By contrast, the same range of accents we hear in Queens is global but local: People land from everywhere and stay, in one of the most ethnically diverse patches of residential real estate in the nation.
Given that mix today, it makes symbolic sense, at least, that for four years, from 1946 to 1950, the United Nations General Assembly had its first headquarters in Queens, in a low, pale slab of a building designed to be New York City’s Pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair. Set on an edge of what is now called Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, with the Grand Central Parkway streaming by, it proved itself a versatile premises, suited equally to athletics and aesthetics. For many years, half the building was a skating rink. The other half, beginning in 1972, was home to the Queens Museum of Art.
Several months ago, the museum closed fully to complete a two-year, $69 million renovation that mostly took place while the museum remained open.
On Saturday it reopens, much changed. Its interior is now twice as large. By absorbing the former skating rink, it has gained about 50,000 square feet, which translates into extra galleries, studios for resident artists, storage room for a growing collection and — the pièce-de-résistance — a high-ceiling, sky-lit atrium that has the feel, in line with this museum’s democratizing spirit, of a community commons.
Until now, the museum turned its back on the parkway with a solid wall, but no more. The new design, by the Grimshaw architectural firm, includes big sheets of glass on both sides of the building, so you can see right through. Along with transparency comes a semi-logical layout. Over many years of visiting, I never really got my bearings; the floor plan seemed to jump around. Now, even with more ground to cover, I already sort of know my way.
The cost for the whole ambitious, expanding, revivifying job may sound like a lot for a smallish museum. But to add some perspective, the Metropolitan Museum is spending almost as much just to gussy up its Fifth Avenue plaza.
Along with the additions, the Queens Museum has also let something go: The words “of Art” are no longer part of its name. The institution’s executive director, Tom Finkelpearl, explained the rebranding in a news release. In his view, so-called outer-borough museums are faced with two basic options: Either shoot for a bridge-and-tunnel-phobic Manhattan audience or use the same energy to interact more with the immediate community, which is what they were meant to do.
For the Queens Museum, the choice was clear. Given the cosmopolitan breadth of its home population, and the lively history of the building itself — it also was the New York City Pavilion for the city’s second World’s Fair, in 1964 — Queens consciousness was the way to go, and so it has.
Long-favored features from the past have been retained. The giant, infinitesimally detailed relief-map panorama of New York City, commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 fair, is where it has always been, embedded in the building’s center like a captive spaceship, twinkling with lights. For the reopening, the museum has added some new elements to the old by surrounding the panorama with a suite of handsome, time-lapse photographs of the recent expansion in progress, taken by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, a young artist born in Taiwan and based in Queens.
Elsewhere, a new open-storage display brings some 900 vintage World’s Fair souvenirs out of attics, desk drawers, shoeboxes and the museum’s archive for perusal. They vary in size from admission buttons to a full-scale plaster cast of Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” The actual Pietà was the high-art highlight of the 1964 fair, shipped from the Vatican and seen by hundreds of thousands of conveyer-belt-riding viewers.
Some people call this stuff material culture, some call it junk. Whatever you call it, it’s history: loaded evidence of a time, a place and an era-defining event that happened miles away from big-deal Manhattan.
Finally, the museum’s Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, once upstairs, has main-stage visibility in one of the six new galleries that surround the atrium. With 20 stained-glass lamps aglow, the display is like an Art Nouveau version of Chartres.
And who knew that the Tiffany Studios were once located a mere stone’s throw away, in Corona? Or that some of its most interesting designs were created by a phalanx of female workers known as Tiffany Girls?
The Queens Museum has a track record for making history as well as showing it. It has always given pride of place to contemporary art, often to work that few Manhattan museums noticed before Queens led the way. In the 1990s, Cai Guo-Qiang’s first United States museum solo show was there. And there were “Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora” and “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950-1980s.” New York might not have paid much attention to such shows, but the international art world did, and they helped shape the increasingly cosmopolitan direction that art was taking.
The museum has assembled no fewer than four contemporary exhibitions for the reopening, two of them, in different ways, Queens specific and hard to judge as of this writing.
An installation called “The People’s United Nations (pUN),” by the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, inaugurates the new atrium. The obvious reference is to the fledgling General Assembly meetings here, which promised much and embittered many. The decisions to divide Palestine and to separate North and South Korea were made here.
Mr. Reyes clearly intends his work as wry rebuke. Beneath an outsize, doctored version of the United Nations seal, he has placed miniature drones in the shape of doves and clocks made from twisted firearms. On Nov. 23 and 24, he will convene a mock-Assembly session, during which 193 New Yorkers from the 193 states that make up the United Nations will gather for a kind of boot-camp immersion in conflict-resolution techniques. The idea is to tackle serious issues in the disarming spirit of play, an approach I’ve become suspicious of. We’ll see.
The museum’s signature biennial show, the Queens International, is back, the 2013 edition put together, for the first time, by two curators: Hitomi Iwasaki, the resident director of exhibitions, and Meiya Cheng, co-founder of the Taipei Contemporary Art Center in Taiwan. The biennial has been built around artists who live and work in the borough, but this time includes participants from Taiwan, which has a large immigrant population in Queens.
Like Mr. Reyes’s piece, the show has crucial performance components, which will unfold over time, so a one-off look gives only a partial sense of the whole. Still, there’s a lot in place to see, and some artists — Nobutaka Aozaki, Kevin Beasley, Chou Yu-Cheng, Siobhan Landry, Arthur Ou — stand out.
At the same time, it may be a sign of art’s current global-melting-pot state that clear distinctions between work made in New York and work made anywhere else can be hard to detect. This suggests that avenues of international communication are strong, which is good. It also suggests that diversity has become generic, which is a problem.
A third show, “Citizens of the World: Cuba in Queens,” is, despite its title, less about a Cuban presence in the borough than about the significance of a particular selection of Cuban art in the museum. All the work is on loan from the collection of Shelley and Donald Rubin, for whom the gallery is named. The Rubins, who founded a museum of Asian art in Chelsea, are among the very few large-dollar donors who routinely write checks for art institutions beyond the Manhattan mainstream. In a heartening quid pro quo roundelay, the Queens Museum benefits from the Rubins’ largess, the Rubins get to air their collection in a museum, and we get to see a kind of alert, passionate art that the Met, MoMA and the Whitney continue to pass right over.
Out of all the inaugural bounty, though, the largest and most moving component is the exhibition called “The Shatterer,” the solo museum debut of the artist Peter Schumann. Mr. Schumann came to New York from Germany and founded the Bread and Puppet Theater, blending populist political happening and medieval mystery play, on the streets of the Lower East Side.
That was in 1963, 50 years ago, a time when America was at war with itself and the world, and most of Manhattan was still — as it is not now — working-class immigrant turf. In the 1970s, Mr. Schumann moved to Vermont, where he has stayed, his social vision undiminished, working collaboratively in theater and producing his own art.
The Queens show, organized by Jonathan Berger and Larissa Harris, demonstrates how thoroughly Bread and Puppet is Mr. Schumann’s creation. Its down-value look and activist ethos are evident in everything, from the black house-paint mural he has brushed across one of the museum’s new white walls to the hand-printed, hand-bound books he has placed in the gallery that he designates as both chapel and library. Every inch of this room is covered with figures and words: saints and ogres, exhortations and condemnations, art for one and for all, straight from the hand, right to the moral core.
The Queens Museum is a good place for it.
Mr. Finkelpearl’s interests have long centered on participatory, activist art — art as a form of instruction. He recently published a book on the subject, “What We Made:Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation.” Much of his museum’s programming revolves around this idea. It makes sense that he has known and loved Mr. Schumann’s art for many years; that’s why it’s here.
And where else would it go? At once poetic and preachy, modest and obsessive, satirical and spiritual, it’s probably too unfashionably “alternative” for anyplace else. But given the condition of passive, formalist dullness that has stalled art in New York, alternatives of all kinds are what we need. These days, at the end of the No. 7 train to Queens, you’ll find at least one.
