Lefferts Boulevard Bridge Transformed Into Outdoor Art Gallery

KEW GARDENS, QUEENS — Two Kew Gardens residents striving to lift their neighbors' spirits during the coronavirus pandemic have transformed the neighborhood's shuttered storefronts into a makeshift gallery.

The gray roll-down gates of the closed businesses lining the Lefferts Boulevard bridge are now adorned with the work of nearly 60 Kew Gardens artists — the youngest among them making their gallery debut at just 4 years old.

Coordinators Carol Lacks and Tony Mavilia said they put together the exhibit, entitled "Here, There and Everywhere: Artists of Kew Gardens," to create community and showcase the artistic talents of their neighbors at a time when many are struggling.

"How do you cultivate hope and strength, remain positive and affirming, when everything around you seems to point in the opposite direction?" Lacks and Mavilia's exhibition description reads. "This is when artists step in to remind people of the beauty of the world, its strangeness and its transience, the power of imagination and experience to shape sensibility and response, to provide respite and hope."

The exhibit features works by 57 local artists, including 22 children, reproduced on weatherproof vinyl banners and displayed along Lefferts Boulevard and nearby streets.

There are paintings, watercolors, sculptures, photographs, lithographs and computer-generated imagery.

Several pieces draw inspiration from the surrounding area, like an oil painting by Weimin Mo of the Church-in-the-Gardens and Liana Shemper's work "Autumn Walk Through Forest Hills Gardens."

"It is hoped that they will entice people out of their homes, give them a reason to take a stroll in the village area and see the amazing art — which just happens to be by friends and neighbors they see or pass almost daily," Lacks and Mavilia said in a statement.

The exhibit is funded by a grant from City Council Member Karen Koslowitz to the Kew Gardens Council for Recreation and the Arts and a Citizens Committee for New York City Neighborhood Grant awarded to the Kew Gardens Improvement Association.

It will run through Sept. 21.