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Young performers at Corona Plaza
On Saturday, June 13, the Queens Museum of Art teamed up with the Corona Community Action Network (CAN) to host an International Family Day in Corona Plaza. Intermittent rain storms didn’t keep local residents and visitors from across the tri-state area from gathering in the Plaza to hear music, dance and applaud as adults and children representing various nationalities performed. The event featured more than 10 musical and dance groups from around the area, including the Juarez Show Mariachi, Blue Pipa Trio, and the Charlie Cajares Salsa Ensemble. There were also several booths set up by various organizations that serve the local neighborhoods, each providing different ways of learning about important health and social service issues in the community.
Local, International Performances
The event provided a means for residents of different cultural backgrounds to come together and celebrate the diversity present in the neighborhood. Vicky, a resident of Corona for 10 years, had never heard of most of the groups that performed at the festival. “It’s kind of new,” she explained, “because I was like ‘Where did they come from?” As someone born in Haiti she stated, “It’s nice, what has happened today, making everybody, all of the nations interact… Just like I’m not Hispanic, and I’m enjoying it.”
Jorge, who performs in the Afro-Uruguayan group Manos del Candombe, agreed. “For me and my group, it’s something very useful because it’s not just one country or flag being represented, but rather one united community of Hispanics. And it’s great to be able to display our customs, our music, and all that is ours, from our homelands. It is really a brilliant idea, and it’s a real honor to be participating in something like this.”
Manos del Candombe performing through the crowds at Corona Plaza
While most spectators were from Corona and neighboring communities, some came from other areas to enjoy the festival. One woman traveled from Long Island to see the Blue Pipa Trio, which plays a combination of Chinese folk, jazz and pop music. Noting the range of acts, she observed that the event was “very rich in different cultures, dancing —it’s more than what I expected… I definitely got to learn more about Hispanic music from this festival.” She also noticed the age diversity among the acts. “I was surprised about the performers’ ages. Someone can be really young, but they perform like dancing stars, and it’s very impressive.”
Exchanging Information
Alexandra, the museum's community organizer, at the QMA booth
International Family Day also acted as a means for groups to share information about important local issues. Onias Pacheco, representing the U.S. Census 2010, encouraged residents to participate in next year’s collection, and a Greenmarket booth advertised the arrival of the city’s latest farmer’s market here in the Plaza. At the QMA booth, we offered information about free programming at the museum, including photography courses. In keeping with the festival’s focus on healthy living, we distributed copies of A Taste of Corona, a heart-healthy cookbook with over 30 recipes collected from restaurants, elected officials, and community-based organizations in the Heart of Corona Initiative. This book showcases traditional foods from a variety of countries reflecting the diversity of cultures in the neighborhood, while at the same time updating the recipes to make them healthier.
A nurse gives free tests for high blood pressure and cholesterol level at the HealthFirst booth.
Rosa Marticorena, who worked at the HealthFirst booth, expressed how important this kind of event is in providing information about health. ‘It’s a great idea, especially for us Hispanic-Americans, because honestly many of us are not well-informed about health. We’ve been testing many people today, and have discovered that several of them have high blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and they didn’t know!” HealthFirst is a hospital-sponsored organization that aims to improve the health status of low-income individuals and families by increasing access to high-quality healthcare. “If you are healthy, you can work, stay active, and do achieve all of your goals in life,” continued Ms. Marticorena. “Because there are dreams, visions that people have upon arriving to this country, goals that they set for themselves. But without health, such success is not possible.”
Plaza Possibilities
Neighbors at the International Family Day also considered how Corona Plaza has changed in recent years, and what they hope for its future. The Plaza, commonly recognized by locals for its proximity to the busy 103rd Street train station, is actually a parking lot used throughout most of the week as the unofficial garage of large mudanzas, or moving trucks. Enclosed on one side by Roosevelt Avenue and the elevated 7 train line, and National Street (one of Corona’s oldest) on the other, Corona Plaza is also recognized by many as the commercial center of the community. The businesses that surround the Plaza—small restaurants, barber shops, locally-based supermarkets, record stores, gift shops—are a reflection of most of Corona’s commercial environment.
Volunteer waters marigolds in the Plaza's garden
Recently, a small fenced garden located near the station entrance, once covered with bird droppings, has been adorned with flowers and frequently maintained. And a couple of months ago, a new shiny automatic public toilet—only the city’s second—was installed near the busy intersection of Roosevelt & National. Mr. Leonido Bravo, waiting on line to check his blood pressure and cholesterol level, reflected, “Yes, it’s changed, mostly over the last two years. It’s become more organized and cleaner.” Florencia, another local, agreed. “I think it has changed very much. There was more garbage, more drunkards all throughout. And now it appears cleaner to me. There is a stronger police presence too, and you can sense the difference.”
The upgrades slowly being made to the Plaza become more visible when public events shine a spotlight on the busy space, and may even help provide the local community with an alternative vision of how public spaces can function for them. “If it continues to be done,” claimed Florencia, “…we will be able to come and have some fun for a while. It’s free, and not too far!” This sentiment was echoed by others at the festival. Mr. Bravo expressed, “I think the Plaza will have a better future, better than a parking lot. It looks more elegant today.” Jorge, the Candombe player, felt that International Family Day was “Like a calling. As you saw, at the beginning there was nobody. And then little by little, people started to join I, and then they started to open their eyes and take in all of this.”
Crowd in Corona Plaza
And a representative from Corona CAN stated, “I just hope that Corona CAN and the [Queens] Museum can continue to do events like this, that show that they are concerned with issues in the community, and maybe it can grow into something where it’s more interactive, and more helpful to businesses, and potential entrepreneurs in the community.” As she continued, the last performers took the stage before a cheerful crowd that was unwavering even as heavy rain began to fall. “I think that this kind of event will bring more attention to [Corona Plaza], and will help show that there is organization around what the interests of the community are… that this Plaza does deserve an upgrade.”
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.
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.
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