This is the fifth edition of the Queens Museum of Art’s biennial of artists living and working in Queens. The 31 artists included were selected from 650 online applications and hundreds of recommendations from participants in previous editions. They live or work in the Queens neighborhoods of Astoria, Flushing, Jackson Heights, Long Island City, Kew Gardens, Richmond Hill and Ridgewood.

Typically for the borough, many of the participating artists or their parents hail from around the world—from Taiwan, Israel, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Russia, Lithuania, Japan, Tibet and Uruguay, plus exotic locales like upstate New York, Kentucky and Los Angeles. Some artists’ families have been living in Queens for generations. Artists in the show range in age from their 20s to their 60s.

Themes the curators noticed while conducting studio visits became a significant part of the exhibition. Many artists were working in forms of abstraction, both painting and sculpture. Many others were telling fantastical stories of other places and times through painting, video and performance. Together, they seemed to be combining the rational and the emotional in a search for worlds beyond our own, while living daily lives saturated by technology.

The exhibition will be installed in three first-floor galleries at the Queens Museum.  The biennial’s subtitle “Three Points” originates with French Surrealist René Daumal’s unfinished novel Mount Analogue (1944), in which—in close correlation with the thematics of the exhibition—eight explorers use scientific knowledge and metaphysical powers to search for a magical mountain invisible to the human eye.

Artists:
Tatiana Berg
Becket Bowes
Karen Y. Chan
Sam Clagnaz
Gintaras Did_iapetris
Sharona Eliassaf
Jesse A. Greenberg
Scott Grodesky
Angelina Gualdoni
Mikhail Gubin
David Kearns
Dieter Kuhn
Eleen Lin
Robert Lobe
Rachel Mason
Angel Otero
Eric Palgon
Claudia Peña Salinas
Carmelle Safdie
William Santen
Adam Shecter
Trevor Shimizu
Teng Chao-Ming
Scott Verhagen
Allyson Vieira
Palden Weinreb
Joe Winter
Brian Zegeer

Workshops:
Matthew Buckingham
Alejandro Cesarco
Scott Hug