‘We create our own sanctuaries’: Finding refuge in Elmhurst’s community sculpture garden
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Artist Yvonne Shortt’ created the African American Marbleization series, which features her new sculpture Bantu Knots & The Underground Railroad. Photos by Sara Herschander
By Sara Herschander
When his cramped apartment became a virtual classroom, an Elmhurst grandfather found solace in a small garden between an Olive Garden and the Long Island Expressway off ramp.
After live music venues shuttered, the same patch of land transformed into an open-air studio for a guitar player.
And as the pandemic stretched on, artist Yvonne Shortt would sometimes find flowers laid at the feet of a statue she erected in the community plot known as the Elmhurst Sculpture Garden. The impromptu bouquets invoked a famous quote by painter Henri Matisse: “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
Shortt and a team of volunteers created the Elmhurst Sculpture Garden in 2017 and seeded it with works like “Waking Blind,” a sculpture of a girl of color where she occasionally finds the flowers.
“These are little gems in our city that we can use to become our own little personal sanctuaries,” Shortt said during a community clean-up in November 2020. After tidying the garden, she unveiled her latest sculpture, “Bantu Knots & The Underground Railroad.”
Space for a cramped community
Elmhurst and its surrounding communities are some of the most overcrowded neighborhoods in New York City, and its open spaces quickly fill with people, particularly during the pandemic.
In Elmhurst and nearby Jackson Heights, every 1,000 residents share just 1/10 of an acre of open space, the equivalent of one basketball court, according to the organization New Yorkers For Parks.
“We’re very overpopulated [in Elmhurst] and we have a lot of children, seniors, and people with disabilities.” said Jennifer Ochoa, a lifelong Elmhurst resident who attended the community clean-up.
Young women tidy the garden during a community clean-up event.
Community volunteers tend to the garden, which has received funding from Burning Man Global Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
“As a community we have to work together, and for a long time this was completely abandoned,” Ochoa continued. “Now that we have a sculpture garden, not only as a beautifying place, but as a serene place to relax, we [the community] have to maintain it.”
Before 2017, the lot was overgrown and dilapidated but still popular among residents of the nearby LeFrak City apartment complex, Shortt said.
As she spoke, a couple walking along a path to the Queens Center Mall paused to gaze at the garden’s other installations, like Shotgun Home (America), a piece on gun violence, and Interlaced, a sculpture composed of deconstructed fences.
Shortt’s newest piece depicts an Afro pick, a type of traditional comb popularized during the Civil Rights movement as a symbol of Black Power.
The sculpture weaves the history of the Afro pick into its very foundation. Shortt called the wood in its handle “a nod to the roots of the piece coming from Africa,” where wooden and stone Afro picks first emerged 5,500 years ago. Metal provides a tribute to the version patented by two Black businessmen in 1969.
The sculpture’s head depicts a woman with bantu knots, a traditional African hairstyle, and a route of the Underground Railroad. Both are cast in marble dust, a hallmark of Shortt’s African American Marbleization series, which depicts people of color using marble.
“When you go to museums and art galleries, you don’t see many people of color that are sculptural. So, I wanted to use the language of the museum, that marble that they’re always using, and incorporate that into the work as well,” Shortt said.
The Elmhurst Sculpture Garden.
Kelly Lee, a Queens-based architect, visited the garden for the first time during the clean-up and installation. She has assisted Shortt with several of her pieces and praised community members for maintaining the unlikely art space
“Without the artwork that’s here, it’s definitely easy for places like this to get left by the side and neglected,” Lee said. “Bringing [artwork] here makes it a place that’s a lot more welcoming for the community and for people passing through.”
Like the Elmhurst Sculpture Garden itself, Shortt developed each of her pieces for the community and through collaboration with neighbors, rather than for private display or with private funding.
“It’s always important to me to not just create a sculpture and drop it somewhere, but to create it in places that are left in decay. I work with the community to bring these pieces to these spaces and at a level where we can exist in them,” she said.
“We create our own sanctuaries—and our own spaces.”
