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,
he did leave some pretty impressive damn works behind, though, like the triborough bridge, flushing meadows park, the verrazano bridge eh. the bronx happens to be the home of the two largest parks in new york city pelham bay and van cortlandt, and you see stuff here you probably ain t seeing in central park. the garifuna come from honduras, guatemala, and belize, and they trace their ethnic group back to a single slave ship that crashed off st. vincent, and whose freed africans then mixed with carib-indians. where is home for many of the garifuna community living in the u.s.? you guessed it, the bronx. baron ambrosia: living in the bronx you re able to, kind of, travel the world without leaving the borough. anthony: right. baron ambrosia: and, you know, it s like an addiction. when you go to another country, and that first day in the market anthony: yeah. baron ambrosia: and all your dreams, and you smell the diesel, and you re just looking around you re like, where
was two, uh, wars. you would never know those things because it s not reflected in the music. and, at some point somebody was supposed to step up and make those songs. twenty years from now they ll still be talking about the message and planet rock and all the classic records. you know what i mean? so that s what it is. anthony: robert moses has been dead over 30 years now. and people in the bronx, for the most part, still hate him. in his role as master builder he ran the cross bronx expressway and the parkway system straight through dozens of working-class neighborhoods, seemingly uncaring about the destruction of whole communities. massive housing projects conceived as utopian solutions to stacking the poor into centralized vertical ghettos were also his bright idea. he did leave some pretty impressive damn works behind, though, like the triborough bridge, flushing meadows park, the verrazano bridge eh. the bronx happens to be the home
message and planet rock and all the classic records. you know what i mean? so that s what it is. anthony: robert moses has been dead over 30 years now. and people in the bronx, for the most part, still hate him. in his role as master builder he ran the cross bronx expressway and the parkway system straight through dozens of working-class neighborhoods, seemingly uncaring about the destruction of whole communities. massive housing projects conceived as utopian solutions to stacking the poor into centralized vertical ghettos were also his bright idea. he did leave some pretty impressive damn works behind, though, like the triborough bridge, flushing meadows park, the verrazano bridge eh. the bronx happens to be the home of the two largest parks in new york city pelham bay and van
you know what i mean? so that s what it is. anthony: robert moses has been dead over 30 years now. and people in the bronx, for the most part, still hate him. in his role as master builder he ran the cross bronx expressway and the parkway system straight through dozens of working-class neighborhoods, seemingly uncaring about the destruction of whole communities. massive housing projects conceived as utopian solutions to stacking the poor into centralized vertical ghettos were also his bright idea. he did leave some pretty impressive damn works behind, though, like the triborough bridge, flushing meadows park, the verrazano bridge eh. the bronx happens to be the home of the two largest parks in new york city pelham bay and van cortlandt, and you see stuff