2016

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...

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...

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....

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...

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,...

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?”....

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...