Selections from “Crossing the BLVD:
Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America”

February 10 - April 6, 2011

Created by EarSay artists Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan
Presented in collaboration with The Center for Migration and the Global City, Rutgers University – Newark

At a time when immigration issues and policy are being hotly debated throughout the nation, this exhibition shares the stories, sounds, and images that reveal the human toll of a cold- and post-cold war-world, and pre- and post-9/11 world. Crossing the BLVD forms a portrait of a paradoxical and ever-shifting America. It intimately portrays the lives of new immigrants and refugees living in Queens, NY, a modern-day Ellis Island where cultures overlap in a choreography of chaotic co-existence. For three years Lehrer and Sloan traveled the world by trekking the streets of their home borough in search of migration stories and a deeper connection to their
diverse community.

A project of EarSay, Inc., the “Crossing the BLVD” exhibition was originally commissioned by the Queens Museum of Art with support from The Ford Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Queens Council on the Arts. The four-year Crossing multimedia project received support from: The Rockefeller Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, New York Foundation on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, a V-Day Award.