2016
Observing the Anthropocene: Staring back at the Eye in the Sky / Erin Turner
As the United States careens towards this year’s presidential election, its citizens are considering the issues of class and education. The cost of a higher education is a significant barrier to lower income students, but it is not the only factor in the educational...
Shadow Play, Tales of Urbanization / Alejandro Salgado
Immigrated from Beijing and based in Flushing, NY, the artist collective, Lily & Honglei, are interested in exploring current social and environmental issues through the lens of Chinese cultural identity and heritage. The outcome is work of the 21st century digital...
Inflato Dumpster – John Locke & Joaquin Reyes / Raina Panagiotopoulos
Can you picture yourself walking down a busy commercial corridor in Jamaica, Queens? A cradle of Hip-Hop and the home for many jazz musicians, downtown Jamaica is an intersection where commerce and culture meet. Attracting tens of thousands visitors on a daily basis,...
Rejin Leys / Eun Woo Nam
An artist and art educator, Rejin Leys adopts the process of recycling paper as a way of making her performative art. Out of junk mail and flyers, she recreates new colored paper that can be used for drawing and art making. PulpMobile, her movable installation in...
Dominique Sindayiganza / Gina Minelli
Dominique Sindayiganza is a socially-driven photographer. Sindayiganza focuses primarily on the photography of people, combining strong colors with visual cues from subjects’ poses, setting, and attire to deliver a thematic message. An active volunteer and community...
Jeffrey Allen Price: MODA / Jenna C Makuh
The idea of death and decay is normally a somber subject. People rarely find the beauty in this idea due to the loss of physical presence; but what comes from a object after it departs this Earth? The unseen process of decay can turn into something beautiful,...
“A Community Engaged Artist Residency” / Jeffrey Kasper
It all began with a facility tour of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL). Walking through the over 100-year-old city-owned building on Jamaica Avenue, formerly the Queens Register of Titles and Deeds, led to an unanticipated encounter with the museum’s...
Kakyoung Lee: Illustrator/Animator/Messenger // Maria (Mia) K Karlberg-Levin
The Window project in Jamaica Flux: Workspaces & Windows 2016 presents a video depicting scenes of the inside of a gallery on whose window a moving image is projected. The animation captures postures and gestures that people exhibit inside the gallery while they are...
Sue Jeong Ka / Zaid A Islam
BluMarble is a project by interdisciplinary artist Sue Jeong Ka, in collaboration with local residents of Jamaica, Queens. The project explores housing issues and real estate development, focusing on how they affect related communities. The project includes videos,...
Nicholas Fraser – Jamaica Flux / Effi Ibok
The alienation of workers to the products of their labor, most famously put forth by Karl Marx in the 19th century, is an issue that continues to play a central role in our current market-based economy. This is the view that capitalism prohibits workers from...
hannes bend – metaNoYa (2016) / Floor A Grootenhuis
metaNoYa is an interactive collaborative performance that takes place in the natural environment of the streets with the communities of Jamaica, Queens. metaNoYa is inspired by the ancient Greek word μετάνοια (metánoia). This refers to psychological rebuilding or...
Serpents and Tea / Eliesha Grant
When faced with the opportunity to be a part of Jamaica Flux: Workspaces & Windows 2016 and while preparing for her solo show in Maine this fall, Shervone Neckles thought, “How can I bring people in these communities together?” She wanted to have an “in” to get to...
ART&COM : Work Displays History / Alix G Camacho Vargas
Thiago Szmrecsányi is an artist, working primarily as a sculptor, who adds new meanings to existing things. Natalia de Campos is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, video, sound, writing, interactive media, and theater. She is also a producer, educator,...
Adam Brent’s Through Peaks and Valleys
An interdisciplinary artist, Adam Brent is interested in producing public sculpture that is architectural, interactive, and functional. With this interest, Brent provokes questions about the way that fine art has been traditionally understood as a useless object....
Can Teaching Be a Political Act? If the Act of Teaching Is Fundamentally Performance, Can it Be an Act of Authenticity? / Scott Braun
As the United States careens towards this year’s presidential election, its citizens are considering the issues of class and education. The cost of a higher education is a significant barrier to lower income students, but it is not the only factor in the educational...
The Prep Is an Old School Dance: Performing The SAT / Kenya (Robinson)
The Main Idea Ayana Evans is a performance artist and painter. An accessories designer and native Chicagoan. An idea athlete and Ivy League graduate. A husband-seeker and night owl. A catsuit wearer and game-killer-in-heels. An educator, congratulator, and...
Nicholas Fraser / Akiko Ichikawa
Nicholas Fraser’s work can seem ungraspable. In Unfixed/Unfixable (2009), his stenciled-in-ash texts on a sidewalk along Manhattan’s 14th Street present the artist’s site-specific observations of public moments like BABY KEPT FRESH IN PLASTIC, HUNGRY MAN MAKES EYE...
Samantha Holmes: Abstracting Narrative Clarity / Michelle Woo
One thing that initially struck me about Samantha Holmes’ work was its attention to historic notions of permanence and a reverence for patterns found in nature. Through conceptual experimentation in traditional media such as mosaics and sculpture, she recontextualizes...
Anne Lise Jensen: Plaque series in commemoration of Clarence Williams and Eva Taylor / Kwami Coleman
Jazz now enjoys, after almost a century’s worth of debate and struggle, the prestige of an indigenous American art music with a global presence. The dominant narrative of jazz history in the United States is thus populated with women and men who, through their...
SUE JEONG KA / Tammy Kim
The young Korean-American artist, Sue Jeong Ka, makes work about legal restrictions: why only some bodies are condoned, why only certain people have rights. She transforms subjects into partners, including undocumented immigrants, domestic laborers, queer homeless...
Kakyoung Lee, Window Project / Kalia Brooks
Kakyoung Lee’s practice is centered on the observation of people’s movements in everyday life. She uses a process that combines drawing, animation and video projection to trace the nuance of human actions, and present them back to the public in the form of the moving...
Rejin Leys: PulpMobile / Kantara Souffrant
Wander down the streets of Jamaica, Queens and you’ll find Rejin Leys pushing her PulpMobile, a papermaking station on wheels. The location of the PulpMobile varies but seek and you will find it along the increasingly commercialized areas of Downtown Jamaica, Queens,...
Dandelion City: Observatoins of Shervone Neckles’ Wellness Cart / Bushra Rehman
I left Shervone Neckles’ Wellness Cart feeling, well… well. The sudden spring sunlight glowed outside, turning the cartoon-like blur of McDonalds, gold jewelers, and T-mobiles, into a backdrop for the glow happening inside me. I was hurrying to a train, but felt as if...
Jeffrey Allen Price / Juliana Driever
Jeffrey Allen Price’s processed-oriented work begins with the habit of collecting. Accumulations of objects and images, often the result of a years-long engagement with a singular concept, are the sources for the artist’s multi-faceted installations. Price’s material...
Dominique Sindayiganza / Sasha Dees
“Sindayiganza makes my favorite art of all, the kind that makes us question and check ourselves”. Sindayiganza has been a resident in Jamaica, Queens for exactly a decade. It is where he came of age as a professional photographer. He’s is a gangling easy going man...
Stan Squirewell / Seph Rodney
Stan Squirewell asked a seemingly simple question at the start of his project Flight of the Jamerican (2016), a series of vinyl cutouts strategically placed on the ground in the 165th Street Mall in Jamaica, Queens: “When you are not at home what gives you comfort?”....
Cruel Modernity: the Allegories of Lily and Honglei’s Shadow Play / Serena Jara
A smoggy window view looks outwards towards a bustling cityscape, where traffic, skyscrapers, and pedestrians disappear into the industrialized atmosphere. An inverted figure materializes from the haze, suspended midair. Free falling through dense smog, the body...
Inflato Dumpster, designed by John H. Locke and Joaquin Reyes / Paul Laster
Inflato Dumpster is an inflatable classroom installed inside a dumpster. Designed by architect John H. Locke and industrial engineer Joaquin Reyes through their organization the Department of Urban Betterment, the structure serves as an interactive installation for...
Flight Lines by Ellie Irons and Dan Phiffer / Heng-Gil Han
It was late summer last year when Ellie and Dan came out to JCAL and installed a tiny camera on the rooftop of the facility. The camera lens was placed to aim at the sky to record the celestial body. Any movements in this infinite space, such as clouds, birds, and...
The Six Labors of Woodham: An Epic Poem of Human Resources / Christine Licata
Labor I [Prologue]: Artist as Social Scientist (Sociologist) [Chorus] We find Woodham simultaneously at the beginning and the end of his journey in the laborhood of Jamaica, Queens. Originally named Yameco (beaver) by the Lenape, this commercial district has always...
How to Sell Nothing / Edward D. Miller
The installation ART&COM™ enacts a confrontation of two modes: contemporary artistic practice that advocates for an active audience and old-fashioned merchandising designed for the sale. While Thiago Szmrecsányi and Natalia de Campos set up shop in two vacant spaces...
A conversation between Aurora de Armendi and / Raquel De Anda
April 19th, 2016 Aurora, you are a multidisciplinary artist that has been working in the the format of the book for the past seven years. What is it that attracts you to the book as a medium of expression? The book has been one of the most important technological...
Adam Brent, Peaks and Valleys / Sarah Cascone
Taking on a public art commission is no small task. As a member of the New York City’s Department of Transportation Art Advisory Committee, Adam Brent thought he knew what he was getting into when a local community group, Jamaica Center BID, offered to make his...
hannes bend: metaNoYa / Jessica Holmes
Questioning how life can be made more fulfilling, and how humanity’s collective sense of compassion and love can be made more robust lies central to artist hannes bend’s practice. At the University of Oregon, where he has been both a visiting scholar since 2014 at the...
2010
Beyond Criticism and Arts of Postproduction
and Post-studio Practices / Heng-Gil Han
Led by Freddy, his close friend Dan came out to the Center the other day to see his friend’s paintings. I offered the both artists an exhibition tour. We saw Ilona’s street signs and we went to Jong Il’s exhilarating outdoor installation. Dan was amazed by the fact...
2007
Adaptation / Heather Hart
In art and in verbal communication, much ofthe meaning of a thing falls between the linesof description. Hermeneutics, the intendedmessage of the semantics one chooses, changefrom person to person, based on their perspectives.These gaps grow and narrow dependingon...
Visibility, transparency, diplomacy, security…
Notes on artistic experiments on the streets of Jamaica in 2007 / Aniko Erdosi
While organizing Jamaica Flux 2007, we encountered the terms of visibility, invisibility, and transparency conspicuously often. The words were used in regards to numerous practical aspects of the creation of the 25 art projects in different public or semi-public...
After Tilted Arc: Site Specificity in an Age of Enterprise Culture / Gregory Sholette
November 18, 2007 In a late text entitled Black as an Ideal, Theodor Adorno outlined the severe conditions artists would have to meet in order to endure the historical despair and bogus affirmation of popular culture. If works of art are to survive in the context of...
The Open Source Millennium
and the Artist in Public / Olu Oguibe
The difficult and contentious relationship between the American artist and the public is now a celebrated part of the history of contemporary art. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this often poisoned relationship has almost always been cast in a singular,...
Jamaica Flux and Art in the Public Realm
/ Juliana Driever
The neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens is a place defined by dualities. It is a locus of bustling commerce after a long period of economic decline; it is a neighborhood dangling on the New York City limits, though a major commercial and community center; it is a place of...
Regenerative Jamaica Flux
/ Heng-Gil Han
The 2007 Edition Jamaica Flux: Workspaces and Windows is an innovative, multi-dimensional, and perennial project. It involves an alternative, experimental exhibition of site-specific art, performance art events, educational seminars, and public discussions. The...
2004
A Conversation between Heng-Gil Han and Miwon Kwon
June 20, 2004 at Getty Research Institute Heng-Gil Han (HH): Before starting our conversation, I would like to give you a brief overview of Jamaica Flux. Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (JCAL) invited five curators who solicited proposals and selected...
GOD OR MAGIC OR THE CORPORATION OR THE GOVERNMENT / Sara Reisman
To explore the complex chain of relations that comprise Jamaica individually and institutionally, officially, and off the record is in part to explore who the intended—and conversely unintended—audience is for Jamaica Flux, or in broader terms, what, or who, is the...
A Conversation Between Omar Lopez-Chahound & Janet Barkan of the Jamaica Center Improvement Association
August 4, 2004 at 90-50 Parsons Blvd., Jamaica, New York Omar Lopez-Chahoud (OLC): As you know, Jamaica Flux is an exhibition that will take place at different sites throughout Jamaica Avenue, many of which are commercial spaces. What kind of impact do you think a...
Setting a Framework for the Intersection of Art and Life – An Interim Report of Jamaica Flux / Heng-Gil Han
“Is what I am proposing to do driven more by the prospect of increased attendance and sponsorship or more by a free artistic compass? Or can these be balanced without selling out?” – Maxwell L. Anderson, in: “The New Gatekeepers: Emerging Challenges to Free Expression...
Specificities: my adidas / Edwin Ramoran
Jamaica Flux is like hip-hop—that is, before it went really big. The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (JCAL) assembled a posse of independent curators—its agency—which in turn selected its message-providing emcees and writers, ebb-and-flow deejays, and fast and...
CONTEMPORARY URBAN PROVOCATEURS: The Art of Hank Willis Thomas & Roberto Visani / Melvin A. Marshall
The contemporary urban art among young African American artists focuses on the issues of African American male identity, as it relates to sexuality, power and spirituality. Hank Willis Thomas and Roberto Visani are two instances among many. Hank Willis Thomas'...
REFLECTIONS ON A FUTURE THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN / Christopher K. Ho
“American art lovers come with a built-in obsolescence” —Leo Steinberg, 1972 It is easier to criticize a show than to defend it, a truism from which Jamaica Flux is no less exempt for my own involvement in it. So I will start by anticipating two criticisms that might...