Queens Museum to Open Newly Expanded Space on November 9

The Queens Museum has announced the opening weekend events lineup to coincide with the opening of the Museum's expansion and inaugural exhibitions - Pedro Reyes: The People's United Nations (pUN), Peter Schumann: The Shatterer, New York City Building Time Lapse, 2009 - 2013: Photographs by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao, Queens International 2013, and Citizens of the World: Cuba in Queens. A broad variety of exhibitions and programming highlight the expanded gallery space and showcase the Museum's dedication to presenting contemporary art that engages the uniquely diverse communities it serves, reflecting the richness and breadth of the cultural environment. Also timed with the inauguration of the new building, the museum is undergoing a rebranding initiative with a new visual identity, a renaming of the institution from Queens Museum of Art to the Queens Museum, and is soon launching a redesigned website.

The Queen's Museum's opening month of activities will kick off with the Target Wide Open Weekend featuring multicultural welcoming and blessing ceremonies on Saturday, November 9. In addition, the inaugural group of artists in the Queens Museum Studio Residency Program will open their doors and welcome the public into their studios. The weekend also features performances by artists in Queens International 2013 with extended hours on Saturday night for the Museum and exhibition opening party.

Queens Museum's Target Wide Open Weekend continues on Sunday, November 10. The museum will host a community pilgrimage in which community groups will meet in nearby Corona Plaza (103rd street and Roosevelt Avenue) and march to the Museum in solidarity. Further event highlights on Sunday include a Build Your Own Droneaerial video workshop and demonstration with Queens International artists Georgi and Nina Tushev. That afternoon, folkloric dance groups and bands will perform, reflecting the cultural diversity of surrounding neighborhoods.

Monday, November 11, the final day of Target Wide Open Weekend, is a free open house for families. The Museum's teaching artists and art therapists will each have their own stations for families to take part in a variety of art making and crafts from around the world. Monday evening, Peter Schumann will perform a Fiddle Sermon and bake bread as part of the opening reception for Peter Schumann: The Shatterer.

The following weekend, the Queens Museum continues the opening festivities with further programming including an Ander Mikalson performance of Score for Two Dinosaurs along with the Corona Youth Orchestra. Also on Saturday, November 16, the Museum will host a Book Crossing & Literary Flash Mob, a book exchange and performance event, as well as a sound performance by Richard Garet entitled Mnemonics: for Space Invaders. Additional weekend highlights include a Queens poetry event and book launch curated by Paolo Javier with Gabriele Tinti & Burt Young, Warren Lehrer, and Franklin Bruno.

Finally, on the weekend of November 23-24, artist Pedro Reyes convenes The People's United Nations, bringing together 193 citizen representatives of the 193 members of the (real) United Nations for a series of plenary sessions tackling the issues facing the world.

For the full schedule of opening weekend events, please visit:
http://www.queensmuseum.org/queens-museum-re-opening

In addition, the Queens Museum will have the following inaugural exhibitions on view:

Peter Schumann: The Shatterer
Also premiering with the opening of the Museum's expansion is The Shatterer, the first solo museum exhibition of Bread and Puppet Theatre founder and director Peter Schumann. The Queens Museum's presentation of Schumann's groundbreaking political performance art is a strong response to today's urgent questions about the role of the artist in society, at a key moment for both the Queens Museum and Bread and Puppet. The materials used to create Schumann's large-scale puppets and stages-black and white house paint applied to discarded and recycled paper, cardboard, and fabric-reflect the bare-essential production values and approach to living that have been central to Schumann's work for his entire career.

Queens International 2013
Another highlight of the Queens Museum's reopening season is Queens International 2013, the sixth edition of the Museum's biennial exhibition of artists from around the world who live or work in Queens. This year the Queens Museum has invited Meiya Cheng, co-founder of the Taipei Contemporary Art Center, to co-curate with Hitomi Iwasaki, Queens Museum Director of Exhibitions/Curator. This marks the beginning of a new tradition for Queens Internationalthat engages a co-curator from overseas to consider the Queens art community in a fresh perspective. The show addresses globalization in Queens from a variety of angles by facilitating and implementing collaborative projects between Taipei-based and Queens-based artists.

New York City Building Time Lapse, 2009 - 2013: Photographs by Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao
For the duration of the Museum's expansion project, Taiwan-born, Queens-based photographer Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao has been in residence capturing the transformation of the New York City Building. A series of Liao's large-scale photographs will chronicle this most recent metamorphosis while archival photographs, documentation and blueprints will convey the rich history of the building from its role as the New York City Pavilion in the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs, home of the United Nations General Assembly (1946-1950), and site of both the Queens Museum (1972 - today) and the World's Fair Skating Rink (1952-1962; 1964-2008). In addition to Liao's commissioned work, New York City Building Time Lapse will feature material from the Museum's archives, the United Nations Archive, the Archive of the New York City Parks Department, and Grimshaw.

Pedro Reyes: The People's United Nations
The People's United Nations, or pUN, brings together citizen representatives of the 193 member states of the United Nations for mock assemblies and performances which reference the building's history of hosting the General Assembly of the UN between 1946-1950. pUN will be presented as a counterforce to the UN. Reyes will employ alternative negotiation techniques drawn from radical theater, psychology, marriage counseling, and corporate management consulting as opposed to traditional diplomacy to address foreign relations issues. Humorously redeploying the format of the UN-caucuses, plenaries, simultaneous translation-pUN will entertain but also inform, and the objects and documents produced will be delivered to the UN in a culminating event. pUN is planned for November 23 - March 2014, and will include both private and public performance sessions under the new massive central skylight. The People's United Nations (pUN) is part of the Performa Consortium.

Citizens of the World: Cuba in Queens
Citizens of the World: Cuba in Queens explores how Cuban visual artists, living both on the island and in diaspora, grapple with the profound complexities between identity and place. Simultaneously a collective sentiment and a uniquely individual notion, lo cubano extends beyond geographic and existential boundaries. This exhibition focuses on the intangible connections between where one lives and one's sense of self. This inaugural exhibition celebrates the opening of The Shelley and Donald Rubin Gallery and launches a series of collaborations between the Rubins' Private Collection and the Queens Museum. Three exhibitions, curated from the couple's private collection, will feature contemporary Cuban, contemporary Tibetan, and modern and contemporary Indian art over the next two years.

For more information on the inaugural exhibitions, please visit: www.queensmuseum.org.

Also on long-term view at the Queens Museum:

The Panorama of the City of New York
The Panorama is the jewel in the crown of the collection of the Queens Museum. Commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 World's Fair, in part as a celebration of the City's municipal infrastructure, this 9,335 square foot architectural model -the largest in the world- includes more than 895,000 buildings, bridges, parks and iconic NYC sites. After receiving a full update in 1992, recent additions to the model include the addition of CitiField, the new Yankee Stadium, Brooklyn Bridge Park, an updated Battery Park City and the unique Newton Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. In preparation for the reopening of the Museum, the Panorama has been re-lit and received a makeover.

The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass
Founded by early Tiffany collectors Egon and Hildegard Neustadt in 1995, The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass is a private foundation based in Queens that has partnered with the Queens Museum for more than a decade exhibiting its collection of Tiffany lamps, windows, metalwork, and ephemera. The Collection has relocated to the new wing of the Queens Museum and inaugurates the gallery with the exhibition Shade Garden: Floral Lamps from the Tiffany Studiosas well as a permanent display of other Tiffany designs. Shade Garden features 20 lamps exploring Tiffany's masterful translation of nature into glass. Some of the most beloved and iconic Tiffany motifs are included in Shade Garden, which will be on view for two years. Supplementing Shade Garden is a detailed model demonstrating the labor-intensive process of making a leaded-glass lampshade and a film capturing the process of selecting, cutting and soldering the individual pieces of glass in the lampshade.

World's Fair Visible Storage
The Queens Museum will always be inextricably linked to the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs, and with a collection of more than 10,000 objects pertaining to the two expositions, the Museum is a key resource to both scholars and fans. In an effort to provide visitors with a greater understanding of the scope of the Museum's enormous holdings of World's Fair artifacts, the newly installed World's Fair Visible Storage and Gallery on the second floor displays more than 900 three-dimensional pieces -many on view for the first time arranged by the date of each World's Fair, and within these categories, arranged by donor. The World's Fair Visible Storage will provide unprecedented access to students, scholars, and the general public to explore the collection. Also on view within the World's Fair Gallery is ChronoLeap: The Great World's Fair Adventure, a virtual experience and game that transports visitors back in time to the 1964 World's Fair, complete with pavilion tours and a conversation with Fair President Robert Moses.