Enjoy an opening celebration of the Queens Museum’s upcoming fall exhibitions. Experience special artist performances, see video screenings from community members, meet the Queens Museum’s artists-in-residence, and take a peek at work in progress during open studios. Plus there will be a free shuttle from the Mets-Willets Point 7-train subway station running from 1:30–5:30pm.

Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017

The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 is an exhibition by American artist Patty Chang, comprising a personal, associative, and narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics and landscape. Drawing inspiration from The Wandering Lake: Into the Heart of Asia (1938), a book by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin about a mysterious lake in a perpetual state of flux in the desert of Western China, Chang explores how the instability of geography can mirror and rupture our sense of reality, place, and self. The exhibition presents an experimental form of storytelling through a combination of video, photography, sculpture, drawing, and an artist’s book, that examines the way narratives develop through geography, history, mythology, fiction and personal experience.

#PattyChang

Never Built New York

The Queens Museum invites you to step into an alternate Gotham where the boldest, most daring, and most far-reaching urban designs are realized. Curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, and designed by Christian Wassmann, Never Built New York presents 200 years of visionary architectural and urban designs that never came to be, all brought to life for the first time with original drawings, renderings, newly commissioned models, and 3D visualizations.

At 3 pm, join us for a tour with co-curators Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin of Never Built New York.

#NeverBuiltNY

Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence

Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence is the first museum solo exhibition by Smith, a conceptual artist working across film, sculpture, and photography. Her practice explores the many ways that trauma and violence is graphed and marked across bodies. For this exhibition, Smith draws from her own experience of visiting her father in each of the six prisons he has inhabited over the past 20 years in order to question the fictions about the systems and structures that govern our lives, and our illusions of order and justice. Smith examines this quotidian violence, and its terrors that can hardly be discerned, asking how it can be visualized, imaged, and grasped.

At 4pm, two performances will take place in conjunction with the exhibition, Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence.

Artist Devin Kenny will perform If I don’t laugh/Tarda…, a powerful sonic performance incorporating music and spoken word and addressing the role of social media in the widened access to, as described by Kenny, images of “Black suffering that directly results from the machinations of white supremacy the US prison industrial complex and police state, and the aftermath of colonialism and chattel slavery”. The artist calls into question the economy that has developed around the circulation of these images as internet content, exploring the sinister aspects of this increased visibility, including issues of appropriation and exploitation.

Bonita Oliver of French Leave and Simone Tyson as Bloodstone will score Smith’s nine channel video work, Untitled: Father Daughter Dance (2013-2017), live, using voice, meter, pitch, pause, and—as the artists state—”the texture of a weight which resides in the body–after which, just the silence will remain.”

#SableElyseSmith

Julia Weist with Nestor Siré: 17.(SEPT) [By WeistSiréPC]™

For the project 17.(SEPT) [By WeistSiréPC]™, American artist Julia Weist collaborates with Cuban artist Nestor Siré to explore and intervene in El Paquete Semanal or “the weekly package,” a cultural and economic phenomenon that developed in Cuba in place of internet connectivity, in which a 1 terabyte digital media collection is aggregated weekly and circulated across the country via in-person file sharing. The centerpiece of 17.(SEPT) [By WeistSiréPC]™ is a 64 terabyte server containing 52 weeks of El Paquete Semanal. It is the only formalized archive of the Paquete and its construction and deployment was designed around the legal and logistical restrictions of the changing US-Cuba relations over the last year.

A paquetero, or Paquete agent/guide, will be available to guide visitors through downloadable content that they can take home. Bring a hard drive or USB stick!

#JuliaWeist

Stepping into Our Courage Community Partnership Gallery Exhibition

At 3–5pm join us in the theater for programming in conjunction with the Community Partnership Gallery opening of Stepping into Our Courage highlighting the activities of the Museum’s offsite immigrant arts and activism center, Immigrant Movement International Corona. They will present a staged reading of a piece developed at their recent We Want Theater! workshop as well as screening of three videos documenting public actions for IMI Corona’s justice in schools campaign by videographer-in-residence Milton X. Trujillo. Plus enjoy the premiere of a new video Lost Kids Of Corona: Finding IMI created in a summer workshop at IMI Corona as a Hate Free Zone Collaboration facilitated by Global Action Project. At 430pm meet back in the Community Partnership Gallery for a quick walkthrough of the exhibition.

Images: Patty Chang, Installation view, Invocation for a Wandering Lake, Part I, 2015. Projection, 12:49 minutes, sound, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and BANK/MABSOCIETY. Photo by Hai Zhang; Buckminster Fuller, Dome Over Manhattan, 1960. Black and white photograph on board with dome overlay, 12 3/4 x 18 3/8 in. Courtesy Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries and The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller; Sable Elyse Smith, Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors (video still), 2017. Courtesy the artist; Julia Weist and Nestor Siré. Still from Holguin (BABALAWO), 2016–2017. Digital video, 00:49 minutes, sound. Included in ARCA, 2017. Mixed media installation. Courtesy the artists

Exhibitions at the Queens Museum receive significant support from Ford Foundation and the Charina Endowment Fund. Major funding for the Queens Museum is generously provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, Lambent Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc., and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.