Two Queens public art projects were among 10 citywide installations recently honored at the New York City Design Commission’s 27th Annual Awards for Excellence in Design ceremony at the New Museum.
The winning projects, given awards on July 1 by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Public Design Commission President James P. Stuckey, range from a terra cotta tile installation in a Manhattan health center to a new Brooklyn Botanic Garden visitor center to a greenway and an EMS station with a “green” roof in the Bronx.
“Public projects help define how New Yorkers relate to the city around them,” Bloomberg said. “In tough economic times, we all have to do more with less, but that doesn’t mean simple, elegant and timeless public design can’t flourish.”
Four of the winners were commissioned by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), including the two Queens projects – both still in conceptual stages – planned for the Elmhurst and Glen Oaks community libraries.
The projects emerged through DCA’s Percent for Art program, which applies one percent of eligible city-funded construction budgets for permanent, public artwork.
Thanks to artist Allan McCollum, who has been at work on his “Shapes” project for more than 20 years, a wall in the Elmhurst Community Library’s reading room at 86-01 Broadway, will in late 2010, be home to an arrangement of over 1,000 unique plywood forms. Each shape – which will have a veneer of natural elm, in a reference to the neighborhood’s historic trees – is derived from a system of 300 “parts” capable of re-combing to form enough shapes to match the global population when it peaks in the mid-21st Century.
“It is my hope that this collection of unique shapes can come to represent both the commonality and the diversity of the Elmhurst community, at the same time,” McCollum said in a statement.
Over in Glen Oaks, Janet Zweig’s “The Opposite of a Duck” installation will cast a spotlight on life’s “unanswerable questions.”
Zweig’s two-sided LED sculpture will hang from the ceiling of the children’s reading room at the 256-04 Union Turnpike library branch upon completion in the fall of 2011. The piece will feature an undulating aluminum frame with moving lines of text posing questions such as “Do snakes have tails?” and “Can you dig a half hole?”
In a statement, Zweig said she hopes “that children will be provoked, puzzled and amused” as they look up at the hundreds of questions collected from philosophers across the world.
DCA commissioner Kate D. Levin praised the artists and members of city government for their “creativity and ingenuity,” which, she said, “continually transform[s] the ordinary into the extraordinary.”
Established in 1898, the 11-member Design Commission reviews permanent works of art, architecture or landscape architecture proposed on or over city property. The commission members selected this year’s 10 award-winners from hundreds of citywide submissions.
