The Downtown Flushing Business Improvement District along with Councilman Peter Koo and state Senator Toby Stavisky on Friday unveiled the latest art installation at the Flushing BID Kiosk.
“New York: City of Tomorrow — Hudson Yards to Flushing” created by Sunnyside educator and artist, Jennifer Williams, is a large-scale artwork juxtaposing images of the Panorama of the City of New York with photographic documentation of areas currently undergoing radical change at the Flushing BID Kiosk located in front of the Flushing Library at 41-17 Main St.
The artwork can be seen at the Flushing BID Kiosk located in front of the Flushing Library at 41-17 Main St. The installation was made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and a space grant from Flushing BID.
“We are excited to have ‘Hudson Yards to Flushing’ project in downtown Flushing,” said Tina Lee, co-chair of the Flushing BID. “We would like to give everyone in this community an opportunity in their daily life to experience culture in a different way. We welcome everyone to stop by the kiosk and enjoy the art piece.”
The artwork is a study in parallel growth exposing, en masse, the sprouting skyline at the Main Street-Flushing station, the last stop of the 7 line, offering Flushing residents a window into the fast-paced change sweeping over the boroughs.
“The project summarizes different neighborhoods and histories from Hudson Yards to Flushing,” said Koo. “It is a great project for the Flushing community.”
The work encourages residents to explore their neighborhood with critical eyes by shifting the perspective of those intimately familiar with its architecture. Additionally, the work describes the dreams and aspirations chased by a 21st-century New York, one anxious to remain a world-class city, putting forth a vision of New York’s rising skyline from a “feet on the pavement” pedestrian point-of-view.
“Everything she shoots is visible from a pedestrian point-of-view — from the street or in public spaces — and her work is an interpretation of the city as it is in its present, ever-changing form,” the Flushing BID said.
The incorporated map-like imagery is taken from the Panorama of the City of New York, a 10,000-foot model of the five boroughs built as a descriptive tool for the 1964 World’s Fair and last updated in 1992. It offers a miniature, three-dimensional opportunity to travel back in time to an earlier version of the city.
Pieces addressing Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn, 57th Street (Manhattan) were installed in the room housing Panorama for the 2016 Queens International Exhibition. The series continued on in other venues and included lower Manhattan (FIDI) and The Bowery. A work addressing Williamsburg and a book of the series are both in the works.
For the last 10 years, Williams has created large-scale, photographic installations that interact with the architecture of galleries, museums and cities. Her public projects have included the DUMBO Arts Festival, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Strongroom Inc. (Newburgh, New York) and the Howl Festival in the East Village.
Represented by Robery Mann Gallery in Chelsea, Williams’s work has shown across the country at venues such as The Akron Museum of Art, The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, The Pittsburg Center for the Arts and Virginia Tech. She was also awarded a Queens Council New Works Grant in 2016 and was one of the inaugural Queens Council Art Hotel residents in 2017.
