They do make art in Queens, not just condominiums, and this excellent show at the QMA (say "CUE-ma") is all about it. Note the strong contingent of LIC-based artists. While you are there you can check out the supercool mini-New York City they have.
Barbara Leven
Sara Rychtarik
Queens International 2006 at the Queens Museum of Art
How to get there: take the 7 to Willets Pt/Shea Stadium.
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Queens International 2006: Everything All at Once
Queens International 2006 is the third installment of the Queens Museum of Art's biennial survey of Queens-based artists. This year, 52 artists and two collaboratives weigh in on American culture, the politics of war, contemporary feminist issues, spirituality, the environment and a host of other subjects close to the hearts of many local residents. The multiplicity of experiences and ethnicities that coexist side by side in this borough is matched by the myriad approaches employed by the artists in Queens International 2006. Narrative, documentary, performative and conceptual strategies are explored with materials as broad ranging as mountaineering rope and incense sticks to cake frosting and motel towels.
Driven by the local/international flavor of the museum and given the astonishing cultural diversity of the borough, a conscious effort has been made to avoid arranging this exhibition by theme, national origin, or aesthetic affinity. What results is an incarnation of the biennial befitting of a subtitle that could just as easily describe the borough from which it was born – Everything All at Once.
Additionally, for the first time, Queens International incorporates an exhibition within the exhibition. An exploration of everyday life in the borough as seen through the eyes of 38 local photographers who have focused on the rich complexity of life in Queens, The World in a Picture/The World in a Borough brings the exceptional, the familiar and the exotic, together in a singular tapestry of the chaotic but incomparably rich worlds that exist here.
