Announcing the 2012-2013 Corona Studio Artists: Quillian Riano and Aurash Khawarzad

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Aurash and Quillian will seek to activate Corona Plaza, as it enters its new pedestrianized phase this summer.  A key element of their projects will be to go beyond design workshops and into citizen journalism, skill-sharing, and other elements that foster thoughtful public involvement, activism, and analysis. Furthermore, the installations and programs that result will maximize use and understanding of the space by being temporary and interactive. The project will provide important data for how the space can be used and redesigned in the coming years.

 

Quillian Riano

Quillian is a designer, writer, and educator currently working out of Brooklyn, New York.  He founded and provides the vision for DSGN AGNC. He also collaborates on a variety of architectural design and research projects with other groups, including the non-profit Architecture 2030, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Archinect, Places Journal, #lgnlgn, Harvard University, and Parsons The New School for Design. The projects he works on cross disciplinary boundaries and are located in Africa, Europe and North, Central and South America.  He was born in Bogota, Colombia and received his Masters of Architecture at
Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

 

Aurash Khawarzad

Aurash is the founder of Change Administration, a studio for urban planning, urban design, and action.  For the past 7 years Aurash has been working in urban planning at planning agencies in Fairfax County, VA, the non-profit Project for Public Spaces, and has co-founded the action-planning collective DoTank. He has recently exhibited work in the US Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, 2012 Chilean Architecture Bienal, and the Urban Prototyping Festival in San Francisco, along with teaching a summer studio course at the Strelka Institute for Architecture, Media, and Design. He is also part-time faculty within the Integrated Design Program at Parson’s the New School for Design.  Aurash has a BS in urban studies from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MS in urban and regional planning from Virginia Tech University.

 

COMPLETED – First SPQ Course: Transforming Corona Plaza

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Social Practice Queens (SPQ) – has just completed its first interdisciplinary seminar Transforming Corona Plaza. This experiment brought together a group of graduate and undergraduate students in studio art and in urban studies and successfully merged research work involving the demographics, local politics, and concerned stake-holders of this mostly Latino region of Queens, with interventionist theory and practical design concepts drawn from case studies of socially-engaged visual art. The educational team was drawn from Queens College: Professor Maureen Connor and Gregory Sholette from Studio Art Dept., Professor Tarry Hum from Urban Studies Dept.; plus additional instructors from the Queens Museum of Art including its Director Tom Finkelpearl, and Manager of Programs Prerana Reddy.

Two dozen students met off-campus at the Immigrant Movement International space where they developed in-depth knowledge of one nearby urban site known as Corona Plaza (103 St. and Roosevelt Ave). In the process they were introduced to local community activists, business people, computer modeling experts, borough politicians, and the planning team of the Department of Transportation (DOT) . Four final proposals were generated by student teams and presented to the community for critical feedback from a range of individuals including Tania Bruguera (artist), Arturo Sanchez (Professor of Urban Planning, Cornell) and Ricardi Calixte (a Neighborhood Development Director). Documentation of these projects can be seen here: http://www.socialpracticequeens.org/projects/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other exciting news is that investigation into Corona Plaza will continue over this summer and into fall as independent study with a team of ten students working under the guidance of our newly invited Corona Studio Artists Qullian Riano and Aurash Khawarazad.

Corona City Councilmember Julissa Ferreras Visits SPQ Seminar

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On April 2, SPQ got a visit from Councilmember Julissa Ferreras, who is a strong advocate for public life in Corona, and has been active on the issue of Corona Plaza.

Corona City Councilmember Julissa Ferreras

On the same day, students were introduced to Visual Imaging Technology with a session by Cark Skelton

Visiting Professor Arturo Sanchez at SPQ Seminar

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Visiting guest lecturer Professor Arturo Sanchez (Community Board 3, Professor of Urban Planning, Cornell University) speaks with the Corona Plaza class about the complexities of mapping and interpreting ethnic immigration into the neighborhood:

 

Corona Plaza Field Trip #2

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These  images are fragments of documentation from a day ‘in the field’ by the four MFA students participating in the class called Corona Studio: Transforming Corona Plaza.

Sol Aramendi, Barrie Cline, Seth Aylmer, and Jose Serrano-McClain ventured to Corona Plaza earlier this week to listen to what the people of Corona desire of their plaza.   Our approach to ‘listening’ was a mixture of things.  We used an ‘interview tool’ developed collaboratively by the faculty and students of the class, alongside a “story map” activity that encouraged adults and children to share a story about Corona Plaza and mark it on a blueprint of the current plaza, an approach motivated by a recent visit to the class by Dylan House of the Hester Street Collaborative from their People Make Parks toolkit.  We approached several groups of ‘Mudanzas’ (moving van) workers and asked their opinion of the plans to pedestrianize the parking lot where their business has been anchored for years.  And we topped off every conversation with a question based on a potential temporary sculptural installation idea of representing famous animals from their home countries.

Listening to the over 20 people that we spoke to that day was illuminating.   There was real creative input coming from the actual stakeholders of the re-design of the plaza, and we got a much better understanding of the plight of the Mudanzas men, an issue that has been talked about as one of the most challenging aspects of this transformation.  The findings from the field trip by the four SPQ students will be presented to the rest of the students during class next week.

 

Prepping for Corona Stakeholder Interviews

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Jose Luis Serrano-McClain discussing Corona Stakeholders

Students Seth Pollack and Joanna Santana practice Interview methods with special guest Valeria Treves, Director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment.

Corona Plaza Field Trip # 1

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These are some images from the first field trip of the class “Transforming Corona Plaza” that is taking place at Immigrant Movement International this semester.

 

 

 

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.

 

First Day of First SPQ Seminar!

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On January 30,  the first SPQ seminar, “Corona Studio: Transforming Corona Plaza” convened at Queens College.  It brought together students from both the Art Department and the Urban Studies Department.  The students were introduced to their 5 faculty members and told they would be meeting in the Corona neighborhood of Queens from now! 

Welcoming the Pioneering SPQ MFA Students

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Say hello to the four students that entered Queens College’s MFA program identifying their practice as social.

 

Sol Aramendi is a New York based Argentinean artist working in photography and installation. Sol has merged her artistic work with Social Practice. She is the founder of the Project Luz Photography Program for New Immigrants. Using photography as a tool of empowerment, creating a dialogue of understanding, connecting people with communities and their creativity.  Her work is currently on view at the Museum of the Americas in Washington DC. She was featured at El Museo del Barrio’s 2011″(S) Files,” the museum’s sixth biennial of art created by Latino artists living in NY. Sol’s work has been shown widely in New York, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Los Angeles, Tolouse, Barcelona, Madrid, Utrecht, and Split.

Seth Aylmer is a public sculptor and philosopher, and a former Presidential Scholar of the Arts with a degree in Philosophy from Colby College. In 2010 his sculpture, The Helper, was installed in Marcy Green South Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he also lives. The Helper is part of a series of works inspired by 2000-year old native American petroglyphs in his native Maine, and served as as a source of inspiration to community members in Williamsburg working to improve the park and surrounding areas. In 2010, he was selected as a George Mitchell Scholar for his video art. In 2011, he installed a temporary sculpture at the Burning Man art festival in the Nevada Desert. Seth has started working with Corona community members on a a series of public sculptures.

Jose Serrano-McClain is an artist, community organizer, and social entrepreneur.  He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and started his career as an economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he realized his passion is the economics of the creative spirit. In 2009, he co-founded Trust Art to experiment with new economic models for artistic practice that has the potential to transform communities. As part of Trust Art, he has actively collaborated in the development of dozens of community-oriented artist projects in NYC. In 2010, he joined the Queens Museum of Art in a unique role that reports to both the curatorial and community engagement departments at the Museum, identifying opportunities for Museum-commissioned artist projects to make meaningful connections with community organizations in Corona. As part of his museum work, he is one of the lead visionaries of Social Practice Queens.

Barrie Cline has long engaged diverse communities in a collaborative art practice for projects created in the public realm in NYC. She was a homesteader and housing advocate for people battling mental illness in the Lower East Side in the 80s.  In the late 1990s she created a digital media center in an after school arts center in the Lower East Side and developed the entire program into a child-directed, free play oriented arts venue that accommodated all income levels. Since 2004 she has been teaching public art to union electricians and plumbers, working with them to create exhibitions that among other goals, seeks to make their labor, craft, and being more visible to each other and a wider public. She has continued to collaborate with graffiti artists, housing organizations, and various members of the communities she has worked in (or taught in) on projects ranging from guerilla art shows of construction workers art, to multiple incarnations of a children’s miniature city, able to roll out at strategic places where communities are being encouraged to claim their right to public space—and the good life that art is a part of.