The first World’s Fair held in Queens’ Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in 1939, helped transform an area of near wasteland into a modern destination. Twenty-five years later a second fair, dubbed a “billion-dollar dream” by Life magazine, thanks to its costs, showcased exhibitions around the theme “peace through understanding.” The fairs put the park on the map, and structures erected for both still stand. The Unisphere, a monumental steel globe, was built as a symbol of the 1964–65 fair and is now a symbol of the borough—not to mention a popular Instagram spot. But you can best engage with the fairs and their legacy at the Queens Museum, originally the New York City Pavilion for both editions.
Displays from the museum’s deep World’s Fair collection include permanent installation The Panorama of the City of New York, from 1964, and exhibition A Billion Dollar Dream, which opened in November 2024. For the museum’s 2024 artists-in-residence program, the QM-Jerome Foundation Fellowship, curators challenged the recipients to respond to the 1964–65 fair in their own work. Umber Majeed and Abang-guard spent a year in the museum’s on-site studios developing pieces that contextualize the event while appraising the social, political and cultural differences between 60 years ago and today.
“They [were] looking at the Pakistan and Philippines pavilions through the lens of all the regional histories that we know happened before, during or shortly after the World's Fair,” says Lindsey Berfond, an assistant curator and studio program manager at the Queens Museum.
Exhibitions of the completed works opened in mid-March, the first solo museum shows for these fellows. We talked to the artists in their studios to capture their insights, inspirations and in-progress work. Get a sense of their projects before heading to the Queens Museum to see the installations in person.
Note: Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Umber Majeed: J😊Y TECH
Umber Majeed
Umber Majeed grew up between New York’s Long Island and Pakistan, and attended art school in Lahore, Pakistan, before coming back to the City for an MFA at the Parsons School of Design. Along with being a working artist, she teaches video and animation. Her exhibition for the Queens Museum, J😊Y TECH, reflects on the Pakistan Pavilion from the 1964–65 World’s Fair and amplifies her various iterations of Trans-Pakistan, an ongoing project about an uncle’s travel business that examines the South Asian diaspora. Berfond calls J😊Y TECH “an imaginary revitalization of her uncle’s tourism business, [as well as] taking on the visual language of Jackson Heights.”
What have you created during the residency for your exhibition?
Umber Majeed: J😊Y TECH is a multidisciplinary installation that includes drawings, ceramics, video and augmented reality. Each element is based on physical as well as digital elements.
What topics did you concentrate on?
UM: A phone repair store in a Pakistani diasporic neighborhood, Jackson Heights, that is called Joy Tech; it’s owned by a Bangladeshi. When my parents moved here, we lived in Queens and then on Long Island, and were heavily invested in visiting Jackson Heights. My family has a business there. I’ve been interested in researching the neighborhood but also thinking about what community there means.
How does that play out in your pieces?
UM: The world building for my show is around a couple of elements. One is the store Joy Tech and another is my uncle’s failed tourism company, which was based in Islamabad, Pakistan. My uncle started his business, I think, back in the 1980s. It was successful for a while, but it ended in the early 2000s. After 9/11 everybody just got lumped into one category of person. It’s complicated; location wise Pakistan is right next to Afghanistan. I’m also looking at the idea of bootleg images.
What about that interests you?
UM: I’ve always been obsessed with graphic design. A lot of the graphic design in Lahore is around stock imagery—cutting it out, pasting it, pixelating it, blowing it up. The whole reason why bootlegged materials exist is for accessibility. It’s how a lot of media is consumed in South Asia, through pirated images, glitched images.
In Jackson Heights there’s really strange, kitsch graphic design. There are people who will recognize the inverted Apple logo, and they’ll be like, Oh yeah, different parts of the world have these kitsch elements. It’s a little bit off. There’s a politics to that aesthetic.
I look at the way bootleg is not only in the aesthetic but in the method. I’m co-opting, using facades, using the idea of tourism or the corporation through Trans-Pakistan to access places I wouldn’t as a woman and artist.
I’m looking at diasporic politics, how Jackson Heights is Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Nepali, and thinking about how we’ve been archived. There are artists who have also thought about these ideas. I’m coming from a tradition. J😊Y TECH is continuing a conversation in a different form.
Where does the concept of an archive fit in?
UM: This is where the Queens Museum and World’s Fair enter: How was Pakistan depicted in the 1964–65 World’s Fair? Who is doing the archiving, and who is the tourist?
The tourist was the white middle-class person introducing industries to potential business collaborations. For example, the jewelry designer who did stuff for the Pakistan Pavilion was a white woman from New Jersey, Barbara Anton.
In the 1964–65 World’s Fair there were a lot of corporate entities, which I find interesting because I’m using a corporate entity—the store Joy Tech—but for social justice.
For A Billion Dollar Dream, one of the curators, Sarah Cho, created a wonderful timeline that incorporates what was happening in the Philippines and Pakistan at that time. The Philippines and Pakistan were “created” in 1947 and 1948, respectively. So in 1964 you have all these new states, and they had an opportunity to share their history or heritage, but obviously it’s very complicated.
The Pakistan Pavilion didn’t give a lot of representation to East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh, but they were using all its resources. A lot of money was coming from the jute industry, and the jewelry collection used pink pearls from Dhaka, which are quite rare.
A lot of your previous work is only black-and-white. Why change it now?
UM: Through the iterations of Trans-Pakistan I have usually been looking at the checkerboard, the black-and-white. But Trans-Pakistan is a fluid entity, so it’s responsive to its context. The newer version is white and fluorescent pink, which is an important color throughout the experience of the installation. It is a custom paint and vinyl, so the main colors are black, white and pink. I’ve been interested in logos, like Apple’s, and there’s a lot of fluorescent pink in the ads.
Installation shot of Umber Majeed: J😊Y TECH. Photo: Hai Zhang. Courtesy, Queens Museum
What impact has the fellowship had on you?
UM: It’s been amazing to have access to the studio. The Queen’s Museum staff and the curators are fantastic. They supported our projects and were super invested. To have a guaranteed solo show in a museum—not all fellowships do that. That’s a huge trust. They didn’t know what I would do, but because of the budget, I was able to experiment.
The space is big, so I proposed things I wouldn’t have in other spaces. It’s important for me as a visual artist to think about allowing visitors to enter the work as much as they want to. Sometimes I provide translation or QR codes. It really depends on how much the participant wants to enter the work.
Abang-guard: Makibaka
Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug: Abang-Guard
Abang-guard comprises Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug, two Filipino American artists who met while working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The duo’s work focuses on immigration, labor and visibility. Their name plays on the term “avant-garde” as well as their positions as museum security guards. Catbagan says, “The term ‘avant-garde,’ it’s a front liner. It makes sense that we’re museum guards but also artists. We’re guarding something of value. Our experience in the back informed our practice, and now we’re in the game.” Their museum exhibition is titled Makibaka, a Tagalog word for “coming together,” and looks back at the Philippine and New York State pavilions from the fair.
How do you work together?
Maureen Catbagan: I mostly do photography and video, the sculpture installations. And then [Vitug] mostly concentrates on paintings. We intersect with performance.
What aspects of the 1964–65 fair sparked your works for this residency and exhibition?
Jevijoe Vitug: We concentrated on the Philippine and New York State pavilions. The paintings are based on those shown in the New York Pavilion by Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist. At that time these pieces were considered avant-garde. When we think about what American art was during those days, the people represented—Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist—are mostly white men. I wanted to make versions of the works, but instead of being about American consumerism, they are about the narrative of Asian Americans, specifically Filipino nurses and migrant labor.
Instead of calling one the 13 Most Wanted [the name of Warhol’s mural], it’s America’s Most Help Wanted. Warhol’s work was removed after a few days because he put the actual most wanted men in America.
MC: [Vitug] takes the American modernist and inputs Filipino subjectivity into the paintings. Even though there was a Philippines Pavilion, the depiction of the history was more like a colonial narrative: a Spanish colonizer “discovered” the Philippines, and it ended with the Battle of Bataan, when Americans and Filipinos joined together to fight the Japanese.
The pavilions focused on the space age and American consumerism, but where was the Filipino American history? Not just the Filipino American history but the Asian American in general or the migrant labor that built America? That’s our question.
We directly reference the architecture of the original Philippines Pavilion and do our version of a salakot [a Filipino farmer’s hat] in the roof. We’re installing time capsules to layer past, present and future. We’re challenging the architecture of commemoration.
How do the time capsules fit in?
MC: It’s based partially on the Westinghouse time capsule, which was part of the fair. That looked like a missile—it was all about the space age. They had their own idea of what was valuable to put in it. We put in gifts for the labor movement, like how you leave fruit and items for ancestors.
There’s two Filipino diasporas, the farmers and nurses. Our gifts commemorate the Delano Grape Strike, which occurred on September 8, 1965. The fair happened around then, along with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which incentivized the recruitment of nurses from the Philippines. The strike was the largest solidarity movement between Mexicans and Filipinos. They created the working conditions we have now, all these things we take for granted. But they were hard-won with solidarity movements, a lot of blood, sweat and tears.
One of the pictures is the Filipino Community Cultural Center of Delano, the strike-organization HQ. We wanted to put Larry Itliong [a Filipino American labor organizer] in the forefront because Filipinos started the strike.
Another painting looks at the nursing efforts. What were your goals there?
JV: This is a take on Rosenquist’s World’s Fair mural. The way the US recruited nurses from the Philippines was by saying, “This is kind of feminist. You can travel around the world and have this freedom—‘your cap is a passport.’” There was a lot of advertising in 1965 that nurses could come to the States as long as they were skilled, then become a US citizen, bring your family, have a better life.
MC: Being an American is intrinsically an immigrant story. Immigrants built this nation together—which is makibaka, a solidarity—and that identity should not be put in the background. Just because you’re American doesn’t mean that you can’t acknowledge where you come from.
What’s the significance of Makibaka?
MC: Makibaka is the whole solidarity movement and telling each other’s story. Filipinos want to create community to survive whatever situation we’re in. Makibaka is a coming together to be able to provide space.
Installation shot of Abang-guard: Makibaka. Photo: Hai Zhang. Courtesy, Queens Museum
What did you learn through this fellowship?
MC: We didn’t know half of the history about our own people; we learned that through this residency. It created a depth and pride. We went to California to listen to the stories of the farm workers from their children, who carry their parents’ story. To acknowledge that in a public place, to give permission to others to put their origin story on the table, is an amazing thing.
JV: We drove to Delano. It’s different between when you read about it and when you dare to absorb the heat, smell the pesticide.
MC: You see the pictures and wonder, Why are they wearing long sleeves? And you realize, because peat, like the scent, it’s so itchy. They just have to cover everything.
Having that accessibility, the funding to do field research, having an archive at the museum, having a dedicated studio for a year—that’s rare. And technical and curatorial support is a golden thing. We work mostly in performance and documentation of the performance. This gave us the opportunity to think big and be ambitious.
Makibaka and J😊Y TECH run through October 5, 2025; A Billion Dollar Dream is on display until July 13, 2025. Check out the Queens Museum for more on events in conjunction with the exhibitions.
