Exhibits at venues large and small

by Deirdre Bardolf

Chronicle Contributor

Exhibits on view around Queens shine a light on local talent and commemorate the culture and history of The World’s Borough. An upcoming exhibit at the Kupferberg Holocaust Center will be the largest ever held there and a revered public art installation honoring those lost on 9/11 will get a permanent home at the GodwinTernbach Museum this year. From the 1964 New York World’s Fair to classic illustrations from a Flushing native, visitors can explore the rich offerings of Queens in exhibits across the borough, in person and online.

“My home borough of Queens is home to an amazingly diverse and vibrant collection of communities, and that is reflected in the extraordinary cultural organizations that are rooted here,” city Cultural Affairs Commissioner Gonzalo Casals told the Chronicle via email through a spokesperson.

The range of cultural programming here reflects the way art “knits us together as New Yorkers, engages and uplifts audiences, and makes our communities strong,” he said.

Mary Treacy and Rachel Davison spent a recent afternoon enjoying the tranquil gardens of The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City for the first time.

“Friendship brought us out, but a love of Japan brought us here,” said Treacy, a Brooklyn native. They have friends in Japan and traveled there in the past and visiting the museum was always on their list. It was created by sculptor Isamu Noguchi, who spent his childhood in Japan, and contains examples of his life’s work.

Currently exhibited in the museum’s sculpture garden is Christian Boltanski’s “Animitas,” consisting of 180 small bells on steel stems with reflective plastic lures, capturing sound and light. The installation was one of the last by Boltanski before his unexpected death in July and will only be up until Sept. 5. “It is like a portal to Japan,” said Amelia Grohman, communications and design director at the museum.

“Noguchi: Useless Architecture” is an exhibition of about 50 pieces from the museum’s collection highlighting his desire to create sculptures that deviate from the “responsibilities of architecture.”

“We’ve done a playful installation of those works, looking at Noguchi’s relationship with architecture,” said Grohman. It will be up until May 2022.

The museum is also hosting an open call for emerging Queens-based Asian American and Pacific Islander artists to submit designs for the venue’s outdoor welcome banners.

While exploring visual art in Long Island City, another stop is Socrates Sculpture Park, where Guadalupe Maravilla’s “Planeta Abuelx” will be up through Labor Day weekend, to be followed in October by “The 2021 Socrates Annual: Sanctuary,” which offered an open call to artists addressing the meaning of “sanctuary.” Socrates provides artists with financial support, materials, equipment and space to create works on-site.

Materials for the Arts, a program from the Department of Cultural Affairs, also supplies artists, collecting over 1.5 million pounds of reusable items a year. Now on view at the Materials for the Arts gallery in LIC is “The Path of Least Resistance,” a solo exhibition of recycled materials by Argentinian artist Elisa Insua, which will be up through Oct. 12. The center also hosts artist residency programs, events and workshops.

Before summer ends, outdoor art can also be enjoyed at the Queens Botanical Garden in Flushing, where a collaboration with the AnkhLave Arts Alliance, the AnkhLave Garden Project, is on view until Sept. 12. The annual fellowship produces “site specific art installations within the grounds of QBG,” by Queens-based BIPOC, or Black, indigenous and people of color, artists. On Sept. 17, a new exhibit, “Spirit Sees Red,” will feature art from M.E. Guadalupe Rubi, a New York-based fiber artist.

Another museum nestled in lush gardens is the Queens Historical Society, which operates out of Kingsland Homestead, surrounded by Flushing’s Weeping Beech Park. The museum is currently offering a portrait of the past with an exhibit celebrating two prominent Queens photographers, Percy Loomis Sperr and Frederick J. Weber, who captured the changing borough during industrialization.

Also at the Queens Historical Society is “Charles Dana Gibson: The American Trendsetter.” Gibson, who grew up in Flushing, was an illustrator who created the “Gibson Girl,” which set a standard for beauty and fashion, and his drawings poked fun at the upper class. Gibson was the highest-paid illustrator in America at the time, working for Life magazine and Collier’s weekly.

The Queens Historical Society has two books of Gibson’s art that are “exceedingly rare these days,” said Jeran Halfpap, coordinator at the society. People would tear illustrated pages out of the books to frame or paper their walls back in the day.

“I love the style and the humor that’s in a lot of them,” Halfpap said of the drawings. But Halfpap, a coin collector, is excited for what will replace the Gibson exhibition later this fall. A collection of silver will be on display, including tableware, decorative objects and coins, exploring how the metal was used as a status symbol and currency.

The Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park is also highlighting Queens history with “Ambitious Slogans and Colorful Promises: The 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.” It will be on view through January and new items are added every month. The exhibit is complemented by the museum’s “crown jewel” and longstanding “Panorama of the City of New York,” a model that was created for the World’s Fair and given upgrades over the years. “It’s an interesting item,” said Heryte Tequame, assistant director of communications and digital projects. “There are still the Twin Towers but there are new things like the Citi Field stadium,” she said. The World Trade Center will be commemorated permanently at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum in honor of the 20th anniversary of its collapse. Six months after the attacks, two beams of light, known as the “Tribute in Light,” rose from Ground Zero, becoming a public art installation illuminated every year on Sept. 11. Photographs of the tribute, by artists Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, were donated to the Godwin-Ternbach Museum and will become part of the permanent collection. The museum, part of the Kupferberg Center, is located on the Queens College campus in Flushing.

Last year, the Kupferberg Holocaust Center launched an online version of the largest exhibition it had ever done on concentration camps, “The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide.” Now, the center, at the Queensborough Community College campus in Bayside, is in the process of creating an in-person installation. The opening has not been announced but the exhibit will be up for several years and, in the meantime, the website includes every aspect of the exhibition, including images and testimonials from local Holocaust survivors.

The physical installation will feature wood, brick and iron gates. “It will absolutely transform our space,” said Dr. Laura B. Cohen, executive director of the Harriet and Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center.

She said that the point of the exhibition is twofold: to understand the system of incarceration as well as the different groups that were persecuted, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, the LGBTQ+ community, political prisoners and people with disabilities.

“We’re really excited about this exhibition. We’ve never had one nearly as extensive online and in, what will ultimately be, a physical component,” said Cohen. “We are always looking for ways to connect the past to the present.”

For the month of September, museum-goers can visit the Garage Art Center, a nonprofit community space in Bayside, to see Amy Supton’s “Wildflowers: An Exhibit of Clay & Fiber,” celebrating female identity, and take her workshop to create a textile ornament. For cinephiles, the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria will have “Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey” through September, “An Act of Seeing: Barry Jenkins’s The Gaze” until October and the ongoing Jim Henson exhibit, an attraction for all ages. Q

“Noguchi: Useless Architecture,” above, is on display at the sculptor’s eponymous museum in Long Island City, recently visited by friends Rachel Davison, inset left, and Mary Treacy. PHOTOS BY DEIRDRE BARDOLF