Sam Felix is a civil rights lawyer from Cambria Heights who paints when she\u2019s not litigating, and she intended for her warmly colored, Diego Rivera-esque depiction of a Q110 bus to appear inside the new terminal at JFK Airport, part of its call for artists to respond to the endless concrete world around the city\u2019s busiest airport.<\/p>\n
But fate instead took her stirringly titled \u201cHurry Up! You\u2019re Gonna Miss The Bus\u201d to the walls of a public library, right above the fiction collection, and two blocks down the street from her home. It\u2019s JFK\u2019s loss.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m happier that it\u2019s here with everyone else\u2019s art from the community,\u201d Felix told the Chronicle at the opening, last weekend, of \u201cExpress Freely,\u201d the second show in as many years put on by Marissa Lowe, a painter and art consultant, and lifelong Cambria Heights-resident.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to paint the Q110, because it felt like it represented what life is like over here in Southeast Queens,\u201d said Felix.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe trains don\u2019t go out that far, so we\u2019ve often just got to take the bus,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The painting, taken up by the familiar white and blue length of an MTA bus, is a small mural of cultural observation, from the exaggerated, wide-eyed faces in the windows to the soaring jet plane above.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s now among the 48 paintings Lowe selected for her second show at the Cambria Heights branch of the Queens Public Library, which will remain installed above the bookshelves until Sept. 30.<\/p>\n
In their way, the paintings complement the library\u2019s permanent art collection, namely \u201cAll the Things You Are,\u201d a series of 55 birch panels that hang over the children\u2019s section, the work of Barbara Ellmann, an artist who works at the Whitney and whose abstractions have also been commissioned by the MTA and the city of Summit, NJ.<\/p>\n
The juxtaposition is moving.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a chance to show artists who don\u2019t get to see their work in a gallery in Manhattan,\u201d said Danielle Robinson, one of the librarians at Cambria Heights.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsually when you go to a gallery in Chelsea or the Lower East Side, it\u2019s usually drawing in a lot of Euro-centric people, and that art is inaccessible in neighborhoods like mine,\u201d said Lowe. \u201cThis gives our community an equal chance to just see great art by people who look just like them.\u201d<\/p>\n
What unifies Lowe\u2019s show is not so much a shared visual language, as a shared ethnography; a presentation of the city\u2019s Black diaspora and the way it stretches from the Bronx down to South Brooklyn and Queens.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the subject of a trio of paintings by Aaron Brown, \u201cborn into the foster care system\u201d in East New York, as a line in his bio reads.<\/p>\n
\u201cEach of these paintings represent a different part of that diaspora,\u201d Brown told the Chronicle, before breaking down their rich symbolic register at great length.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re the first person to say it\u2019s Basquiat,\u201d Lowe said, with a smile, pointing at another painting she selected, a canvas by the Bronx painter Rafael Caraballo, a riff on the \u201980s painter\u2019s signature style, but now imaginatively adorning a dinosaur.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone just says its Jay-Z,\u201d Lowe said with a smile.<\/p>\n
But its an easy mistake to make. The other month, Caraballo had just been commissioned to personalize a few baseball bats for the rapper\u2019s shows at Yankee Stadium. But the dinosaur, that\u2019s all Caraballo<\/p>\n
\u201cI chose that because that\u2019s Reptar, from the \u2018Rugrats,\u2019\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n
Lowe\u2019s own paintings \u2014 some four of which appear in the show \u2014 are part of that same language too, depicting various pop culture symbols, from the rapper J. Cole to late Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant to a version of Wonder Woman that she modeled off herself.<\/p>\n
Everyone has their idols. Lowe says she\u2019s going to be working on a painting of the victorious Knicks next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Felix is a civil rights lawyer from Cambria Heights who paints when she\u2019s not litigating, and she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4982,19034,118983,118982,9,24,63,37187,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-315376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-arts","tag-cambria-heights","tag-cambria-heights-library","tag-marissa-lowe","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-qpl","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}