Corona Plaza, Center of Everywhere v2 Summer 2008 / Corona Plaza, el Centro de Todos Lados v2 Verano del 2008

QMA commissions second year of public art projects in Corona, curated by Sara Reisman / El Museo de Arte de Queens encarga por segundo año consecutivo proyectois de arte público en Corona.  Curado por Sara Reisman

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Miguel Luciano sold piraguas from his pimped out cart in Corona for a week to many happy patrons!

Pimp My Piragua

Puerto Rican artist Miguel Luciano’s Pimp My Piragua is a multi-media, mobile, public art work that combines nostalgia and urban fantasies in a modified street vendor’s pushcart. Miguel didn’t just design it, but cast, painted, and fitted out the cart himself in a painstaking process. “Piraguas” are cups of shaved, flavored ice popular in the tropics on hot summer days.

Pimp My Piragua commemorates and reinvents the humble piragua pushcart and turns it into a low-rider fantasy, a metaphor for “bling culture” and the accumulation of wealth. He also worked with local hip hop artists from QueTV to come up with his own theme song! The artist sold ices, often making his own flavored syrups (Tamarindo is my fave!) for an entire week to hundreds of eager customers and meanwhile had lots of interesting conversations with Corona residents and other vendors. It’s hard work as he can attest to, but an honest living that brings joy to everyone whom he encounters.

Check this great NY Times video story on Pimp My Piragua.

Unisex

Lin + Lam’s Unisex visually and sonically maps the diversity of the Corona neighborhood as expressed through the voices and daily activities of neighborhood barbers and stylists and their clients. Hair salons and barbershops have long served as informal settings for conversation, gossip, and social networking, and the dynamic between stylist and client can be similar to the connection between therapist and client, requiring deep trust and intimacy. To document this intimacy, Lin + Lam interacted with the Corona community on street festival days by offering free haircuts (don’t worry Lam is licensed!) and interviewed barbers and beauticians in numerous shops. They produced a beautiful video installation for QMA with monitors behind two-way mirror evoking a salon, as well as installed monitors showing the videos in various Corona salons, which drew in local residents interested in seeing themselves represented on film.

The Adventures of La Coronita

Mike Estabrook produced comic strips and animation scripted by local community members at Corona Cares festivals based on the exploits of a fictional character, La Coronita (little crown) who acted as a petite superheroine or mascot for the neighborhood. These Adventures of La Coronita followed a young girl as she flew around the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, shopped with her family, witnessed a car accident, and even had a Western-style showdown with a Corona beer bottle. Estabrook produced new animations to be shown in the QMA galleries each week, providing area residents with a good reason to engage with the Museum on a regular basis. He also installed a life-size painted wooden Coronitas in the locations where each of his stories took place, acting as a mysterious marker for a place of meaning for a community resident. His comic strips were gathered together and published in a September issue of The Community Journal. At the last Corona Cares street festival of the year, he also distributed dozens of dvds of the compiled animations, each with on-the-spot hand drawn illustrations.

Spectacle Path

The artists’ collective vydavy sindikat (“Vydavy” in Russian literally translates to “you and you”) used Corona Plaza: Center of Everywhere as an opportunity to transform local residents’ views of their community. Spectacle Path invited pedestrians and cultural tourists to become part of a new visual experience, one that magnified, multiplied, and distorted the mundane views commonly associated with urban living, through Fresnel lenses and kaleidoscopes installed in storefronts and park fences. The installation followed a clear path throughout the neighborhood, serving as a de facto guided tour of the ways in which new perspectives can alter an environment.

Corona Plaza: Center of Everywhere v1, Summer 2007 / Corona Plaza: Centro de Todos Lados v1, Verano 2007

QMA launches first edition of public art projects in Corona Plaza, with curator Herb Tam  /  El Museo de Arte de Queens hace el lanzamiento de la primera edición de proyectos de arte público en Corona Plaza bajo la curadoría de Herb Tam

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El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man

Shaun "El Conquistador" Leonardo battles El Hombre Invisible in Corona Plaza

Shaun “El C.” Leonardo presented the final performance of El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man, a recurring wrestling event in which the artist portrays a Mexican wrestling luchador battling an invisible opponent to fight invisibility, both metaphorically and literally, as well as to challenge the idealization of hypermasculinity in Latino culture. The match became a physical way to manifest not only a battle against societal obscurity, but also an internal struggle with the complexities of the artist’s identity (Queens-born, of mixed Dominican and Guatemalan descent).

The project in Corona Plaza entailed a slow building of hype around the luchador persona and the culminating fight performance which took place during the final 2007 Corona Plaza street celebration (September 15, 2007). A video piece simulating a “press conference” was presented on screens at local electronic stores and restaurants, along with wrestling workshops with youth at local elementary school’s and autograph-signing events our Corona Cares Street Festivals. Posters announcing the battle were plastered in shop windows from July 1 through the time of the September performance. El C also just spent a lot time hanging in local barber shops talking up the event and building anticipation. Over 1000 people packed Corona Plaza to see the nail-biting finale. The performance itself was a journey starting with the comical and “glam” and building in physical and psychic energy to a climax: the exhausted and defeated luchador finally unmasked.

Muros Distopicos/Dystopic Walls

Hector Canonge helps a young particpant create a flag of her country of origin and letter to relatives on the other side of the border to be displayed at the local Western Union.

Hector Canonge’s Muros Distopicos / Dystopic Walls project erected a wall inside Western Union in Corona Plaza that referred to the border wall dividing Mexico and the U.S. Upon entering Western Union, viewers could look through peepholes at images evoking memories of various countries “south of the border,” and when exiting, images of America appeared, mimicking a border-crossing experience. Also on display were objects made by Corona residents during the street festivals referring to their status as immigrants or children of immigrants. For example, at one festival, Canonge asked attendees to write letters to their loved ones on the other side of the border on Western Union Moneygram forms.

The project pointed toward the ways in which immigrants support families and towns in their home countries through remittances, performing a type of transnational community development that these individuals might actually never benefit from themselves. The cost of these “development projects” is an often invisible individual sacrifice by the immigrant worker subject to separation from loved ones, anti-immigrant discrimination, and fear of deportation. This project made visible these transactions and dislocations.

This is What I Eat

Designed to look like a supermarket circular, This Is What I Eat was distributed for free in and around Corona Plaza and the Queens Museum.

Stephanie Diamond’s public art project involved her with the health and wellness of the Corona community. This is What I Eat, a cookbook created in the style of a supermarket circular, was developed in conjunction with residents living near and around Corona Plaza through workshops with QMA community partners and Cookbook Committee members, fun surveys and games with local youth during our street festivals, research conducted with shoppers in local supermarkets, and numerous dinners with residents. The contents of the cookbook consisted of local residents’ recipes and customs from their country of origin and how they adapted while living in New York, recommended food remedies, shopping lists, and written memories of family meals. They were visually arresting and gastronomically informative. The cookbook was printed primarily in English, but with sections featuring all the major languages spoken in Corona. This is What I Eat was available free of charge in several dispensers near Corona Plaza, and distributed with the help of local supermarkets and at QMA’s street festivals.

A New Americana

Xaveria Simmons takes portrait against backdrop in outdoor studio at Corona Cares Festival

In stark contrast to the beautiful, but brutal, performance art of Shaun “El C.” Leonardo, Xaveria Simmons created idyllic vinyl backdrops featuring nature photographs of upstate New York. These were stretched between trees in Corona Plaza during April street festival days and served as a backdrop for the free portrait sessions she conducted with festival attendees. The backgrounds created scenes reminiscent of the American Dream, which for many Corona residents is impossible due to immigration status and long work hours. Simmons provided hand-printed portraits to members of the community free of charge. In order to better connect Corona residents with QMA, these portraits were available for pick-up at the Museum and were accompanied by free museum passes. The collection period coincided with QMA’s exhibition Generation 1.5 (June 10 – December 2, 2007), which featured the work of artists who were born abroad but came of age in America, a subject that proved to be of special interest to local residents – more than 1,000 people attended the show’s opening. Simmons selected four of the pictures to be blown up into translucent banners and hung in the second story windows above the bakery on Corona Plaza from July to the closing ceremonies on October 14, 2007. These banners, and the internal contradictions they present to many recent émigrés, were visible to all commuters exiting the 103rd Street 7 train station, making visible many families who are invisible due to their work schedules and lack of documentation.

Center of Everywhere v1 on WNYC radio

Siddhartha Mitter talks to Corona Plaza: Center of Everywhere v1 artists Hector Canonge and Shaun “El C” Leonardo.