Limited visibility and geographic isolation are common hurdles for many artists residing in the New York City borough of Queens, in part due to the prevalence of transit deserts — areas with insufficient public transportation — which hinders inter-community engagement. It’s one of the main challenges identified by the Queens Cultural Mapping Initiative, a year-long research project exploring the strengths, needs, and barriers affecting the area’s arts and culture landscape.
Led by the arts services team at Flushing Town Hall (FTH) in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the initiative involved town hall meetings, a community survey, and more than 150 one-on-one interviews with individual artists and organizations across the borough — many of whom are spotlighted in a new borough-wide digital map released last week.
Created by map designers Nolen Phya and Oussama Ouadani, the platform pinpoints a plethora of multidisciplinary artist studios, galleries, community gardens, museums, and other cultural spaces, from the SculptureCenter in Long Island City to the Rockaway Artists Alliance, in an effort to foster cross-borough connections.
Phya told Hyperallergic that his own experience growing up in the southwestern Queens neighborhood of Ozone Park had a big influence on his understanding of the borough’s transit inequities.
“To even come to a place like Flushing Town Hall, there is no direct train line. You have to take multiple buses to even make it here,” Phya said. “So just thinking about that commute alone, my accessibility to the arts is quite limited.”
“Day of the Dead” altar at the Queens Museum
Aside from connecting groups geographically, the map was also created in response to the need for a centralized arts and culture resource, sorely lacking since the Queens Council on the Arts took a year-long hiatus to “restructure and rebuild” in 2022, only to then merge with the Variety Boys and Girls Club of Queens in Astoria in 2024.
“[It’s] left a big gap in advocacy, strategic planning, and resource coordination, and having a unified voice,” said Natalie Bedon, the initiative’s project manager, during FTH’s monthly artist meet-up last week.
“ The grants that the council previously administered are now handled by Flushing Town Hall and the New York Foundation for the Arts in Manhattan, which has also caused some confusion about where to apply,” Bedon said, emphasizing the need for dedicated hubs like the new digital map.
In addition to the map, which users can add locations to using an online application form, FTH is slated to release a comprehensive report on its findings from the cultural mapping initiative next month.
For the project, Bedon told Hyperallergic that she worked with collaborator Amara Thomas to prioritize areas that have not received the same attention for their arts and cultural offerings, unlike Long Island City and Jackson Heights, which have become hotspots for galleries and artist studios.
“People often forget about places like the Rockaways and Southeast Queens, and that’s something we really wanted to bring attention to,” Bedon said.
Among the map’s highlighted sites are the eco-centric art center Buena Onda Collective in Rockaway; the World’s Borough Bookshop in Jackson Heights; community cultural organizations like Centro Corona and Un Colectivo Recuerda, which operate out of the same space in Corona; and Allure Art Academy, a new arts education hub in St. Albans founded by artist Amy Simon that is slated to open in mid-October.
Simon told Hyperallergic that she hopes the map initiative will help expand job opportunities for artists in the borough.
“I would love to see a section for people looking for work, looking for volunteer opportunities, looking for spaces,” Simon said. “It could be like an interchangeable thing where it’s not just you seeking out the venues, but venues also being able to seek out help.”
Overall, Simon said she’s mostly looking forward to learning more about the work happening in her neighborhood. “I hope to just connect with artists who do different forms of art,” Simon said.
