Exhibition Review: Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, Queens Museum of Art

On Saturday, August 2, I hopped on the subway from Manhattan and arrived in Flushing Meadows, Queens.  The grounds of Corona Park are adorned with architectural remnants from New York’s 1964 World’s Fair.  Behind the giant Unisphere, the focal point of the park, stands the Queens Museum of Art (QMA).  The QMA presents fine arts exhibits, performance art, and films throughout the year.  The museum is best known by New Yorkers for its scale model of New York City, the world’s largest architectural model of an urban area. 

The special exhibit Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center is in a room adjacent to the urban model.  Red Lines, created by artist Damon Rich, follows the intricate shaping of today’s housing crisis in the U.S.  In the midst of the subprime meltdown, Rich uses this space as a means to reflect and teach visitors about the evolution of real estate finance.  This presumably quick study, however, quickly becomes a complex overview. 

The narrow, jaggedly shaped gallery presents a dense timeline of the U.S. housing policies.  The timeline spans approximately 100 years.  The front of the room, also considered the beginning of the timeline, provides a basic history of mortgages, but as museum visitors travel deeper into the room, the timeline becomes more intricate which reflects the complexities residents are currently faced with in the U.S.  Today people are being pushed out of their homes and this is contributing greatly to the deconstruction of neighborhoods, bankruptcy of institutions and the overall global climate.  Something needs to be done.  The first step in Rich’s mind is to educate people. 

This exhibition/learning center is a project Rich worked on during a residency at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in collaboration with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization.  This project was funded by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Artists & Communities, and Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. 

The linear story is supplemented by archival material representative of the time period.  For example, early on there are newspaper clippings and still photographs, but as the timeline reaches present day, newer media like split simultaneous film clips of interviews, large projections and computers are used.  The technological evolution that runs parallel with the exhibit has a quiet way of demonstrating how far our country has come in the technological age yet has failed to evolve with the same vigor socially and economically.  In this exhibition, the housing crisis serves as the catalyst for social and economic discourse. 

The exhibition is broken up into sections.  The first is the history of mortgages in the early 1900s.  Originally homeowners were required to put down 50% of the cost of their purchase.  For the subsequent 5 years, owners would pay just the interest on the mortgage.  After 5 years the rest of the amount was due.  This system only worked until families became strained during the Great Depression.  This historical context sets the stage for reform and the inclusion of the Federal Government. 

The second part focuses on the country’s recovery after the Great Depression.  Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation were introduced to help rescue homeowners from foreclosing.  Under the reformed structure homeowners were asked to put just 20% of the value down. 

The pioneer of real estate appraisal, Frederick Babcock and his methods, determined the value of a home.  The valuation of real estate, as it was initially called, had a lot of flaws.  Babcock is portrayed as an oppressive elitist in this exhibition because valuation of property, as the exhibition points out, was greatly impacted by racial mixing in neighborhoods.  For example, “blockbustering” was a scare tactic used by real estate appraisers to encouraged white residents to sell cheaply by drumming up fears that incoming black families would lower property values.  This set the white families up to fail if they trusted their banks and appraisers because they bought in while the prices were still high.  More importantly this tactic alienated people and added to social tension. 

“Redlining” refers to a time when Chicago bankers drew a red line on a map to avoid lending to certain neighborhoods around the city based on their social and cultural standing.  These practices were finally abolished in 1975.  After a long battle, Congress passed the House Mortgages Disclosure Act which exposed banks and real estate firms as discriminators.  This doesn’t mean there aren’t remnants of Babcock’s ideals today, however.  Less direct mechanisms to marginalize minority groups looking to secure real estate still exist.  This is evident when viewing the scale model of New York.  Rich marked all of the foreclosed properties with bright pink tape on the model to show where the clusters are.  Many are in African-American and Latino neighborhoods –the same neighborhoods that were directly affected by Redlining tactics. 

The exhibition space comes to a close in a multi-media section.  There is a reading table with a computer that has the Mortgage Disclosure Act on the screen.  There are numerous videos including simultaneous interviews from mortgages lenders, non-profit organizations and academics which provides a wide spectrum of expertise, representing different points of view.  There were also childlike animations and puppet shows in Spanish on the televisions.  The characters in the stories are victims of housing and mortgage scams.  This example shows one way organizations like Lawrence Community Works (Lawrence, MA), in this case, try to inform citizens of their community about the crisis. 

This exhibition has a real physical presence not only because of the rich material, but the use of the museum’s main attraction-it helps put it into perspective.  While the gallery is not a large space, the fact that Rich focused on keeping everything in proportion was effective.  The tangible components create a space that satisfies all of the senses -making it easy to absorb all the information that was presented.  It wasn’t monotonous or boring.  The exhibition had enough variety to keep one’s interest, enough careful research and material to provide a thorough report.  It almost felt like a children’s museum with its large plywood room divider (the height changed with the changing of interest rates), computer screens, headphones, cartoons, and building models.  But behind the activity was a serious message. 

The message I got from this museum visit was a reminder that I should prepare myself for more revamping of the system.  I also got the message that no system will keep everyone safe so the best thing to do is stay vigilant and live below one’s means.  With projects like Rich’s which makes this information accessible through bilingual literature, computer links and websites, there is some hope that citizens can learn from earlier mistakes.  I would only hope it could be a permanent exhibit at QMA. 

The QMA has taken great strides to engage their community by providing rich programming, exhibitions, literature and special events. It’s important that QMA be recognized for promoting shows like Red Lines because the show’s message affects their local community.  Corona, Queens, the neighborhood surrounding the museum is one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city and therefore affected by the housing crisis.  Without a community-based agenda, places like Corona will stand in silence.  QMA has given residences information so that they can have a voice.

Elen Woods, M.A. Program, Museum Professions, Seton Hall University