Based on the Queens Museum exhibition Bringing the World into the World (2014), Hitomi Iwasaki will guide us in examining the largest object in the Queens Museum’s collection, the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335 square foot scale model of the metropolis commissioned by master builder Robert Moses (1888-1981) for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair and other diverse body of works by artists today to explore the formal and conceptual principles of panoramas as devices of wonder and the many ways in which we see, imagine, and comprehend worlds both familiar and unfamiliar.

Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions and Programs, Queens Museum, been a member of the QM curatorial staff since 1996 and has worked on the Museum’s landmark exhibitions including Cai Guo Qiang (1997) and Global Conceptualism: Points of Origins 1950s- 1980s (1999–2001), Caribbean: Crossroad of the World (2012), and After Midnight: Indian Moderns and Contemporary Indian Art (2016). She has organized a number of group exhibitions of emerging artists, including iterations of Queens International (2002, 2004, 20014 and 2016), and project exhibitions with emerging and mid-career artists including the Museum’s first artist-in-residence program with O Zhang, Johanna Unzueta, Daniel Bozhkov, Duke Riley and many others. Hitomi won the International Association of Art Critic’s (IACA) Curator’s Award Best Project in a Public Space, 2009-2010. Most recent publications include Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake (2018; Queens Museum and Dancing Fox Press/New York) and The Panorama Handbook: Thoughts and Visions on and around the Panorama of the City of New York (2018, Queens Museum).