Queen Mother of Reality Opens at Socrates Sculpture Park

QueenMother-Socrates-4-9-14-1024x768

Opening: May 11, 2014 (2:00 pm – 6:00 pm)

Opening: May 11, 2014 (2:00 pm – 6:00 pm)

Queen Mother of Reality by Paweł Althamer is a monumental, mixed media sculpture of an elegant figure that is peacefully reclining in the shaded southern section of the park overlooking the East River waterfront. Althamer’s sculpture is dedicated to and inspired by “Queen Mother” Dr. Delois Blakely, a U.S. Ambassador of Goodwill to Africa,who has been the Community Mayor of Harlem since she was sworn in by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1995. Queen Mother of Reality serves as a call to highlight the numerous displaced and homeless of New York City – Dr. Blakely’s paramount cause.

Originally built as a part of Althamer’s Performa Commission in 2013, Queen Mother of Realityat Socrates Sculpture Park will act as a platform for creative dialogue and interactive programming, reflecting the park’s commitment to engaging audiences through public art. This spring the sculpture was  reassembled by Althamer and his collaborators – a team of artists and community members, including artists Noah Fischer, Roman Stańczak, Rafal Zwirek, and Jim Constanza (aka the Aaron Burr Society), and the artist’s sons Bruno Althamer and Szymon Althamer, as well as members of the community.

Continuing Althamer’s commitment to social collaboration, which underlines most of his work,Queen Mother of Reality will engage audiences through interactive programming organized by Socrates and the artist that will invoke Dr. Blakely’s pursuits of social justice and community building. The sculpture is situated in the midst of an active community. The park is surrounded by three of the nation’s largest public housing complexes (Astoria, Ravenswood, and Queensbridge Houses), and the local community has been a park stakeholder since its creation in 1986.

The first program is a Mother’s Day celebration during the opening on May 11 from 2pm-6pm, featuring art-making workshops presented by Minor Miracles Foundation and an experimental social project titled Nails Across America by artist Breanne Trammell.

Programming will develop throughout the summer, so please continue to check back for updates.

Queen Mother of Reality is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park in collaboration with Performa, and in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

The Exhibition Program at Socrates Sculpture Park is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Charina Endowment Fund, Lambent Foundation, Mark di Suvero, the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Agnes Gund, Ivana Mestrovic, and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.

Queen Mother of Reality is a Performa Commission and was originally presented as part of the Polish Pavilion Without Walls for Performa 13.  The commission was generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts and Toby Devan Lewis, with additional support from Foksal Gallery Foundation (Warsaw), neugerriemschneider (Berlin), Fundacja Sztuka i Współczesność, CCA Ujazdowski Castle, and Polish Ministry of Cultural and National Heritage, Tilton Gallery

Summer of Change

IMG_4311

Coins, those age-old metallic discs struck with the symbols of national mythology,  just might unlock reason & light in the fourth year of the Dire Global Recession, an economic state whose laws do not apply within the stones of Wall Street; whose invisible great wall is impregnable to marauding justice, equality, and change.  So we present the Summer of Change; a series of numismatic ritual offerings to our nation’s bankers; those citizens worthy of prizes and honors; which we as artists are honored to bestow in public. Standing on The Street safely within the commons of the commonwealth, we shall seize this extraordinary moment by the horns to re-distribute wealth in the form of dollars, fifty-cent pieces, quarters, dimes, nickels, and the Lincoln penny; sacrificing one denomination per event.  Lacking the private means to fund this unprecedented showering of coins, we turn to Kickstarter; with every penny that we raise from The People guaranteed to find its way into the palm of a Wall Street Banker.

LINK HERE TO SEE VIDEOS OF ALL THE DISTRIBUTIONS

We Present a series of 7 events to take place at the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets.(map)

SCHEDULE: The events will start on the Summer Solstice and end on the Fall Equinox

Distribution of 100 Greenback and Liberty Dollars:June 21st 12:00-1:00 PM

Distribution of 200 Kennedy Fifty-Cent Pieces: July 15th

4:00-4:30 PM (Wall Street)

4:30-5:00 (March to Irish Hunger Memorial)

5:00-7:00 (Irish Hunger Memorial) (map)

Distribution of 400 Washington Quarters: TBA

Distribution of 1000 Roosevelt Dimes: TBA

Distribution of 2000 Jefferson Nickels: TBA

 

Distribution of 10,000 Lincoln Pennies: September 22nd 12:00-1:00 PM

Rhetoric Machine

RM_2

Rhetoric Machine is a two-room kinetic installation that appropriates the language of movies, television, radio, and speechmaking. Presidential speeches and emotionally laced pop songs serve as the soundtrack for a sculptural light show that marches through the last sixty years, what many would call the golden age of American history.

Rhetoric Machine is a two-room kinetic installation that appropriates the language of movies, television, radio, and speechmaking. Presidential speeches and emotionally laced pop songs serve as the soundtrack for a sculptural light show that marches through the last sixty years, what many would call the golden age of American history. American icons such as an eagle, a tank, and a television set react variously to the soundtrack, creating what Sergei Eisenstein called an “intellectual montage” where jarring associations between light and sound lead to new meaning constructions, often charged with emotion. With this work Fischer asserts, “the ancient art of rhetoric has not been lost – it has been transformed. We may associate rhetoric with a politician standing at a podium, delivering a speech with which we either agree or disagree. But behind the podium there are the hissing speakers, the buzzing screens, and the rumbling engines of an expansive Rhetoric Machine. This machine has been built to shape around us a persuasive and controllable version of reality from our  that you can download, one that we accept before we have the chance to examine it.”