Sarah Cassidy & Akiva Leffert
Grand Army Plaza
Rex's Dino Store
Sarah Cassidy & Akiva Leffert
Rex’s Dino Store is the first and only bodega for dinosaurs in New York City. Featuring a hand-crafted 7-foot tall papier-mâché orange dinosaur named Rex, the scene is a life-size diorama of a bodega with prehistoric-themed products and publications with seemingly endless dinosaur puns. Observers can imagine a local Triceratops stopping by the store to pick up a copy of Dinopolitan magazine, the Pangaea Times, or The Maul Street Journal and grabbing a snack like “Trilo-bites”, ClawmondJoy or Meteoritos. The installation is a whimsical celebration of New York City bodegas and a childlike exploration of what it’s like to be a New Yorker—if you’re also a dinosaur, that is.
Brooklyn Public Library Center for Brooklyn History & East New York Community Land Trust
Euclid Av
Memories Matter
East New York has always been a community of change and potential. From the marshland that Jameco, Rockaway, and Canarsee native people fished for food, to the farmland that made up the Dutch community of New Lots, to the exciting new community of East New York established before the Civil War, to the abundant community gardens of today, for centuries, people have invested in the promise of the land above your head right now.
Memories Matter is a pop-up museum experience that invites you to take a closer look at where this neighborhood has been, and to dream a little bit about its future. Through a partnership between the East New York Community Land Trust and the Center for Brooklyn History at the Brooklyn Public Library, East New York residents of all ages have come together for the past year in community workshops to learn about history and make art together. You can see their work featured throughout this exhibition in bright floral displays and map collages. The display also features historical photographs of the neighborhood and images from community newspapers The East New Yorker and The Link, as well as excerpts from interviews with local residents.
These community art pieces and historic images work together to invite us to look more deeply at where we’ve been, and like the thousands of people in this train station every day, think about where we might go next. It’s a reminder of the strength of this community and it acknowledges the role we play in shaping this neighborhood’s history every day.
ChaShaMa
Founded in 1995, ChaShaMa transforms vacant properties throughout New York into creative venues. Each year, ChaShaMa gives $13 million worth of space grants to minority and women owned small businesses, artist work and show space, and free arts education in under-resourced communities.
As of 2023, ChaShaMa has given space to over 50,000 creators, hosted 6,000 public art events, provided 3,500 free art classes for the underserved, and reached upwards of 12 million audience members.
ChaShaMa uplifts underserved, diverse communities to cultivate a new generation of creative leaders, and continues to fill empty spaces with commerce, beauty, and connection; serving as a catalyst for a more vibrant future.
5 Av/53 St
Nympheas Rouge, Reflections of Spring
Kathleen Marie Ryan
Art has the ability to lift the viewer beyond the physical world, offering a glimpse into the infinite, inviting contemplation, stillness and introspection. A place to reflect. A retreat from the rush of the outside world. Kathleen Marie Ryan’s paintings provide a soothing respite, a visual escape from a cluttered world. She feels that art should be an abstract, perfect, immutable concept that transcends time and space which remind human soul of their mystery. This installation was created to take us to a place that our own eyes seem to recall. A place where we enjoyed solitude which required no statement, no explanations. A journey to provide a way of viewing the objective world through a subjective lens. A lens which does not climb down into alienation or oppression seemingly imposed by a complicated society, a toil that may also eschew beauty. Kathleen seeks what the great artists down through the millennia have sought……a picture, a poem, a symphony, a garden, or a space that can elevate us above the temporal to remind us of the beauty that is within each one of us.
50 St
Safe Space
Traci Johnson
What would a world look like absent from injury? A space free from judgment, an escape that nourishes the mind. Perhaps think of the starting point of time when life gave us glimpses of beginnings and the pureness of comfort. It resembles being cradled, how a baby is wrapped, and protected in the womb, how do we nurse ourselves back to comfort? It’s the infinite amount of colors and boundary-less shapes of imagination. A world without trauma is all the possibilities of what brought you joy as a child. As we return to our true selves, a metamorphosis is necessary in order to heal. As we let go of old ways we usher in a new phase of ourselves, unapologetically, we give light to our true selves.
63 Dr-Rego Park
Glory
Vanessa Powers
Oil on canvas, printed on vinyl
A portrayal of the untouchable core inside of us that cannot be conquered, traumatized, or commodified. This is symbolized by a Brocken Specter, an optical phenomenon naturally occurring at high altitudes which casts the shadow of an object or person onto clouds at a lower altitude, enveloped by a spherical rainbow. Also known by hikers as a "glory," these rare spectacles can appear to be 100 feet tall. Every translucent insect in this painting can be found in nature such as the white satin moth, book lice, garden symphylan, and the rose leafhopper nymph.
Art on the Ave
81 St-Museum of Natural History
The Soundbooth
The ultimate busking station, the Soundbooth brings music to the space so all can enjoy their commute and journey. The space has been transformed into a music box designed to attract local buskers and encourage them to perform for commuters, students, tourists, and passers-by. Community members can look forward to themed performances such as Classical Wednesday, Thursday Jazz, Beatles Era Friday, Weekend Hip Hop with DJ Chris, and Amateur Night.
Los Herederos
Los Herederos (the inheritors) is a Queens-based non-profit organization dedicated to inheriting culture in the digital age. They engage in research-based documentation for public consumption to produce projects, programs and services that address the realities of local culture, evolving communities, and an increasingly diasporadical immigrant experience. They believe in the power and complexity of transmedia storytelling to educate and encourage a more culturally aware, equitable and sustainable society.
Jackson Hts-Roosevelt Av
Queens as Cultural Crossroads
Los Herederos has transformed a former retail space in the station into a multimedia and community-inspired public art installation, which also serves as a home base for their web radio station LH Radio. The installation, Queens as Cultural Crossroads, explores transportation, movement and sense of place through and interdisciplinary approach to ethnographic fieldwork and documentation. It is produced as part of a long term project they have undertaken with the Library of Congress to document Jackson Heights’ Diversity Plaza (which includes the Jackson Hts-Roosevelt Av/74 St-Broadway subway station complex) as a treasured gathering place. The temporary exhibition will share materials from the multivocal and multilingual digital Queens community archives via multiple mediums and media formats. Documentary images captured throughout the Plaza and surrounding neighborhood will be displayed on photo fabric transfers to create the sense of layered movement so central to evolving communities and neighborhood cultures. The exhibition prioritizes local BIPOC and immigrant community narratives and will include interpretive materials and other media assets in several of the most spoken languages in and around the borough (Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Spanish, English, Nepali, Mandarin, Arabic, etc).
Queens as Cultural Crossroads will be open to the public on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. and select weekends.
WPZSCH
WPZSCH is a not-for-profit arts collective focusing on public exhibition and performance in non-traditional space. WPZSCH invites artists from all backgrounds and disciplines to showcase and collaborate on experimental and boundary pushing works which evade classification and commodification, with a major emphasis placed on accessibility, humor, and spontaneous joy.
The founding members of WPZSCH are artists Emmett Palaima and Nathan Asher Sherman.
Chambers Street
Chambers Hum
Chambers Hum is a public sound art installation playing a series of experimental and ambient compositions by a curated series of composers on a multi-channel sound system.
Now Playing: Chambers Hum
Composer: Emmett Palaima
About the Work: In Taos, New Mexico, there is a hum, a low but constant resonance of the landscape. Vibrating just on the edges of the listener’s perception, it is heard most often in the solitary hours of the late night and the early morning. A 1995 study by the Acoustical Society of America found that the frequency of the hum varied by individual listener, from 32hZ to 80hZ, suggesting an internal, psychosomatic origin for the sensation, but also that listeners consistently identified a phenomenon of acoustic beating when a reference tone was played for comparison, an effect only produceable by two sounds interacting in physical space.
With Chambers Hum we have reintroduced this phenomenon into our urban environment of maximum distraction. Arriving subway cars produce a sustained vibration at 224hZ, which Chambers Hum uses as a root note for its tonality. By creating a slowly evolving tonal structure tuned to harmonize with the environmental sounds inherent to the subway system, Chambers Hum restores a connection to the universal order.