Richard Plunz and Damon Rich in Conversation

Richard Plunz and Damon Rich in conversation

Sunday, February 13, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm, 2011

In the shadow of the recent and ongoing housing crisis in the United States, the Queens Museum of Art will host a conversation between Richard Plunz, urbanist, designer and the Director of Urban Design Program at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, and Damon Rich, artist and urban designer for the City of Newark, New Jersey.

Both Plunz and Rich, known for their contributions in the larger discourse of urban planning and design, have works featured in exhibition“Structure has a Life with Personality:” Art about Architecture from the QMA collection (November 14-February 13, 2011).

At the Queens Museum, Plunz and Rich will engage in a wide-ranging intergenerational conversation touching on their research on the interplay between society and its living environments, the impacts of contemporary ways of life on the urban sphere, and the use of architectural models within gallery spaces.

Plunz’s New York Paleotectonic 1964 -95 (1995), a unique three-dimensional hanging graph made from building models removed from the Queens Museum’s Panorama of the City of New York, is on view at the QMA for the first time since 1996. In accordance with Plunz’s larger project, the piece suggests how changes in urban infrastructure register deeper social and economic change.

Rich’s solo exhibition Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Centerwas on view at the Queens Museum of Art May 31-September 27, 2009. Two works from this exhibition, recently acquired by the Museum, are on view in the current exhibition: Real Estate Sitesconsists of photographic documentation of mortgage brokerages, viewed as “buildings that manage the buying and selling of other buildings,” and Mortgage Stakeholders, a 47-minute video staging a fictional conversation between bankers, regulators, architects, investors, and financial justice advocates.