dancers. Food and beverages by Isla Restaurant.

QMA Non-GALA

Tuesday, June 30

Leave your tux in the closet and don’t hire a babysitter! This year the Queens Museum of Art is hosting a recession era fundraiser called the NON-GALA where the entire event takes place on www.qmanongala.org. The NON-GALA features fabulous raffle prizes, social networking opportunities, and a special one night only web event to take place on June 30, 2009. Since there are minimal costs for the NON-GALA, 100% of your contribution will support what you love most about the QMA our exciting exhibitions, innovative public events, and nationally recognized education programs.

Public Events at the Queens Museum of Art are supported in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Ford Foundation Partners for Livable Communities, J. M. Kaplan Fund, and Independence Community Foundation.

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