Social Practice Queens: Re-imagining and Re-invigorating Corona Plaza

Poised at the fore­front of impor­tant con­tem­po­rary social move­ments, com­mu­nity activism, tac­ti­cal urban­ism, and par­tic­i­pa­tory art pro­duc­tion, a nascent col­lab­o­ra­tion devel­ops between a cul­tural insti­tu­tion, a pub­lic uni­ver­sity, local artists, urban plan­ners, and Queens res­i­dents, to cre­atively solve local urban issues.

This past spring City Atlas met with Pre­rana Reddy, the Direc­tor of Pro­gram­ming at The Queens Museum of Art, to talk about Social Prac­tice Queens (SPQ) - a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the museum and Queens Col­lege – and the future of Corona Plaza.

The team up between two of the borough’s highly regarded insti­tu­tions began with the ques­tion of how to bring visual art stu­dents together with local res­i­dents, in order to tackle social issues par­tic­u­lar to Queens. A part­ner­ship of this nature has never before been attempted between a museum and an aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tion. Only in its early devel­op­men­tal stages, SPQ is the only edu­ca­tional pro­gram of its kind on the east coast with sim­i­lar pro­grams emerg­ing across the coun­try at insti­tu­tions like Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts and Port­land State University.

“The goal is to allow access to this type of socially rel­e­vant stu­dio art edu­ca­tion at a large diverse and afford­able urban uni­ver­sity set­ting such as CUNY (City Uni­ver­sity of New York.)”… “It gives stu­dents a space to inves­ti­gate crit­i­cal pub­lic art prac­tices, within one of the coun­tries most diverse pop­u­la­tions and immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties.” – Pre­rana Reddy

For those new to the term – “social prac­tice” is an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary dis­course that links artis­tic activ­ity and pro­duc­tion with press­ing social issues related to com­mu­ni­ties, groups, or soci­eties. Typ­i­cally this type of art prac­tice is highly col­lab­o­ra­tive (often work­ing with non-artist groups) and empha­sizes process based trans­for­ma­tions (in addi­tion to) the cre­ation of an art object, arti­fact or expe­ri­ence. “Within the art mak­ing process, the prac­tice empha­sizes peo­ple in rela­tion­ships to each other and their sur­round­ings, “focus­ing on engage­ment and account­abil­ity between the audi­ence and the artist” – Jules Rochielle

SPQ stu­dents are afforded the immense resources of each of the involved insti­tu­tions, in addi­tion to con­nec­tions with out­side col­lab­o­rat­ing groups. Cur­rently the project also involves Immi­grant Move­ment Inter­na­tional and design groups DSGN AGNC and Change Admin­is­tra­tion. Stu­dents work across dis­ci­plines and depart­ments of art and urban stud­ies at Queens Col­lege – to come up with rich strate­gies of cre­atively work­ing on social issues.

Their recent work “Corona Stu­dio: Trans­form­ing Corona Plaza” involves the research and plan­ning of future artis­tic inter­ven­tions, pub­lic instal­la­tions, and com­mu­nity pro­gram­ming for the upcom­ing rede­vel­op­ment of Corona Plaza, in Queens, New York – into a pedes­tri­an­ized area in the Sum­mer of 2012, as part of the NYCDOT pub­lic plaza pro­gram. This is in hopes of bring­ing the plaza from its cur­rent state of dis­may and dis­use into a place for recre­ation, as well a venue for the exchange of ideas, cul­ture, and commerce.

This past spring, stu­dent of the class “Trans­form­ing Corona Plaza,” suc­cess­fully com­bined urban research involv­ing the demo­graph­ics, local pol­i­tics, and con­cerns of local stake­hold­ers, with the­ory from inter­ven­tion­ist art prac­tice and prac­ti­cal design con­cepts drawn from case stud­ies of socially-engaged art. Through­out the semes­ter, stu­dents met off-campus at the Immi­grant Move­ment Inter­na­tional space where they researched and became famil­iar with the nearby Corona Plaza (103 St. and Roo­sevelt Ave.) In the process they were intro­duced to local activists, busi­ness peo­ple, local politi­cians, and the plan­ning team of the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion. Four design pro­pos­als were cre­ated by stu­dent teams and pre­sented to the com­mu­nity and a range of pro­fes­sion­als for crit­i­cal feedback.

“We wanted to envi­sion Corona as a cen­ter for for­mu­lat­ing a pro­duc­tive rather than a reduc­tive notion of glob­al­iza­tion and diversity…the heart of our project is look­ing at Corona as a lab­o­ra­tory for address­ing cer­tain dilem­mas inher­ent within the social frame­work of this net­worked era of mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism: who and what is a com­mu­nity?”- Pre­rana Reddy

Recently, The Queens Museum of Art has called upon the exper­tise of archi­tect Quil­ian Riano of DSGN AGNC and city plan­ner Aurash Khawarzad of Change Admin­is­tra­tion to lead the process in col­lab­o­ra­tively devel­op­ing pro­gram­ming and pub­lic instal­la­tions that will cre­ate a new space for the entire com­mu­nity – titled Corona’S Plaza.

In our dis­cus­sion with Pre­rana, she stressed how their work was more than revi­tal­iz­ing the area so it can attract tourists to the neighborhood’s already rich and diverse cul­tural col­lec­tion, but devis­ing strate­gies to ben­e­fit the exist­ing community.

“Im con­cerned for peo­ple like the con­struc­tion work­ers who have nowhere to rest on their breaks. They can’t stand on the street cor­ner or in front of busi­nesses because they would be loi­ter­ing and the children’s park is no place for them either….the pedes­trian park is a per­fect solu­tion to issues such as this. We are work­ing to have activ­i­ties such as pub­lic art pro­gram­ming and health fairs for these peo­ple who have been neglected and nor­mally don’t read­ily have access to these type of resources.”

The devel­op­ment of Corona’S Plaza will include work­shops that are designed to empower locals to design the space, encour­ag­ing max­i­mized cre­ative use of the plaza. This process involves diverse com­mu­nity mem­bers – includ­ing immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties – who are usu­ally unin­volved in the urban plan­ning process.

At the end of the day, work like SPQ pro­motes the ques­tion of what respon­si­bil­i­ties local insti­tu­tions such as muse­ums have to urban issues. As cities become an impor­tant topic of con­ver­sa­tion among more peo­ple, it appears that cul­tural insti­tu­tions are lead­ing more dia­logues about urban stud­ies in accom­pa­ni­ment to con­tem­po­rary art and his­tory (think BMW Guggen­heim Lab and The New Museum’s Fes­ti­val of Ideas for the New City.) There is no doubt the amount of pos­i­tive change col­lab­o­ra­tions such as SPQ can accom­plish, and this project what­ever the out­come, is an amaz­ing exam­ple for future com­mu­nity and socially engaged visual art and plan­ning endeavors.

The project will be con­tin­u­ing through­out the sum­mer where 10 stu­dents will work inde­pen­dently with SPQ Res­i­dent Artists Qul­lian Riano and Aurash Khawarazad.

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pho­tos cour­tesy of SPQ and Change Administration.