“Bringing the World into the World” Exhibition
Queens Museum of Art
This event has ended.
Bringing the World into the World is an exhibition exploring the physical and intellectual experiences of the act of seeing. The show is inspired by the largest object in the Queens Museum’s collection, the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,355 square foot scale model of the metropolis commissioned by master builder Robert Moses (1888-1981) for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. At its 50th anniversary, the Panorama remains the world’s largest and most comprehensive model of an urban environment. Throughout its existence, it has continually served as a departing point for many artistic interventions addressing cinema, surveillance, mass media, memory, city planning, and urban spectacle. Recapturing the allure and the wide-eyed amazement triggered by this historical artifact, Bringing the World into the World also revisits the historical panorama—the crowd-pleasing spectacle of a 360-degree circular painting—and its concepts and roles in the development of 19th century visual culture. Taking its title from a series of works by Alghiero e Boetti (1940-1994), Mettere al mondo il mondo (“Put the World Into the World”), the exhibition adopts Boetti’s vision that art and the world contain, and are contained by each other. To that end, Bringing the World into the World showcases a diverse body of works exploring the formal and conceptual principles of panoramas as devices of wonder and the many ways in which we see, imagine, and comprehend worlds both familiar and unfamiliar.
Bringing the World into the World is organized by Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions and Curator at the Queens Museum. Blagovesta Momchedjikova, Ph.D., acts as a consultant for the exhibition and editor for the accompanying publication, An Incomplete Visitor’s Guide to Panoramas, a mini-encyclopedia of ideas, artists and their work, and historical facts that are relevant to visual representation today.
Media
Schedule
from June 14, 2014 to October 11, 2014