POOLTIME is a public artwork by artists Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong and Dev Harlan. In conjunction with NYC Parks, the pavilion has been installed at the north end of Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and will be exhibited until summer 2020. POOLTIME is a public pavilion and series of community programming centered around the rich history of the Park as a site for the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. POOLTIME activates an underused public space and aims to discuss the World’s Fair structures and their architectural lives and meaning post-exhibition.
This public art pavilion pays homage to the historic Aquacade aquatic amphitheater constructed for the 1939 World’s Fair, whose structures transformed Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The amphitheater was reused and activated during the 1964 World’s Fair held in New York. Now demolished and largely forgotten, the Aquacade aquatic amphitheater was a large community hub and heart of the park even decades after many of the other World’s Fair attractions had fallen into decay and disuse. We are interested in drawing awareness to this neglected moment in the FMC Park’s history and understanding the Aquacade’s social and spatial impact, after the conclusion of the World’s Fair, as more than just an architectural relic. We are interested in the pool’s history as a vibrant site for working-class families to convene, the pool as social hub, and the pool as a carved human intervention adjacent to Meadow Lake.
POOLTIME is a dynamic, ever-changing sculpture that aims to revive the concept of the Pool as social hub by creating the experience of being in (or under, in this case) the water of the pool.
This project is made possible with funds from the Decentralization Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered by the Queens Council on the Arts.
With support from the Parks Build Healthy Communities Grant, led by Partnerships for Parks and made possible by Building Healthy Communities, an initiative of the Mayor’s Office and the Fund for Public Health NYC.
For more information visit the project site here.
