Culture Shock – City Budget Cuts Decimate Staffs, Programming At Queens’ Top Arts And Cultural Institutions

Last month, when the mayor asked the City to cut budgets across the board, he asked that the Department of Cultural Affairs cut 2.5 percent from the current fiscal year and another 5-12 percent in the next one. The $11 million in immediate savings would be a drop in the bucket to offset the City’s [...]

Flushing Town Hall Removes Its Director

Less than three years since he took the helm of one of the borough premiere cultural institutions, Flushing Town Hall’s Executive and Artistic Director Harvey Seifter has been let go by the Board of Directors. The sudden move came Tuesday, Nov. 7, just 11 days after the Oct. 27 death of Lucy Nunziato, who served [...]

Focused On Tomorrow – Museum Expansion Goes Out To Bid As Director Plans For Site’s Future

The $50 million expansion of the Queens Museum of Art has gone to bid – for the second time in the last year, and the museum’s executive director is confident that this time, the project is ready to begin. “When we went out to bid six months ago, many people called it the most difficult [...]

Playwright takes tips from boro denizens to craft dramas

From a two-family home in Maspeth where he grew up to the apartment he has called home for two decades along the Flushing/Bayside border, Richard Vetere is a Queens guy through and through. And in case you couldn’t tell he was from this borough just by his attitude and accent, perhaps you could check out [...]

The view from Flushing Town Hall

Harvey Seifter loves coming to work every day. “This is an extraordinary community and it has been wonderful for me,” he said, sitting in the executive director’s office of Flushing Council on Culture and the Arts at Flushing Town Hall. “I have come to feel at home here very quickly. Every day that I come [...]

History in the making

One of the most celebrated arts institutions in Queens is joining forces with the most popular national museum to create a partnership that can only mean one thing – excellent entertainment right in our own backyard. Flushing Town Hall will kick off its partnership with the Smithsonian Institution Monday with “Smithsonian Day.” An official ceremony [...]

A window on immigration

The transition people experience when moving from one town, city or state to another is often overwhelming. That shift in ones life is even more severe when relocating to a new country, speaking a new language and trying to fit in to a new culture while being sure to retain some sense of self and [...]

Simon and Garfunkel plan reunion tour for boro duo

The on-again, off-again rocky relationship that has been a fixture in the entertainment world is back on: The Queens-raised duo of Simon and Garfunkel will reunite for a tour. At a news conference in Manhattan, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel told the crowd that there will be a reunion tour, their first since the duo [...]

Film history in Astoria – AMMI celebrates 15 years

Some of the greatest films in the history of the moving image have been set in New York. From “The Godfather” and “Annie Hall” to “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “West Side Story,” New York has been the backdrop of some of filmdom’s most stunning tales. More importantly for Queens, some of the [...]

Determining Direction – Queens Museum of Art’s executive director has vision

At the opening of the Salvador Dali “Dreams of Venus” exhibit at the Queens Museum of Art in June, Executive Director Tom Finkelpearl, who has headed the museum for about a year, was beaming with excitement. The Dali exhibit is only the latest one that highlights the cultural and ethnic diversity of Queens. Press representatives [...]