Past Exhibitions
Dani C Song
Prayer Cocoon: PPE in the New Era
Date of exhibition: August 2023
Sewing, a fundamental labor associated with sheltering and nesting, symbolizes the primal act of constructing a safe haven. While architectural dwellings provide stable and stationary shelter, textiles have historically served as materials for nomadic shelters and protective coverings. In Song's recent textile artworks and accompanying performance, she delved into the contemporary meaning of "protection and shelter in the post-COVID era.”
As a cultural transplant and child of immigrant parents, Song recognizes the importance of acknowledging both the fear caused by the pandemic, and the pervasive pandemic affecting the world. Physical barriers and social distancing have simultaneously protected and isolated individuals, prompting a collective reconsideration of what it means to stay safe, both mind and body.
Dani Changah Song is a Queens-based interdisciplinary artist. Born in Seoul Korea, she moved to the United States with her family when she was a teen. Song’s works explore issues of identity, cultural narratives & myths, and the underlying structures within those myths.
Herb Bardavid
Photographs of Downtown Flushing
Date of exhibition: May 2023
As Herb Bardavid notes, Flushing has been home to immigrant families and a thriving center of business and community life for several centuries. The Voelker Orth Museum is less than a mile away from the heart of Flushing’s downtown center–even 125 years ago, the energy, resources and bounty held a magnetic appeal. Like the Voelker-Orths, Herb Bardavid had family ties to Flushing.
These photographs depict an abundance of goods and people in a lively mix of social and business transactions. Emerging from 3 years of reduced social contact and so many challenges, delight with us in these images of community life. And, spend some time in Flushing!
Bardavid’s photographs have been exhibited in the Third Eye Gallery and Umbrella Arts in NYC, the Long Island Center for Photography, the African American Museum in Hempstead in addition to venues in Massachusetts and Spain. He has been published in the WBAI Folio, the Gotham Gazette, and PDN Photo Magazine and reported on at NBC digital News, CBS News in NYC and the Epoch Times.
Huey-Min Chuang
You Are Welcome Here
Date of exhibition: February - April 2023
You Are Welcome Here was an invitation to be idle a little while, to wander among bursting colors, to greet new faces, to feel the body transported to a place and time of warmth and play, and to sit back soaking up the morning light and the afternoon delight. Feeling welcomed is a contagious joy, a taste of the familiar, an open embrace, a sensual smell of home, and a tender knowing of belonging. It brings us to that core foundation that “you are loved”, no matter who you are, where you have been, or why you are here. The world is a wondrous place, and there is always a place for you and me.
Ms. Huey-Min Chuang is a self-taught artist born in Taiwan, lived in Argentina, educated in Germany, Spain, and the U.S.A. She currently works and resides in Brooklyn, NY. She began to draw and paint at 48 years old during the height of the pandemic with her desire to celebrate her mom’s tenth anniversary in the cosmic ether during the darkest days of NYC. When words no longer expressed what her soul and heart felt, she began to draw with a black Sharpie. The act of sharing these works with her family became a ritual of comfort.
Her works have been exhibited with Governors' Island TAAC House, QCC Museum,the Marin Contemporary Art Museum, Long Island City Cultural Labs, Watercolor Society of Rhode Island, Trolley Barn Gallery, 6th Louisiana Biennial Show, SAMA Altoona, and other venues.
Helaine Soller
Growing Up In Queens: Landscapes and Memories
Date of exhibition: August - October 2022
Landscapes and Memories presented by the Voelker Orth Museum draws inspiration from the Museum’s Victorian Garden in a series of plein air landscape paintings and from scenes of people at leisure activities centered around Kissena Park Lake. They are landmarks in Queens and reminiscent of the artist’s Queens roots. Rarely does the Museum have the opportunity to exhibit works by an artist with so long and full a body of work grounded in Flushing’s surroundings. This exhibition focused on recent works. In Soller’s plein air paintings we sense the immediacy of a moment in time, delivered in swift brush strokes of color and line revealing patterns of light and shade falling on flowers and it’s surround in a garden on a summer's day.
Helaine Soller’s career path was set at ten years of age when she first studied oil painting with a president of the National Art League. Subsequently, Soller earned a BFA in Advertising Design from Pratt Institute and an MS in Art Education at Queens College. She attended art residencies in Upstate New York, and her travels to National Parks informed her work. This was Helaine Soller’s 25th solo exhibit. Her paintings have been in over 200 exhibits nationally and internationally.
Amy Cheng
Exhibition name: Spheres and Sinospheres
Date of exhibition: May- July 2022
Amy Cheng took us into her “worlds within worlds” through circles, spheres, dots, flowers, even children’s balls. She shows us overlays of life and activity, earthly and cosmic at the same time. Children play, as in Before We were Young (2007), rural folk gather harvest, and travel in their boats and along roads on simple journeys, surrounded by cosmic circles. Figures are small, glowing, reflecting, nearly dissolving into the patterns of the ambient life and stars, surrounded by the smoldering colors of sunsets, moonlight, and night skies--all of nature is living patterns of shapes, strokes, and dots.
The work is both the artist’s own consciousness and the whole of nature, at the same time. The artist seeks and finds her subject and responds to its living presence, setting down her musings and resonances. The painting is filled with living strokes, colors, shapes, and images vibrating with life.
Cheng also responds to the traditional Chinese landscape sense of scale—humans are miniscule and nature is large. As Cheng says, “the human is just a speck in the universe—and not the biggest speck.” This contrasts with our Western focus on the human as the measure and center of all things.
Guest Curator: Sara Henry
Alexander Meshibovsky
Nature Beckons: Landscape Photographs
Date of exhibition: January - March 2020
The landscape photographs of Alexander Meshibovsky almost magically reconnect us to the natural world. A violinist and photographer, Mr.Meshibovsky approaches each artistic form with a nuanced interpretation and technique. He finds correspondences between moods, textures, and tones of musical compositions when creating photographic works of art. Alexander Meshibovsky ventures out with his camera to capture the beauty of local landscapes, beckoning us to explore the natural world nearby.
Voelker Orth Museum came to know Alexander Meshibovsky as a violinist in the Con Brio Ensemble, and later learned about his work as a visual artist.The concert violinist who is passionately moved by music comes as no surprise. But surprising to this violinist himself is the degree that he is also drawn to photography. In pondering this, his somewhat surprising revelation is that the two disciplines are quite intimately related. Both rely on nuances of story, form, shading and time to synthesize and form a singular work.
Meshibovsky earlier exhibited a group of photographs of Long Island’s Gold Coast, Image and Sound in 2013.
Linda Rose Rettich
Moments
Date of exhibition: September- December 2019
Linda Rose Rettich is an artist. She designs, paints, prints, sews, embroiders, and collages to accomplish all that she does. “Building an object with tiny beads is an intense activity”, states Rettich. The process demands close scrutiny, constant decision-making, flexibility, innovation, and time.
Starting from a concept all past experiences become available in the moment of making. Often times she chooses techniques appropriate for the piece she’s contemplating, I gather tools and other materials, and, most important, select beads that will inspire the work. Rettich loves working with the smallest of beads to create textile-like patterns, color progressions, textures, and tiny details within larger shapes.
Irene Buszko
Flowering Trees of Victorian Richmond Hill
Date of exhibition: April- June 2019
As the Voelker Orth Museum’s garden comes into spring bloom we are delighted to offer an exhibition of paintings by Irene Buszko showcasing a group of her Richmond Hill paintings, created from the 1980s onward. The late 19th—early 20th century in Queens saw the transformation of much of the landscape from farmland and estates to early suburban communities of single family houses with home gardens and street trees, a blending of Victorian architectural and horticultural flourishes associated with the Gilded Age. The seasonal palette and beauty of the trees and plantings that grace the individual homes represented here is essential to the sense of place.
Irene Buszko grew up in Richmond Hill, Queens, where the pictures in the present exhibition were painted.
The artist received a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA in painting from Queens College. Based for many years in downtown Manhattan, Buszko is one of a group of artists leading a resurgence of interest in figurative art. She paints landscape from direct observation of nature. Buszko works in a strict plein-air tradition, following a line in American landscape painting that reaches back into the eighteenth century. The Queens Museum presented a large show of the Richmond Hill paintings in 1986.
Guest Curator: Janet Schneider
JungOck Chang
Minhwa- Colorful Paintings with Many Secrets
Date of exhibition: September - November, 2018
Minhwa literally means painting of the people or popular painting. It is an art that found its way into people’s homes, marking special events and important stages of life. Following Minhwa’s long pictorial tradition, Ms. Chang followed the techniques and imagery from the art-form that developed over several hundred years.
The paintings work on a number of levels. They reflected a number of traditional subjects— animals, birds and flowers, calligraphy and scholar’s accoutrements. There is potent meaning in the images using symbolism known by the art collectors and anyone who has studied the form, adding another dimension to the work.
Mrs. JungOck Chang is a former New York City public school teacher, who retired after 27 years of teaching. For six years, she received instruction from Ms. SungMin Ahn, a professional artist in New York, and has continued to practice and develop her skills and artistry. At the age 70, she felt fulfillment and joy in Minhwa by sharing her paintings with others who are interested in Minhwa and by introducing Minhwa to the broader community who may not have knowledge of the style of the art. Her paintings draw on traditional Korean artwork and was commonly used by many artists as a model to develop their own artistry.
Elizabeth Korn (1900-1979):
Her American Half Life
Date of exhibition: September - April 2017
The Voelker Orth Museum presented mixed media assemblages and works on paper from the last two decades of life by the German-born artist Elizabeth P. Korn. Korn, who had studied art in Germany before fleeing with her husband, continued as a painter and illustrator after settling in New Jersey. By the mid-1960s she turned to a distinct style that incorporated images from classical antiquity in structurally complex, often three-dimensional forms. These inhabit a space between abstraction and representation, located also in the interstices between painting and sculpture. They live in the past, present, and future, referring to the earliest Greek sculptures and music of the Beatles.
Elizabeth Korn fled Germany in 1939, entered the USA via Mexico, then settled in New Jersey and died in New Jersey in 1997. She studied at the Institute of Fine & Applied Arts, University of Breslau; masterclass with Emil Orlik (painter, etcher and lithographer), at the Museum of Fine & Applied Arts, Berlin; and also studied: Rome, Italy & Madrid, Spain. She was the first finearts faculty member at Drew University in New Jersey.
Guest Curator: Larry Qualls
Carlos L. Esguerra
Essence of Queens
Date of exhibition: February - May 2016
This exhibition grew out of the artist's response to the article he saw in Fodor's Travel magazine in June 2015, "Why Queens Is the NYC Borough You Can No Longer Ignore". Esguerra's goal was to go beyond the 'pretty picture' level in creating the images of our landmarks as well as Queens enclaves of cultural diversity and to make powerful images of our built and natural environment.
Carlos Esguerra was born in the Philippines, and was in the computer field for 36 years as a programmer analyst for IBM Corporation in White Plains, NY, and later as founder and president of CLÉ Systèmes, Inc. for 12 years. He re-discovered photography before retiring in 2003.
His landscape and fine arts photography work has received more than 60 national and international awards, and has been exhibited both in the U.S. and abroad. In 2008, he received the 'Pamana ng Pilipino' (Philippine Heritage) Presidential Award, the highest award given by the President of the Philippines to overseas Filipinos who excel in their fields of expertise. The was the first exhibition at the museum.
A group of his Lotus and Lily photographs were exhibited in 2024 at the Museum.
Dora Sofia Caputo
Summer Glory: Indoors and Out
Date of exhibition: July - October 2016
Visitors to the Voelker Orth discovered that dahlias come in a spectacular array of colors and sizes, from showy "dinner plates" to slender singles. The exhibition focused on two versatile flowers that are native to North America: dahlias and sunflowers. Both can be found in bloom in the Museum's garden into autumn. Native to Mexico, these herbaceous perennials were noted in sixteenth-century Spanish reports sent back to Europe.
Dora Sofia Caputo is a Queens-based photographer with a passion for capturing the beauty of nature and its surroundings. She studied photography at Queensborough Community College in New York and is a member of the United Nations Photographic Society, where she has exhibited her work on numerous occasions. She participated in group exhibits of the Great Neck Camera Club (GNCC) in Great Neck, N.Y, the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park, N.Y., the National Art League. She is a member of the Photographic Society of America.
This is the second collection of floral art by Ms. Caputo shown at the Museum. Past exhibition was titled: Visions of Spring- Glimpses of Summer, 2009.
Marna Chester
Paper Aviary
Date of exhibition: July - September 2015
Marna Chester says of her newest work, “The idea is that each bird is quite unique in appearance and gesture, yet they are like a family–feeding off the same core/nest. The birds are both in fight and flight mode, and also experiencing a range of feelings and objectives. Like people in real life.” In starting the piece, Ms. Chester initially thought of it as Survival of the Fittest, changing the title as her work progressed. She envisioned exhibiting the sculpture with a black backdrop. If one takes a moment to listen, it is possible to hear the songs and clatter of the birds in the garden.
Marna spent time in a paper-making studio in rural Ecuador, and traveled to cigar shops in Hong Kong where she reformatted Cuban cigar boxes into books. She is passionate about working with recycled and natural materials. Her paper installations have been featured through multiple seasons in Bergdorf Goodman's window displays. She holds a BFA from Alfred University, and an MPS from Pratt Institute.
Christine Yost
Reigning Cats and Dogs
Date of exhibition: September - November 2015
For Christine Yost, the campaign is waged using as a chosen subject animals, sometimes accompanied by people, in often mysteriously anodyne settings. Yost’s work is poised between whimsy and gravity, reflecting a depth of feeling and character that sets her apart from so many artists in this demanding medium. Her technique brings mystery to life. She captures the ephemeral moment with feathery brushstrokes and delicate lines over broad swaths of color, evoking, alternately, feelings of endless freedom and confinement, perhaps allowing the view a moment of release from the enclosing barricades—structural, linguistic, psychological—that constrict us.
Christine Yost began her art studies at the Fiorello LaGuardia High School of Music and Art in Manhattan then continued painting throughout a varied business career, including a number of years working for the Environmental Protection Agency on issues affecting the tribal lands of Native American groups. Throughout her working life, she continued her experiments in painting, with an emphasis for the past few years on watercolor. Works in various media are in a number of major private collections in the United States and Europe. This was her first museum show in New York.
Guest Curator: Larry Qualls