Foreclosure exhibit at Queens Museum of Art

BY DAVID GORDON

Wednesday, July 15, 2009 11:02 AM EDT

During the next few months, visitors to the Queens Museum of Art (QMA) in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park will notice a new addition to the famous Panorama of the City of New York.

Hundreds of pink plastic triangles, symbolizing blocks that had three or more foreclosure filings in 2008, have been added to the 9,335 square foot model of the city as part of the Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center installation by artist Damon Rich.

Rich’s project began near the end of 2006, during residency at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as part of a project for a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization he founded, called the center for Urban Pedagogy.

The exhibit contains photographs, models, videos, drawings, all of which, according to the museum, “melds ‘Sesame Street’ graphics with do-it-yourself investigations into the intricacies of real estate finance.”

“They had commissioned me to do a project that looked at risk,” Rich said. “Eventually, after a couple different versions, it became a project about how financial risk, and finance in general, affects the built environment. My background is as an architect and a lot of the exhibitions that I do that are like this are about things that have a big impact on buildings, but aren’t buildings themselves.”

Rich noted that back when the project began, “all the things that everyone knows about now about subprime, etc. were not in the news, although people who were working in communities on housing issues and financial issues saw that something was happening and knew that it wasn’t very good news.”

Part of his residency at MIT entitled him to work with students, as well as take a class at Harvard Business School. He called it a “self-education project,” admitting that he was not well versed on these issues.

The findings became the exhibit, through which their goal was to communicate what they learned to a broader audience. “We had been interested in traveling the show,” Rich mentioned.

The museum had hired Larissa Harris, one of the center’s curators, who decided to bring the piece to Queens. “[Harris] brought it down here because it would be the perfect show for us, and then [we] added this amazing new element which was to map foreclosures on the Panorama,” said Tom Finkelpearl, the QMA’s director.

It was a daunting task to install the triangles (pizza box lid supporters) to mark the 13,000 foreclosures of 1-4 family homes, on the map, which hasn’t been updated since 1992, except the recent addition of Citi Field in place of Shea Stadium. Still, according to Finkelpearl, “they finished ahead of schedule.”

“We had a lot of help,” Rich added. “There was a fantastic cadre of volunteers…We thought it would take like three days or four days, but it took about a day and a half.”

In Queens, you’ll find 551 markers on the Panorama, most of which are in the southeastern sections of Cambria Heights and Ozone Park. There are significantly fewer in Staten Island (140) and the Bronx (151). Brooklyn has the largest number, totaling 582.

The exhibition runs through September 27.

Photo Courtesy James Harris
A volunteer places triangles on the Panorama at the Queens Museum or Art as part of a project talking about foreclosures in the city of New York.

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Reader Comments

The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of queenscourier.com.

Jill Tartano wrote on Jul 17, 2009 3:11 AM:

" How about an exhibit showing people who defied all personal finance logic, and got 100% mortgages on properties they couldnt afford?

How about an exhibit showing people extracting every last cent of their homes to buy a Lexus, etc?

How about an exhibit showing people who looked at their finances, the price of homes, and decided NOT to buy something they couldnt afford?

This is just part of a concerted effort to punish those who lived within their means at the expense of those who got greedy and wanted the high life. "