A Public Art Pavilion in Flushing Meadows Corona Park w/ artists Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong & Dev Harlan
Sunday, June 9th, 2019
2:00PM
FREE Admission
You are invited to participate in the opening of this year-long public artwork with a discussion on the site’s history and a movement workshop. This event is free and completely open to the public. PLEASE BRING A BEACH TOWEL TO LOUNGE OUT ON THE LAWN WITH POOLTIME!
2:00PM – 3:00PM – Opening Discussion
‘RETROSPECTIVE GAZE’
This inaugural discussion in the monthly series of public programs at POOLTIME will focus on the rich history of Flushing Meadows Corona Park as site for both the 1939 and the 1964 World’s Fairs. The discussion will touch upon the history of the site and its structures.
Led by Thomas Mellins.
With brief introductions from artists Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong & Dev Harlan, and Branka Duknic (Director of the Queens Historical Society).
Thomas Mellins is an architectural historian, exhibition curator, and author. He has organized exhibitions on a wide variety of architectural and cultural subjects. Mellins has organized shows for Philip Johnson’s Glass House, the Museum of the City of New York, the Center for Architecture in NY, Art Museum of the Americas, the Brooklyn Historical Society, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the New York City Ballet, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the South Street Seaport Museum, and Yale University.
3:30PM – 4:30PM – Movement Workshop
‘BIRD’S EYE VIEW’
This participatory movement workshop will center around stretching and kite-flying activities.
About the Pavilion:
POOLTIME is a public artwork by artists Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong and Dev Harlan. In conjunction with NYC Parks, the pavilion will be installed at the north end of Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows Corona Park this summer 2019. POOLTIME is a public pavilion and series of community programming centered around the rich history of the Park as a site for the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. POOLTIME activates an underused public space and aims to discuss the World’s Fair structures and their architectural lives and meaning post-exhibition.
This public art pavilion pays homage to the historic Aquacade aquatic amphitheater constructed for the 1939 World’s Fair, whose structures transformed Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The amphitheater was reused and activated during the 1964 World’s Fair held in New York. Now demolished and largely forgotten, the Aquacade aquatic amphitheater was a large community hub and heart of the park even decades after many of the other World’s Fair attractions had fallen into decay and disuse. We are interested in drawing awareness to this neglected moment in the FMCP’s history and understanding the Aquacade’s social and spatial impact, after the conclusion of the World’s Fair, as more than just an architectural relic. We are interested in the pool’s history as a vibrant site for working-class families to convene, the pool as social hub, and the pool as a carved human intervention adjacent to Meadow Lake.
POOLTIME is a dynamic, ever-changing sculpture that aims to revive the concept of the Pool as social hub by creating the experience of being in (or under, in this case) the water of the pool.
This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by the Queens Council on the Arts.Generous support is provided by the Partnerships for Parks Capacity Fund Grant.
With support from the Parks Build Healthy Communities Grant, led by Partnerships for Parks and made possible by Building Healthy Communities, an initiative of the Mayor’s Office and the Fund for Public Health NYC.
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