Over the weekend of January 12 and 13, DSGN AGNC (led by Quillian Riano) took to Corona Plaza to carry out their ‘Diagram and Research Action’, which looks to identify issues and hidden urban conflicts affecting the community of Corona, and by extension, Corona Plaza.

Here are some lovely photos by Quillian of the action at Corona Plaza:

As the DSGN AGNC site puts it:

“Each of the signs has:

• A specific issue that acts as a boundary, keeping Corona Plaza from being used fully by the community;
• A diagram that looks at how permeable that boundary is;
• A description of the boundary, the agents that may help change the boundary, and a key question for each boundary;
• Finally, each sign has a translucent architectural diagram that looks at the boundary’s affect in the spatial experience of the plaza.

All the boundaries and questions arise from research conducted in Corona. The questions are meant to give us a deeper understanding of the community. Some of the questions, like number 3, are polemical in nature and meant only to challenge assumptions some make about the neighborhood of Corona — i.e. this New York Times article: Roosevelt Avenue, a Corridor of Vice. Our goal is to advocate for and design an open plaza that caters to the entire community.”

 Here is the link to the rest of the post.

This article was originally published by The City Atlas: New York.

Poised at the fore­front of impor­tant con­tem­po­rary social move­ments, com­mu­nity activism, tac­ti­cal urban­ism, and par­tic­i­pa­tory art pro­duc­tion, a nascent col­lab­o­ra­tion devel­ops between a cul­tural insti­tu­tion, a pub­lic uni­ver­sity, local artists, urban plan­ners, and Queens res­i­dents, to cre­atively solve local urban issues.

This past spring City Atlas met with Pre­rana Reddy, the Direc­tor of Pro­gram­ming at The Queens Museum of Art, to talk about Social Prac­tice Queens (SPQ) – a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the museum and Queens Col­lege – and the future of Corona Plaza.

The team up between two of the borough’s highly regarded insti­tu­tions began with the ques­tion of how to bring visual art stu­dents together with local res­i­dents, in order to tackle social issues par­tic­u­lar to Queens. A part­ner­ship of this nature has never before been attempted between a museum and an aca­d­e­mic insti­tu­tion. Only in its early devel­op­men­tal stages, SPQ is the only edu­ca­tional pro­gram of its kind on the east coast with sim­i­lar pro­grams emerg­ing across the coun­try at insti­tu­tions like Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts and Port­land State University.

“The goal is to allow access to this type of socially rel­e­vant stu­dio art edu­ca­tion at a large diverse and afford­able urban uni­ver­sity set­ting such as CUNY (City Uni­ver­sity of New York.)”… “It gives stu­dents a space to inves­ti­gate crit­i­cal pub­lic art prac­tices, within one of the coun­tries most diverse pop­u­la­tions and immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties.” – Pre­rana Reddy

For those new to the term – “social prac­tice” is an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary dis­course that links artis­tic activ­ity and pro­duc­tion with press­ing social issues related to com­mu­ni­ties, groups, or soci­eties. Typ­i­cally this type of art prac­tice is highly col­lab­o­ra­tive (often work­ing with non-artist groups) and empha­sizes process based trans­for­ma­tions (in addi­tion to) the cre­ation of an art object, arti­fact or expe­ri­ence. “Within the art mak­ing process, the prac­tice empha­sizes peo­ple in rela­tion­ships to each other and their sur­round­ings, “focus­ing on engage­ment and account­abil­ity between the audi­ence and the artist” – Jules Rochielle

SPQ stu­dents are afforded the immense resources of each of the involved insti­tu­tions, in addi­tion to con­nec­tions with out­side col­lab­o­rat­ing groups.

Cur­rently the project also involves Immi­grant Move­ment Inter­na­tional and design groups DSGNAGNC and Change Admin­is­tra­tion. Stu­dents work across dis­ci­plines and depart­ments of art and urban stud­ies at Queens Col­lege – to come up with rich strate­gies of cre­atively work­ing on social issues.

Their recent work “Corona Stu­dio: Trans­form­ing Corona Plaza” involves the research and plan­ning of future artis­tic inter­ven­tions, pub­lic instal­la­tions, and com­mu­nity pro­gram­ming for the upcom­ing rede­vel­op­ment of Corona Plaza, in Queens, New York – into a pedes­tri­an­ized area in the Sum­mer of 2012, as part of the NYCDOT pub­lic plaza pro­gram. This is in hopes of bring­ing the plaza from its cur­rent state of dis­may and dis­use into a place for recre­ation, as well a venue for the exchange of ideas, cul­ture, and commerce.

This past spring, stu­dent of the class “Trans­form­ing Corona Plaza,” suc­cess­fully com­bined urban research involv­ing the demo­graph­ics, local pol­i­tics, and con­cerns of local stake­hold­ers, with the­ory from inter­ven­tion­ist art prac­tice and prac­ti­cal design con­cepts drawn from case stud­ies of socially-engaged art. Through­out the semes­ter, stu­dents met off-campus at the Immi­grant Move­ment Inter­na­tional space where they researched and became famil­iar with the nearby Corona Plaza (103 St. and Roo­sevelt Ave.) In the process they were intro­duced to local activists, busi­ness peo­ple, local politi­cians, and the plan­ning team of the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion. Four design pro­pos­als were cre­ated by stu­dent teams and pre­sented to the com­mu­nity and a range of pro­fes­sion­als for crit­i­cal feedback.

“We wanted to envi­sion Corona as a cen­ter for for­mu­lat­ing a pro­duc­tive rather than a reduc­tive notion of glob­al­iza­tion and diversity…the heart of our project is look­ing at Corona as a lab­o­ra­tory for address­ing cer­tain dilem­mas inher­ent within the social frame­work of this net­worked era of mar­ket cap­i­tal­ism: who and what is a com­mu­nity?”- Pre­rana Reddy

Recently, The Queens Museum of Art has called upon the exper­tise of archi­tect Quil­ian Riano ofDSGN AGNC and city plan­ner Aurash Khawarzad of Change Admin­is­tra­tion to lead the process in col­lab­o­ra­tively devel­op­ing pro­gram­ming and pub­lic instal­la­tions that will cre­ate a new space for

the entire com­mu­nity – titled Corona’S Plaza.

In our dis­cus­sion with Pre­rana, she stressed how their work was more than revi­tal­iz­ing the area so it can attract tourists to the neighborhood’s already rich and diverse cul­tural col­lec­tion, but devis­ing strate­gies to ben­e­fit the exist­ing community.

“Im con­cerned for peo­ple like the con­struc­tion work­ers who have nowhere to rest on their breaks. They can’t stand on the street cor­ner or in front of busi­nesses because they would be loi­ter­ing and the children’s park is no place for them either….the pedes­trian park is a per­fect solu­tion to issues such as this. We are work­ing to have activ­i­ties such as pub­lic art pro­gram­ming and health fairs for these peo­ple who have been neglected and nor­mally don’t read­ily have access to these type of resources.”

The devel­op­ment of Corona’S Plaza will include work­shops that are designed to empower locals to design the space, encour­ag­ing max­i­mized cre­ative use of the plaza. This process involves diverse com­mu­nity mem­bers – includ­ing immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties – who are usu­ally unin­volved in the urban plan­ning process.

At the end of the day, work like SPQ pro­motes the ques­tion of what respon­si­bil­i­ties local insti­tu­tions such as muse­ums have to urban issues. As cities become an impor­tant topic of con­ver­sa­tion among more peo­ple, it appears that cul­tural insti­tu­tions are lead­ing more dia­logues about urban

stud­ies in accom­pa­ni­ment to con­tem­po­rary art and his­tory (think BMW Guggen­heim Lab and The New Museum’s Fes­ti­val of Ideas for the New City.) There is no doubt the amount of pos­i­tive change col­lab­o­ra­tions such as SPQ can accom­plish, and this project what­ever the out­come, is an amaz­ing exam­ple for future com­mu­nity and socially engaged visual art and plan­ning endeavors.

The project will be con­tin­u­ing through­out the sum­mer where 10 stu­dents will work inde­pen­dently with SPQ Res­i­dent Artists Qul­lian Riano and Aurash Khawarazad.

On May 19, Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras, joined by Corona Studio artist/architect Quillian Riano and SPQ MFA student and QMA community organizer Jose Serrano-McClain, visited each of the 20+ local businesses directly surrounding Corona Plaza. The goal was to invite the merchants into the conversation surrounding Corona Plaza, with an official invitation to the June 7 workshop to be conducted by the NYC Department of Transportation.

Here are some images from that day:

Social Practice Queens (SPQ) – has just completed its first interdisciplinary seminar Transforming Corona Plaza. This experiment brought together a group of graduate and undergraduate students in studio art and in urban studies and successfully merged research work involving the demographics, local politics, and concerned stake-holders of this mostly Latino region of Queens, with interventionist theory and practical design concepts drawn from case studies of socially-engaged visual art. The educational team was drawn from Queens College: Professor Maureen Connor and Gregory Sholette from Studio Art Dept., Professor Tarry Hum from Urban Studies Dept.; plus additional instructors from the Queens Museum of Art including its Director Tom Finkelpearl, and Manager of Programs Prerana Reddy.

Two dozen students met off-campus at the Immigrant Movement International space where they developed in-depth knowledge of one nearby urban site known as Corona Plaza (103 St. and Roosevelt Ave). In the process they were introduced to local community activists, business people, computer modeling experts, borough politicians, and the planning team of the Department of Transportation (DOT) . Four final proposals were generated by student teams and presented to the community for critical feedback from a range of individuals including Tania Bruguera (artist), Arturo Sanchez (Professor of Urban Planning, Cornell) and Ricardi Calixte (a Neighborhood Development Director). Documentation of these projects can be seen here: http://www.socialpracticequeens.org/projects/

The other exciting news is that investigation into Corona Plaza will continue over this summer and into fall as independent study with a team of ten students working under the guidance of our newly invited Corona Studio Artists Qullian Riano and Aurash Khawarazad.