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.

Youth Work with Artists on Reframing Discourse on Immigrants / Jóvenes y artistas replantean el diálogo acerca de los inmigrantes

Collaborative public art pieces challenge negative perceptions of immigrants in New York and explore the immigrant experience. / Piezas de Arte Colaborativas en Espacios Públicos cuestionan las percepciones negativas de los inmigrantes en NYC y explora las experiecnias de inmigrantes

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One direct effect of working with Leadership through the Arts students was that the museum took more seriously its mission to challenge negative stereotypes of new immigrants. While it’s true that language and cultural barriers strain the ability of schools, public offices, and hospitals to communicate with their clients and provide effective services, this has always been true with previous waves of immigrants. New immigrants, who tend to be less educated or integrated within the power structure, are often scapegoats for community problems such as crime, vandalism, graffiti, and poverty. They are also branded with cultural stereotypes including laziness, a lack of morals or family values, and even uncleanliness. Moreover, Old Queens groups also view newer immigrants as having little interest in and respect for the complex and culturally rich history of the area.

QMA decided to partner Leadership through the Arts students with socially collaborative public artists to tackle this issue and give everyone a more full picture of the vital role that new immigrants play in the social and economic life of the city, the complicated “push factors” that compelled folks to make the risky journey to live in a new country, as well as the many sacrifices they make for their families both living with them and in their home countries. On the other hand, we also saw the need for recent immigrants to get a better sense of the history of the neighborhoods they have moved into and the struggles and contributions of previous generations of immigrants to the neighborhood. Here are some of the projects in which our LTAP youth worked with commissioned artists to execute, document and interpret their projects.

Crossing the BLVD Mobile Story Booth Tour

The Mobile Story Booth project, by Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer with dotsperinch, related to their award-winning photo, sound, and book project, Crossing the BLVD, made stops throughout the borough (Main Branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, Jamaica, LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City, and St. John’s University, Jamaica). At each stop youth participants facilitated access to archived immigration stories and input their own (or parents’ or grandparents’) stories.

Suitcases on Tour

Within the artist Chanika Svetvilas‘s performance/installation Suitcases on Tour, red, orange, and yellow plexiglass suitcases, echoing the high security alert levels that have become a part of daily life in New York, were be carried from neighboring Corona, through the park, and into the Queens Museum by Leadership Through the Arts Youth Program, followed by a presentation by Mabel Tso, Community Organizer, AALDEF, and documentation of the journey. The suitcases echo the paranoia and suspicion associated with unattended luggage during a time of heightened security. The images cut onto the surfaces of the suitcases reflected the recent proposed U.S. legislation to increase monitoring of immigrants, but also the impact on families and the relativity of borders and national identity. Challenging the notion of border control, a mobile immigration booth, co-designed by Miguel Baltiera, located right outside the museum and manned by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, will provide resources and answers to questions by the public.

The event dovetailed with Fatal Love ’06, organized by artist and cultural producer Jaishri Abichandani, an event based around the principles of independence, tolerance and freedom of South Asian nations. Designed to raise discussion and examine current global struggles for resistance, Fatal Love 06 included political and radical readings, discussions and performances by Kiran Desai, Chanika Svetvilas and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Naeem Mohaeimen, Emergency Broadcast Artists and the release of Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. Editor of the anthology Sara Husain was accompanied by contributors Sham e ali al Jamil, Chaumtoli Huq and Zohra Saed.

Open Routines & Sonidero Project

Poster for the Grand Baile Sonidero at Queens Museum of Art

As part of Open Routines, his solo exhibition at QMA, LTAP youth collaborated with Mexican American artist Pedro Lasch on his “Sonido Tianguis Transnacional” projects. “Sonidero” parties bring all generations of the Mexican community together and, by sending CD’s of the event home, link the Queens community with their friends and family in the home country, which they saw as a wonderful tool for communication across transnational lines. Using their newly acquired video skills LTAP youth documented Sonidero forums with DJs, promoters, and visitors at the Museum. From Lasch they are also learned about organizing and promoting events, producing cross- cultural experiences, bringing international music to their events, and both writing and translating poetry. The forums culminated in a grand baile sonidero party featuring over a dozen soundsystems at the museum, that benefited a local organization Mexicanos Unidos de Queens.

Click this link for images of the museum installation, forum, and party as well as the other iterations of the project in Mexico DF and North Carolina.

Mudanzas

Mudanzas, Moving Services in Spanish, is a public video installation by Quito-based artists Maria Teresa Ponce that explores the issue of displacement in the construction of a visual journey. This journey reflects the collective memory of immigrants through video images of longed-for landscapes and people from home that Ecuadorian immigrants living in Queens have asked the artist to film. Today the third largest “city” of Ecuador is in Queens, New York where over half a million Ecuadorians have created a community that struggles to maintain an identity and prosper economically.

Ponce befriended the Ecuadorian driver of one of the many mudanzas vans that wait in Corona Plaza to get hired, and that relationship inspired the project. On the night of the Ecuadorian festival in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, she projected the videos of Ecuadorean landscapes overlaid with a sountrack of one women’s arduous journey with a “coyote” to cross the border. Inside the truck were video letters of the mudanza driver’s family and friends. Numerous passerbys were leaving the park festivities and came upon the projection and were moved to tears by the experience. LTAP students participated in setting up the projection, engaged viewers in conversation, and documented their reactions on video. The experience made QMA staff and LTAP youth see the potential of Corona Plaza as a site for future public art projects and cultural celebrations.