In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, a group of retired New York City businessmen decided to create an international exposition to lift the city and the country out of despair. What resulted was the transformation of an ash heap into the site of the 1939 World’s Fair, and the creation of a small city of forward looking pavilions, incl...
Read more
In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, a group of retired New York City businessmen decided to create an international exposition to lift the city and the country out of despair. What resulted was the transformation of an ash heap into the site of the 1939 World’s Fair, and the creation of a small city of forward looking pavilions, including the New York City Pavilion, housed in the building that is now home to the Queens Museum.
Cutting the Blaze to New Frontiers marks the 70th anniversary of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. The project harkens back to its inspirational theme “the Dawn of a New Day” against the backdrop of today’s financial crisis. While the 1939-40 Fair was the largest of all time, the artist assembled a miniature fair in collaboration with a group of Queens youth of immigrant parents. Having never visited their parents’ countries of origin, the young participants imagined their own “motherland” as a national pavilion. Her mini-Fair reflects the increasingly complex cultural demographics of Queens and its inimitable vigor as the future of the nation. Zhang’s mural-size collage of the participants’ photographic portrait will serve as the U.S. pavilion. The installation of soaring angular structures and a glowing sphere are reminiscent of the Trylon and Perisphere, the signature monuments of the original World’s Fair. In this project, a re-imagined Westinghouse Time Capsule solicits exhibition visitors to write on a wooden chip what they do not wish for future generations. Inverting the capsule’s purpose, this collection of “non-wishes” will be burned at the end of the exhibition, rather than preserved. The exhibition’s title is the artist’s play on the 1939 World’s Fair DuPont Pavilion motto – Blazing the Trail to New Frontiers Through Chemistry.
O Zhang (b. 1976, Guangzhou, China) is a graduate of the Central Academy of Art in Beijing and the Royal College of Art in London and has been working and living primarily in New York since 2004. Her work explores and records political, economic, and cultural shifts in today’s globalizing world. Photographic subjects include: village girls as the least wanted population in contemporary China; American families who have adopted Chinese girls; and Beijing teens sporting mixed-language T-shirts that reflect the rapid transformations taking place in China.
Launch Pad is an ongoing series of site-specific and socially collaborative artist residencies and projects. This program is funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation.
