Gregg Bordowitz on “The Conference of the Animals”
Ulrike Müller,
The Conference of the Animals (A Mural), 2020, latex paint. Installation view, Queens Museum, New York. Photo: Hai Zhang.
I GREW UP IN QUEENS about twenty minutes from Flushing Meadows Park, the site of the 1964 New York World’s Fair and the home of the Queens Museum, where “The Conference of the Animals” opened last September—an exhibition of a forty-five-foot wall mural by artist Ulrike Müller and of children’s drawings selected by independent curator Amy Zion. The Unisphere, an enormous steel globe visible through the glass doors and windows of the museum’s lobby, was an abiding feature of my childhood landscape, glimpsed through the windows of cars and buses and visited regularly. Conceived as an ornament of the exposition, the sphere, according to the New York City Parks Department,