Art in the Parks

Led by artist Nick Kozak, Citizens of Earth is the sixth residency of the Studio in the Park program at the Queens Museum. It is an interactive, performative installation centered on creating junctions for participants to find common ground through the process of unveiling their immigration stories, ancestry, and history. A select group of NYC public school students will help activate the piece by engaging with participants and guiding the conversation towards identifying as a global citizen. Through this process, participants are also encouraged to take part in the creation of a one-of-a-kind global passport, which is completely free of charge. As participants leave the installation, the passport becomes a personal memory of their participation in a world far greater than the borders of the land(s) we inhabit.

The Studio in the Park residency takes place in a 150 square foot purpose-built mobile studio situated adjacent to the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. This exhibition is presented by ArtBuilt and the Queens Museum.

This group exhibition includes 16 sculptures by 15 artists at 14 sites adjacent to the newly completed boardwalk on Shore Front Parkway, spanning from Beach 73 Street to Beach 108 Street. The sculptures celebrate the spirit and beauty of the Rockaways and range from the intimate to the monumental. Artists in this exhibition include Dan Bergman, Allan Cyprys, Sean 'Febrications' Landau, Esther A. Grillo, Bibiana Huang Matheis, Christina Jorge, Sui Park, Siena Gillann Porta, Carl Rattner, Herb Rosenberg, Stan Squirewell, Anne Stanner, Chuck von Schmidt, and collaborative artists Carmen Frank and Laura Frank. During each month of the exhibition, arts and cultural events, special programs and tours will be offered free to the public. For more information on related programming, please visit 14sculptors.com.

This exhibition is presented by 14 Sculptors Inc., with support from the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

What Is Wild is the fifth residency of the Studio in the Park program at the Queens Museum. What Is Wild is a collective nature documentary project and installation made especially for NYC Parks and by a neurodiverse community primarily involving youth. A workshop series prompted by the question “what is wild?” will culminate in a short documentary focused on a collective perspective of the natural plant-life and wildlife within Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The project celebrates both the accessible nature available in our city parks and how we are ALL connected as humans on this planet, regardless of our abilities.

The Studio in the Park residency takes place in a 150 square foot purpose-built mobile studio situated adjacent to the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. This exhibition is presented by ArtBuilt and the Queens Museum.

Installed amidst a grove of trees adjacent to the Lewis H. Latimer House Museum, Light Spectrum draws the viewer’s attention to the science of light and color. Composed of discarded metal lampshade frames welded together in a totemic form, Perez’s sculpture is wrapped with crocheted plastic bags that turn the column into a filter for natural light infused with color. Her sculpture is an homage to the house’s former inhabitant, inventor Lewis Howard Latimer who played an integral role in patenting the light bulb and telephone.

This exhibition is presented by the Lewis H. Latimer House Museum, with support from the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

With robust plantings of native grasses and flowers, and herbs, Meg Webster’s Concave Room for Bees is both sculptural and ecological. Webster highlights the complex interactions of organic systems in the piece in a variety of ways, such as selecting greenery that attracts pollinators and exposing the soil layers for viewing. Park visitors are encouraged to use paths to walk through the work, experiencing it in the round. The work is multi-sensory, a mix of botanical aromas, insect hums, dewy air, and vibrantly colored flora.

This exhibition was originally part of LANDMARK, a series of artist commissions and projects that marked Socrates Sculpture Park’s 30th anniversary in 2016. The works transformed the land both physically and symbolically. LANDMARK directly addressed the idea of place as intimately tied to social and ecological structures, to maintenance and stewardship, and to evolution over time.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

Inaugurated in 2000, Socrates Sculpture Park’s annual Emerging Artist Fellowship (EAF) Exhibition offers a rare opportunity for emerging artists to realize original, large-scale, complex outdoor work. The 15 selected artists are provided with an open studio along with financial, administrative, and technical support. From May through September EAF artists work on-site, negotiating the physical and conceptual challenges of production in the park’s outdoor studio space, enhancing the park’s popular summer programming. The resulting site-specific works are physically and ideologically diverse and address the past, present, and future of the park as it celebrates its 30th anniversary year.

This year’s Emerging Artist Fellows were selected through a highly competitive process by the park’s 2016 Curatorial Advisors, Larissa Harris (Curator, Queens Museum) and Amanda Hunt (Assistant Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem). The 2016 Emerging Artist Fellows are: Liene Bosquê, Travis Boyer, Andrew Brehm, Lea Cetera, Dachal Choi and Mathew Suen, Onyedika Chuke, Galería Perdida, Dylan Gauthier, Dmitri Hertz, Madeline Hollander, Olalekan Jeyifous, Lia Lowenthal, Sable Elyse Smith, Elizabeth Tubergen, and Bryan Zanisnik.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

For her Broadway Billboard, APPLAUSE, Oppenheim creates the vision of a “truly” blue rose by digitally shifting color tones of a stock photograph. This work evolves from the artist’s ongoing study of color and perception, focusing on the impossibility of a “natural” blue rose. Through research Oppenheim learned that blue roses cannot occur without human intervention. For centuries blue roses were created by adding blue dye to white roses, but in 2004 a Japanese company produced a blue rose through genetic engineering.

Appropriately, folklore of various cultures often use the blue rose as symbols of the impossible or unattainable. In tales and poetry, it has also represented unrequited love, blinding phantasm, and deceptive illusion. Now situated in the leafy landscape and post-industrial neighborhood at Socrates Sculpture Park, it takes on an enigmatic tone. As genetic modification organisms are currently hotly debated—both championed as a solution to global hunger and derided as potentially toxic agents–are these blue roses ominous or gloriousΑ

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

Inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad, Montoya’s illuminated sculptures redefine the monarch butterfly as an icon of migration and freedom. This work is part of the series La Isla Bonita, a beautification project that seeks to transform public spaces through public art and community engagement.

This exhibition was made possible by the Art in the Parks: UNIQLO Park Expressions Grant.

Eyes’ intersecting steel shapes are derived from the simple silhouettes of hillsides and stairs, and frame the park’s historic Village Hall. The integrated play feature provides a chance to engage with the work in a way that most sculptures do not allow, appealing to the community in a fundamental way.

This exhibition was made possible by the Art in the Parks: UNIQLO Park Expressions Grant.

Tree Reflections is a series of clay tiles cast from two Osage Orange trees combined with mosaic pieces that tells the story of two parks. The main components of this artwork are cast from an Osage Orange tree in Marcus Garvey Park near the artist’s home in Harlem. After visiting Conference House Park, Stair cast four clay extensions from the Osage Orange tree there, which were added to the existing artwork. Stair’s aims to create portraits of trees through her work. The clay that she presses onto living trees records their species, age, and strength. She was particularly attracted to the trees’ remarkable patterns, bending forms, and endurance, physical qualities that demonstrate the unique historical importance of this species.

An additional exhibition of Stair’s work in the Conference House Park Visitor Center’s Lenape Gallery will open on November 25 as part of Native American Heritage month.