Last Dance: Queens Museum Of Art [46]

Selections from A Book About Death at The Partnership Gallery in The Queens Museum of Art will close on Sunday, November 15, but not without  a party.  From 3 to 6pm you can join artist and curator Louise Weinberg (pictured here, waltzing with one of the artists) for a look at the installation and the more than 165 new works sent in for this exhibition. (Louise notes that no works will be returned to the artists).

The exhibition brought many artists from the original project in contact with nearly 200 more from all over the world who responded to Weinberg's call for new artworks.  These pieces, along with their envelopes, were installed in vitrines, on walls using a simple clothes-line system and in large glass cases in the gallery.


Many of these pieces were made by children in the workshop at the QMA, while others came from Europe, South America and across the United States. Votives and homage works for friends and loved ones, and even Neda, the young Iranian woman killed in the election battles in Tehran, came pouring in to the gallery.  Visual essays using collage, drawing and digital techniques took on the complex subject of death; but the works were unusually uplifting, particularly in their sense of humor and their head-on take-no-prisoner's approach to death, dying, murder and oblivion.

"It was a tireless but extremely rewarding experience," says Weinberg.  "Another chapter in a vast and wonderful collaborative project."

Other artists are currently working in Mexico, Montreal, São Paulo, Brazil, Belgium and even Beijing (where public Internet access to even this web site is prohibited) to put on the exhibition in new and varying ways, inviting the local community to contribute and dipping into the deep well of global collaborators to expand the venue.

Last days at the Queens Museum.  Closing November 15, 2009, from 3 - 6 pm: Queens Museum of Art, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY 11368.

[Installation shot above: Nora Gomez, all other photos: Louise Weinberg].

ABAD Crosses The Bridge To The Queens Museum of Art : Nov 1 Opening [34]

Louise Weinberg has been busy, and will go into overdrive in the next 10 days, installing a selection of the artists' postcards created especially for A Book About Death collaborative project up at the Queens Museum of Art as one of a trio of exhibitions celebrating the Day of the Dead. The exhibition opens on November 1st and runs through November 15. A reception will be held on November 1st from 3 to 6 pm.

Selections from "A Book About Death" is an artists' collaborative project conceived by collage artist Matthew Rose (an American living and working in Paris) for the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York City where the original exhibition took place from September 10 - 22, 2009. Over 500 artists contributed 500 postcards each created from artworks made especially to create an unbound book about death in homage to Ray Johnson (father of mail art), a celebration of Emily Harvey, and a global exploration of how we celebrate memory and death. The only requirement was to include the words "a book about death" somewhere on the card. Since then, the exhibition has traveled to the Otis College of Art and Design in LA, the Mobius Gallery in Boston, The River Mill Art Gallery in New Jersey as well as becoming part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the LA County Museum of Art Research Library.

The Queens Museum is presenting a selection of cards from the exhibition and are also asking the community, in an artist-led workshop, to create their own postcard about death and add it to the exhibition. 

Artist Call: To be included in this exhibition, make a postcard and send it to: Louise Weinberg, Queens Museum of Art, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY 11368.

For more information, please contact: Louise Weinberg : artphotogirl1@gmail.com