Category Archives: Uncategorized

Worker Memorial Day Publication – Barrie Cline and Sol Aramendi

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SPQ graduate students Barrie Cline and Sol Aramendi, founder of Project Luz, and their collaborators, are observing Workers Memorial Day this coming Sunday by launching a publication at Corona Plaza as part of a larger community health fair coordinated by the Queens Museum.  

The publication was the result of a series of dialogues that brought together union construction workers (enrolled in the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies at SUNY) and day laborers (who are members of Corona-based immigrant advocacy organization New Immigrant Community Empowerment-NICE). In these encounters members from both groups shared with each other their feelings about safety and the conditions of their labor. The publication reflects the images and texts of what they hope is the beginning of a conversation towards safer conditions for all workers as well as different ways to look at their labor.

This project was initiated in association with The Harry Van Arsdale Jr. Center for Labor Studies, New Immigrant Community Empowerment, and assistance from the Social Practice Queens (SPQ) component of  Queens College and The Queens Museum of Art.

This project is funded in part by the Student Activity Fee of the State University of New York and the Spirit of Boz, founded by Julien Friedler, Belgium.

SPQ Faculty Greg Sholette Showing at the Queens Museum

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Greg Sholette: Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses

On view through May 20, 2012 at the Queens Museum of Art

The other Saadiyat Island as imagined by Hana Shams Ahmed, One of fifteen islands fabricated by Greg Sholette based on ideas proposed by invited collaborators, Mixed media (paper, sand, plastic, wire, resin), 2012
The other Saadiyat Island as imagined by Hana Shams Ahmed, One of fifteen islands fabricated by Greg Sholette based on ideas proposed by invited collaborators, Mixed media (paper, sand, plastic, wire, resin), 2012

 

Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses is a site-specific art infiltration into the Panorama of the City of New York, which was built for the 1964 World’s Fair by urban planner Robert Moses and is now a centerpiece of the Queens Museum of Art. Artist and theorist Greg Sholette made and placed new islands about the Panorama’s waterways, where they exist as silent, post-9/11 observers of the City’s past, present, and future. Modeled in the same style as the Panorama, each island represents Sholette’s interpretation of a question he posed to a group of other artists and art theorists: “If you could add an island to New York City, what would that new landmass be like?” Touching on issues from environmental and economic justice to the overflowing archives of human memory and immigrant’s rights, the new fantasy islands interrupt the familiar geography of the Panorama, subtly haunting a favorite destination for students, tourists, and urban planners. Surrounding the Panorama is a series of posters about the project’s participating collaborators: Hana Shams Ahmed, Brett Bloom, Larry Bogad, Marc Fischer,Aaron Gach/Center for Tactical Magic, Libertad Guerra, Dara Greenwald, Marisa Jahn, Karl Lorac/Themm!, Ann Messner,Ted Purves, Rasha Salti, Dread Scott and Jenny Polak,Jeffrey Skoller, and Nato Thompson. Special thanks go to Matthew F. Greco for graphic assistance.

Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses is supported in part by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, and The Greenwall Foundation. Additional support provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.