Marlee Wollman

Hundreds of residents delighted in the lively atmosphere at the Queens County Farm Museum in Floral Park Tuesday evening for the NYPD 105th Precinct’s annual National Night Out celebration. Families enjoyed carnival rides, music, barbecue and an evening focused on strengthening relationships between police officers and the citizens they serve.

Isamu Noguchi’s relationship with New York City, and specifically Queens, was fundamental as well as compensatory. As an artist whose transnationalism shaped his identity profoundly, the sculptor found that settling in the city ultimately provided him a place he could not only belong to, but also engage with, integrating and shaping the environment he proudly inhabited. Noguchi believed that art should not only be viewed, but rather experienced bodily and socially.

What counts as American anyway, and who gets to decide? “The American Imaginary” refuses to settle this quandary at the Queens Museum. Instead, the question cycles through resistance, uneasily at first, before crystallizing tenderly via generationally drifting media. Christina Chan, Annette Parkins and Carlos David Trujillo, each with deep ties to Queens, shaped the exhibition not as any final verdict but rather an outwardly building dialogue.