Queens Museum
This has been a pretty great fall in the borough of Queens.
From the NY Art Book Fair and Maker Faire earlier this season, to the ambitious Empire Drive-In that just closed 10 days ago, Queens – typically perceived as the dowdy counterpart to Brooklyn’s thriving culture of creative professionals – is loudly staking its claim as a cultural destination in NYC.
And now the icing on the cake: the Queens Museum will open its newly renovated and designed facility on November 9th. Doubling in size to 100,000 square feet, the building, which was originally conceived as the New York City pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair, has expanded to include the space of a former ice skating rink, with a soaring, light-filled, 48-foot ceiling atrium.
Panorama of New York City
The inaugural season at the QM includes solo exhibitions by Bread and Puppet Theater Founder, Peter Schumann, Pedro Reyes and Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, as well as the sixth installment of the Queens International. New installations of the permanent collection galleries impress – including, of course the panorama of New York City, easily one of the museum’s greatest assets.
Peter Schumann: The Shatterer is incredibly staggering, both in scale and aesthetic prowess – and in the museum’s visionary curatorial decision to highlight work that is often dismissed by the mainstream, as their blockbuster opener no less.
Peter Schumann: The Shatterer
Other galleries featured works representative of the rainbow of cultures in Queens including an exhibition of Cuban artists from the collection of Don and Shelly Rubin (major benefactors of the museum), and a gallery dedicated to the work of artists from Taiwan.
The museum – which has also changed its identity from the Queens Museum of Art to simply the Queens Museum – follows a one-word mission statement: Openness. As an ideology, the museum has been pursuing this purpose aggressively during the tenure of Executive Director, Tom Finkelpearl. Now, it has the physical space to complement it.
The museum will also include a branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, planned to open in 2015. This smart partnership is indicative both of the radically shifting roles that museums and libraries are evolving toward, and the leading role the QM has taken in creating a hybrid, inclusive, social space that will soon become the model for cultural institutions. From their characteristically large focus on service-based public programming and community involvement, to their collaboration with Queens College (CUNY) and the community of Corona on Social Practice Queens (SPQ) — an MFA with a concentration in socially-engaged practices — the QM is setting a high bar a new museum standard.
 The view from the atrium
- Linda Mary Montano: Telling The Truth In The Dark And Light - December 25, 2013
- Artist Profile: Jenny Polak - November 27, 2013
- News from NYC: Queens Museum Re-Opens on November 9 - October 30, 2013
