This is a guest post by Nancy Groce, Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center.
When the New York City-based non-profit cultural organization Los Herederos received an AFC 2023 Community Collections Grant (CCG) for their project “Queens as Cultural Crossroads: Contemporary Cultural Documentation of Jackson Heights Diversity Plaza,” we expected them to innovative, but when they used their supplementary CCG Public Programs funds to open an exhibit on the project in a NYC subway station – well, we were totally impressed!
More information on their “Queens as Cultural Crossroads” project will be posted soon, but right now, please join us in congratulating Naomi Sturm, Mauricio Bayona, and everyone at Los Herederos on launching an exhibit with space for interviewing and community radio broadcasting in the busy Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street Street subway station.
What else is in the exhibit, you might ask? Well, for an great article on the July 25th exhibit opening, by veteran WNYC reporter Arun Venugopal, visit: https://gothamist.com/news/in-the-depths-of-the-jackson-heights-subway-station-a-cultural-center-emerges.
One final note: the Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue/74th Street Station is one of the busiest in the NYC subway system. It serves tens of thousands of riders each day and is also the main transit hub for buses and trains to Kennedy and LaGuardia airports, making it the first stop in America – and the modern equivalent to Ellis Island – for many newly arriving immigrants. We couldn’t think of a better site for a Library-supported exhibit on community, memory, and stories.