Joined by City Councilman Peter Koo, Artist Jennifer Williams, Mingwen Yang from State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky Office and Director Yang Zeng from Flushing Library, the Downtown Flushing Business Improvement District (Flushing BID) is pleased to introduce the piece “New York: City of Tomorrow – Hudson Yards to Flushing” created and installed by Jennifer Williams.
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, Jennifer Williams’s “Hudson Yards to Flushing” juxtaposes images of the Panorama of the City of New York with photographic documentation of areas currently undergoing radical change.
“This project summarizes different neighborhoods and histories from Hudson Yards to Flushing. It is a great art project for the Flushing community”, Said Councilman Peter Koo.
“We are excited to have “Hudson Yards to Flushing” project in downtown Flushing. 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”, Said Tina Lee, Co-chair of the Downtown Flushing BID.
“New York: City of Tomorrow – Hudson Yards to Flushing” is currently installed on the Flushing BID information kiosk which located at the center of Downtown Flushing. The piece is a study in parallel growth exposing, en mass, the verticality sprouting skyward at the terminal ends of the #7 subway line, offering Flushing residents a window into the fast-paced change sweeping over the boroughs.
The work encourages residents to explore their neighborhood with critical eyes by shifting the perspective of those intimately familiar with its architecture. The work ultimately describes the dreams and aspirations chased by a twenty-first 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.
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.
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