The Queens Museum of Art is dedicated to presenting the highest quality visual arts and educational programming for people in the New York metropolitan area, and particularly for the residents of Queens, a uniquely diverse ethnic, cultural and international community.

The Museum fulfills its mission by designing and providing art exhibitions and educational experiences that promote the appreciation and enjoyment of art, support the creative efforts of artists, and enhance the quality of life through interpreting, collecting, and exhibiting art, architecture, and design.

The Queens Museum of Art presents artistic and educational programs and exhibitions that directly relate to the contemporary urban life of its constituents while maintaining the highest standards of professional, intellectual, and ethical responsibility.

Exhibits

Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore

The Queens Museum of Art is pleased to host Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore, organized by the Akron Art Museum. The exhibition of thirty large scale photographs will be on view August 28th 2011 - January 15th 2012.

During 2008 and 2009, Moore spent 3 months in Detroit. Once the epitome of American industrial wealth and might, the Motor City has faced declining population and economic distress for half a century. From an abandoned chemistry lab at Cass Technical High School to a house on the East Side’s Walden Street entirely covered with ivy to the bright green moss covering the floor of Ford Motor Company’s former headquarters, Moore’s photographs depict the remains of an eroding US industrial base amidst a strangely beautiful sense of decay. These highly detailed color photographs of the city, some of which are as large as 62 x 78 inches, belong to an artistic tradition of depicting ruins that began in the 17th century. Moore’s exquisitely realized visions of architecture overtaken by vegetation remind contemporary viewers that our own, familiar culture is subject to the forces of entropy and the eternal strength of nature.

In order to contextualize Detroit Disassembled within Moore’s career, selections from his earlier series on Russia and Cuba have been brought together in a small ancillary exhibition on the second floor. In these works, as in Detroit Disassembled, time and nature have reasserted themselves over architecture and domestic space.

Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore will be accompanied by extensive public programming, with talks and workshops on photography, beauty, and urbanism inspired by the past and future of Detroit.

This exhibition is organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a major gift from Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell with additional support from the John A. McAlonan Fund of Akron Community Foundation. The accompanying publication is underwritten by Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell with additional funding from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.

The presentation of this exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art is made possible through the generosity of the Charina Endowment Fund and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Elegies for Empire: Selections from Andrew Moore’s Inside Havana and Russia: Beyond Utopia

Eight works, four each from the photographic series Inside Havana (1998-2002) and Russia: Beyond Utopia (2000-2004), are brought together here to provide context for Detroit Disassembled: Photographs by Andrew Moore, organized by the Akron Art Museum, on the first floor. Moore uses 8×10 and 4×5 view cameras to mix picture-making and story-telling into atmospheric images which contain layers of time. Symbols of twentieth-century empires coexist with icons of those that came before, as in Green Trucks White Nights, 2002, in which a military installation on the Solovki archipelago abuts a Russian Orthodox monastery used as a prison by both the czars and the Soviet regime. Similarly, in El Almendron, 1998, the American and Spanish spheres of influence within Cuba’s own still-extant Communist regime take the form of a red 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air parked at a crumbling Moorish Art Nouveau townhouse. (In this picture, Moore points out visual sympathies between the design of the house and the car-like all those preserved from the 1950s, referred to as an “almond” because of its distinctive curves.) Although made almost a decade earlier, the Russian and Cuban pictures predict Moore’s engagement with Detroit, also a symbol of a mighty power over which time and nature have reasserted themselves in a potent mix of horror and beauty.

These works are generously lent by the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

On view through January 15, 2012

Niyeti Chadha: A Script for a Landscape

Niyeti Chadha borrows visual cues from her immediate surroundings. The process often begins with her attention to mundane elements in her sight: a stack of bricks or a flowing gossamer fabric or the precisely sewn patches of a filled sail. Her act of drawing disassembles and reduces a space into primal forms to understand their contribution to visually and architecturally making up the space we inhabit.

On view through January 15, 2012

Wonderstruck in the Panorama: Drawings by Brian Selznick

Wonderstruck in the Panorama: Drawings by Brian Selznick parallels the preparation of the author/illustrator’s latest graphic novel with the construction of the Panorama of the City of New York scale model at the Queens Museum of Art, a mythical location steeped in nostalgia. From its beginnings as the main attraction at the New York City Pavilion in the 1964-65 World’s Fair to its contemporary role as a crowd pleasing destination for museum visitors of all ages, the Panorama has served as muse, impetus for reflection, and an idyllic escape. For Brian Selznick, bestselling children’s book author, artist, and Caldecott Award Winner, it proved to be a locus of memory and he cast the Panorama as a leading character in Wonderstruck, due for release by Scholastic Inc. on September 13,, 2011. In conjunction with the release of the book, and marking the culmination of an ongoing collaboration with Selznick, the Queens Museum of Art presents Wonderstruck in the Panorama: Drawings by Brian Selznick, featuring 35 drawings, maquettes, sketches and storyboards that so magically capture the expanse of the Panorama, the experience of viewing it, and the process of writing about it. Wonderstruck in the Panorama: Drawings by Brian Selznick is on view September 18, 2011 – January 15, 2012 and is being exhibited on the walls overlooking the Panorama with original model artifacts and photographs documenting the design/construction process by the great architectural model makers Raymond Lester Associates, in the three years before the opening of the fair.

On longterm view: The Panorama of the City of New York, A Watershed Moment: Celebrating the Homecoming of The Relief Map of the New York City Water Supply System, and The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass

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