Queens College Art Exhibition Explores Environmental Issues

FLUSHING, QUEENS — A new art exhibition at Queens College will look back as far as ancient times to shed light on today's most pressing environmental issues.

"Hope is the Thing with Feathers: Art of the Natural World," which opens Thursday at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum in Flushing, considers modern-day environmental crises by exploring the relationship between nature and art from ancient to contemporary times. The exhibition's name borrows from the poem "Hope is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickinson.

The 130-plus works on display will include Egyptian antiquities that hint at the relationships between humans and animal gods, pre-Columbian feathered textiles once thought to imbue the wearer with animal spirits, late medieval prints, and surrealist works by René Magritte and Max Ernst meant to challenge viewers' conceptions of the natural world.

The exhibition will also feature Dutch landscape paintings, Japanese ukiyo-e prints, 20th-century photography and selections from a 1985 limited-edition folio of John James Audubon’s Birds of America series.

"Like a modern-day Wunderkammer (cabinet of treasures), the exhibition aims to compare—over millennia and cultural boundaries—artifacts of faith and fantasy, documentation and representation," Louise Weinberg, an artist and the show's curator, said. "By examining the past, hopefully we will learn to change our future."

The exhibition opens April 11 with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The Godwin-Ternbach Museum is located in 405 Klapper Hall at Queens College in Flushing.

For more information, visit www.gtmuseum.org.