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.