US Open closes Queens Museum

From the Daily News:

The Queens Museum is shutting its doors for the rest of the U.S. Open because of increased security for the popular tennis tournament, officials announced Friday.

The museum is located next to the sprawling USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

"Due to the heightened security for the tennis tournament, access to the Museum is affected," the museum wrote in a message on its website. "As such, we will be closed from Saturday, Sept. 3 until the September 11 conclusion of the tournament."

The Museum tweeted the news around 7:30 a.m.

Queens cultural institutions getting less funding

From the Queens Chronicle:

Queens ranks last in per capita support from the Department of Cultural Affairs with just $3.27 spent per resident, according to a presentation by Katz’s staff at Monday’s meeting of the Borough Board, despite eight of 35 cultural institutions owned by the city located in Queens.

“Focus on that for a second,” Katz said. “I just want everyone to understand that it’s bad and it’s unfair. We are the number one destination of choice in 2015 and yet we spend $3 per person on our culture.”

Of the eight cultural institutions in Queens — the Queens Botanical Garden, the New York Hall of Science, the Queens Museum, Queens Theatre in the Park, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, the Museum of the Moving Image, PS1 and Flushing Town Hall — the New York Hall of Science is provided the most city funding, $1,847,093, in the new budget, $18,696 more than last year.

However, six other institutions saw a decrease in funding in this year’s budget proposal, with PS1’s allocation remaining steady at $774,496.

The biggest proposed cutback is a $109,000 reduction in the Queens Museum’s city funding, which would decline from $921,135 to $812,135 this year.

Katz said colleagues such as Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer don’t have to make up for shortcomings in city cultural funding with monies from their own budget, and that she plans to negotiate as hard as she can for equality.

Queens Museum wants to host bank robber's art

From the NY Post:

He robbed banks, saying it was for “art” — and now the curator of the taxpayer-funded Queens Museum wants to honor him.

Nutty Professor Joe Gibbons — who videotaped himself ripping off banks as part of a bizarre “art project” — has snagged the prestigious invitation from the Queens Museum to show off his felonious film project.

The curator of the institution — which used $57.5 million in public money to expand — can’t wait to give a forum to this alleged public enemy, who is facing serious robbery charges.

“Once he is released, I hope to help him by extending an invitation to screen his work at the Queens Museum,” curator Larissa Harris gushed in a letter to a Manhattan judge. “This would be an enormous honor for us.”

Making FMCP more accessible?

From the Queens Courier:

What will Flushing Meadows Corona Park look like in the future? The Queens Museum and the Parks Department are asking members of communities around the park to come up with ideas and solutions to make the green space more accessible to local communities.

“This is a bit of an experiment,” said Jose Serrano, the museum’s community organizer. “Instead of having people give us their ideas in some kind of meeting, we asked, why don’t we equip them with the tools to improve the park creatively and practically.”

Serrano and the Parks Department are asking the public to submit ideas on how to improve the parks connection and the way it’s used with the surrounding neighborhoods.

The deadline is Oct. 25 and 20 people will be chosen to create an exhibition project that will be shown next year at the museum. Over the course of a year, the 20 selected people will learn more about the park and its pros and cons through a series of hands-on learning events.

Serrano said that they will be only accepting people from communities like Flushing, Corona and Forest Hills because they are directly connected to the park.

A friend of mine - from Flushing - made this comment: "How about adequate funding and not giving away 47 acres to billionaires?" (I'm sure he won't be chosen for the panel.)

What's left of the 1964 World's Fair

From the NY Times:

All paths once led to the Unisphere, a magnet for the masses.

As the symbolic center of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, the 140-foot-tall globe drew 51 million people to its fountains in 12 bustling months over two years.

Visitors came there on honeymoons or first dates. Some found their way in through well-worn holes in the fence, or rode the subway alone for the first time. Others came to work, or came to protest.

Fifty years ago on April 22, the first fairgoers arrived to see the future. Little did they know, then, how one trip to the fair — or dozens — would affect their own lives.

Few of the physical structures remain. The renovated Queens Museum occupies the cavernous New York City Pavilion, first built for the 1939 World’s Fair and still housing the diorama of New York created for the ’64-’65 one. The Philip Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion is rusting with neglect. The Singer Bowl has morphed into Louis Armstrong Stadium, where United States Open tennis matches are played every summer.

Only the 700,000-pound, stainless-steel globe stands untarnished by time and enhanced by memory.

Queens Museum director appointed commissioner of Cultural Affairs

From the NY Times:

Tom Finkelpearl, the president and executive director of the Queens Museum, is scheduled to be named the cultural affairs commissioner by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday, the mayor’s office confirmed, putting Mr. Finkelpearl in charge of a $156 million budget and making him the point person on the arts for a city widely considered the cultural capital of the world.

The appointment is in keeping with the new administration’s emphasis on the disenfranchised; in his 12 years at the Queens Museum, Mr. Finkelpearl, 58, has hired community organizers to professionalize outreach efforts and emphasized the diversity of the local immigrant population. (He frequently cites the 138 languages spoken in the borough.)

And his institution’s recently completed $68 million renovation was largely aimed at making the museum more inviting and connected to the neighborhood.

“Tom believes that art is for everybody, and has developed an exceptional record of fortifying the city’s cultural institutions across all five boroughs,” Mr. de Blasio said. “That’s exactly the kind of energy, leadership and creativity that we want.”

The appointment, to be formally announced on Monday at the Queens Museum, begins to shed some light on Mr. de Blasio’s plan for the arts. He succeeds a mayor who was heavily involved in cultural affairs, Michael R. Bloomberg, and who used his own wealth to advance the mission of many arts organizations. Mr. de Blasio’s profile on culture has been something of a mystery.

The Queens Museum. Just "museum".

Hey, folks, if you want to see what people are saying about the "new" Queens Museum (of art?), you should read this review from New York Magazine, which I found courtesy of Brownstoner Queens.

World's Fair artifacts at Queens Museum

From the NY Times:

ON April 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, sitting in the Oval Office, pressed the numbers 1964 on an early touch-tone telephone. It was an exciting, if stage-managed, moment.

At the other end of the line, the directors of the New York World’s Fair were gathered in their offices in what is now called Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. At the press of the presidential buttons, a large “countdown clock” began ticking off the days remaining until the opening of the 1964 New York World’s Fair one year hence.

The telephone now sits on a shelf at the newly renovated Queens Museum, pulled out of storage along with about 900 other artifacts from the 1939 and 1964 fairs. They serve as a reminder that the building itself is a kind of artifact, built to house the New York City Pavilion at the 1939 fair. They also remind us that the great fairs generated an extraordinary amount of junk.

Yes, the world’s fairs communicated lofty ideals and grand plans. The 1939 fair promised a sneak preview of “the world of tomorrow,” expressed visually in its emblem, the spirelike Trylon and spherical Perisphere. The 1964 fair took as its motto “peace through understanding.” But the fairs were carnivals, too, vast cornucopias of trinkets, promotional ephemera and mass-produced gewgaws emblazoned with fair advertising.

And so the eye beholds, in the glass display cases devoted to the 1939 fair: a tin Planter’s peanut dish, with the monocled Mr. Peanut posing jauntily in front of the Trylon and Perisphere; tiny green pickle lapel pins from the Heinz pavilion; an orange-and-blue Trylon and Perisphere salt and pepper shaker set; a Trylon and Perisphere pencil sharpener; Trylon and Perisphere bracelets in lustrous Bakelite; a 1939 New York State license plate stamped with the words “New York World’s Fair.” Also, many coins, penknives, dishes, bookmarks and thermometers.

Queens Museum wonders if people will show up

From the NY Times:

When the Queens Museum of Art announced plans for a renovation in 2006, it joined a building boom in which cultural institutions all over the country were adding wings by name-brand architects, seeking their own Bilbaos. And when the recession of 2008 forced many of those institutions to pull back — worried about whether they needed and could support larger physical plants — the Queens Museum persevered.

The road wasn’t easy; the project was ambitious and took seven years instead of the three originally announced. The budget ballooned to $68 million from $37 million. And though the renovation is now about to be completed — a reopening is planned for early November — the hard part is still ahead: with the new building expected to add $1 million to the $4 million annual operating budget, as well as six new full-time positions, will the institution be able to support this larger operation? And, more basically: now that they’ve built it, will people come?

The building became a museum in 1972, though physically it was never ideal. Its western facade, which faces the Grand Central Parkway, was opaque and forbidding and, over the years, became obscured by plants and fencing. “You couldn’t even see the building,” said Mark Husser, Grimshaw’s principal architect on the project.

When they say "plants" they really mean "trees" - dozens of which were removed for this project. Add these to the ones that will be sacrificed for the USTA expansion, and we've lost a small forest.

Even if people’s ultimate destination is the park, to play soccer, Mr. Finkelpearl said, he hopes they stop at the museum just to use the bathroom or get a drink — and maybe they’ll decide to catch an art exhibition while they’re there. (Suggested admission is $8; $4 for students and older visitors.)

Yes, let's bank on that. And this, my friends, is why the Queens Museum is generally thought of as a joke.

It's time to show some love to the NYS Pavilion

Letter to the Editor (Queens Chronicle):

Concerning your article “Is anyone, even the USTA, FMCP’s friend?” (Feb. 28) the old question that comes to mind is the renovation or lack thereof of the New York State Pavilion. Considering the fact that in recent years both the Queens Museum and the Theatre in the Park have both been upgraded and the Theatre in the Park is physically connected to the NYS Pavilion, why has this site never been included in any rehabilitation project where the other sites have received monies from various sources. The NYS Pavilion is an eyesore now and it would be a great asset to fix up and get the elevator going to the balconies. The Parks Department is already in control of it and could run the Pavilion for an entrance fee. Just a thought from a native New Yorker and Queens resident.

Martin Wishnewitz
Jackson Heights

Museum exhibit contains photos of old NYC

From NY1:

He was a banker by trade and a photographer by passion. More than 45 years since his death, Frank Oscar Larson is re-emerging as an artist of museum quality after his family recently found a box of his negatives.

"They thought they would be family photographs or something but what they found was a real treasure trove of amazing street photographs from New York City n the 1950s," said Queens Museum of Art Executive Director Tom Finkelpearl.
Decades Later, Queens Photographer's Vision Comes Into View

From the more than 2,000 negatives, 65 were printed and are now on view at the Queens Museum of Art. A keen observer of the city, Larson captured the everyday and the everyman, giving many a window into city life as it once was.

Finkelpearl allows panorama to be defaced for pipe dream

From the Daily News:

A gleaming "Silicon City" has risen in Queens, complete with a satellite campus of a top-tier university - but you'll have to squint to see it.

It is a pint-size version of a complex for tech innovation, rendered on a famous panoramic model of the city. Though small in size, the model is a nonprofit group's bid to push its big idea for transforming Queens: Bring a tech hub to Willets Point, the shabby warren of body shops near Citi Field that is poised for a huge city redevelopment project.

The Coalition for Change, clamoring to be heard, gave the Daily News an exclusive peek at its model, which will debut at the Queens Museum of Art today.

The museum's executive director, Tom Finkelpearl, said that adding the model to the panorama - built for the 1964 World's Fair - makes the group's concept "viscerally understandable, which is not the case on Google Maps."

Precedent, however, provides a bad omen: Only once before has the panorama featured structures that had not yet been approved, and that was for the city's failed bid for the 2012 Olympics.

Isn't the panorama supposed to show what's there NOW? Why is Finkelpearl allowing this? And why does that thing look like the Millenium Falcon?

$85,000 in grant money for this?

From the NY Times:

Tania Bruguera has eaten dirt, hung a dead lamb from her neck and served trays of cocaine to a gallery audience, all in the name of art. She has shown her work at the Venice Biennale, been feted at the Pompidou Center in Paris and landed a Guggenheim fellowship.

But now she is sharing a tiny apartment in Corona, Queens, with five illegal immigrants and their six children, including a newborn, while scraping by on the minimum wage, without health insurance.

She has not fallen on hard times. Ms. Bruguera is performing a yearlong art piece meant to improve the image of immigrants and highlight their plight. And she is bringing her high-concept brand of provocation to a low-wattage precinct of taco stands and auto-body shops, where the neighbors have responded with varying degrees of curiosity, amusement and befuddlement.

I was going to just make fun of this, since it's a really stupid "art" project. But then I read this: Ms. Bruguera has turned the space, a former beauty supply store, into the headquarters for her new advocacy group-cum-art project, Immigrant Movement International, using about $85,000 from Creative Time, a nonprofit arts group, and the Queens Museum of Art.

She's getting grants from not-for-profits funded by our tax dollars, even though it says in the article that she's a woman of means who could have funded this experiment herself. How generous of us!

Her roommates, especially an out-of-work Ecuadorean laborer, do not know what to make of her. “I explained to them four times what I’m doing already,” she said. “They don’t get it. They’re not very excited.”

Looks like I have something in common with Ecuadorean day laborers in Corona...

Flushing, Queens: tourist destination!

From the Washington Post travel section:

Even though I go to Flushing, N.Y., fairly often, I'm always caught off guard by how quickly things change in the Queens neighborhood. Sometimes it will be just a new restaurant, or maybe a new hotel, but last year, as my train was pulling in, I noticed a whole new stadium. Shea was gone, and Citi Field was in its place. The area has an energy to it that I just want to bottle and sell.

Citifield is in Corona, on the other side of Flushing Creek, not in Flushing (no matter how hard the Wilpons pretend). I do sometimes fantasize about marketing "Eau de Flushing", though...

Here's a neighborhood that really seems to be part of China, only with New York City street signs.

Yes, we've noticed.

When I step off the train at Main Street, get my first whiff of scallion pancakes, make my first sighting of a new menu or find some ingredient that exists nowhere else in the Eastern United States, I know that I've come to the right place.

The first thing you smell when you step off the train at Main Street is definitely not scallion pancakes.

I'm not kidding about the stepping-off-the-train thing. There are Chinese street food vendors right under the elevated tracks.

Yes, we've noticed.

When it comes to shopping, I always set out with a goal; it could be a pair of jeans, an ethernet cable or some cereal bowls. And I can guarantee that I'll never find what I want and will come home with something else. Last time, it was my favorite Fisherman's Friend cough drops in Chinese packaging.

I'd resist the urge to consume any food product in Chinese packaging these days, pal.

The neighborhood is filled with malls that look more like third-world market stalls, and a small storefront could be a gateway to dozens of tiny vendors and even more food.

Finally, a dose of honesty!

Flushing Meadows Corona Park never seems to be on anybody's list of favorite parks.

Another dose of honesty!

At the Queens Museum of Art...head for "The Panorama," a model of New York City as it existed in roughly 1992. At 9,335 square feet, it's the world's largest architectural display. I can't visit it without crying.

Neither can I. New York before Bloomberg. A wonderful place. When they finish updating the panorama, it will show all that we've lost and the crap that we've gained in its place.

At the end of the day, take a walk down Main Street. Embrace the crush of the crowds, browse in the shops, grab a few snacks and pretend for a moment that you're in Asia.

No need to pretend. "Am I still in America?" is a phrase I have said many a time while strolling down the main drag.

Just as I was thinking that this was as urban as a place could be, I heard a rooster crow.

Heh...

Yarvin is a writer and photographer in Edison, N.J.

Ah, that explains it.

Thursday wackiness at Flushing Meadows

From Gothamist:

It looks like the Queens Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum are battling it out... on Twitter! It's impossible to say who is winning this publicity stunt war, but the Queens folk had a pretty good burn, posting the above pic and saying they found the Brooklyn Museum on their panorama.

Of course, the real battle will go down this Thursday, when artist Duke Riley gives the city's art dignitaries "baguette swords and watermelon cannon balls" in order to fight it out in "a flooded World's Fair-era-reflecting pool in Flushing Meadows Corona Park." The artist has constructed vessels and a fitting atmosphere in which to stage a gladiator-style battle between the museums (the Queens Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and El Museo del Barrio are all involved).

Foreclosures added to panorama

From the Queens Courier:

During the next few months, visitors to the Queens Museum of Art (QMA) in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park will notice a new addition to the famous Panorama of the City of New York.

Hundreds of pink plastic triangles, symbolizing blocks that had three or more foreclosure filings in 2008, have been added to the 9,335 square foot model of the city as part of the Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center installation by artist Damon Rich.

Outdated model of City has its charm

From Lost City:

The museum worker I talked to said the money might be in place to bring the thing up to date in 2019 or so. That would be nice. Then again, the current model spares us almost everything ever built by Robert Scarano, Kark Fischer and the Toll Brothers.