Exhibitions

“Crossing the BLVD is a powerful social record… Most of the subjects live in Queens, but their stories resonate far beyond the borders of this multicultural New York borough. What often gets lost in the national debate on immigration is the human dimension, an under-standing of the lives of those people who give up everything to come here. Crossing the BLVD lets them tell their stories… We see the subjects’ faces in the photographs, hear their voices, and enter into their lives through cherished mementos they have carried from home to home… The exhibition also includes a mobile story booth, which enables visitors to enter and record their own stories of migration, or those of parents and grandparents. Once the images and stories have been uploaded onto the Web, they become part of an online archive of immigration stories attached to the exhibition as it continues from place to place around the country… Extraordinary People, extraodinary lives… A living work of art.” The New York Times Benjamin Genocchio

“One of the most engaging photography shows to visit Rochester in years… Both book and exhibition are an innovative patchwork of photo portraits, startling life histories and flamboyant layouts… From 1999 to 2002, they [Lehrer and Sloan] toured a world in miniature exploring their own borough’s housing projects, schools and community centers. They found political refugees who survived torture, a Nigerian prophetess ordered by God to visit America, and a philosophical Hindu driver who made his taxi a sacred space—among other remarkable stories.”
Democrat and Chronicle Stuart Low

“Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America—a multi-media installation of photography, text, and sounds is an   is more akin to watching a movie, because the narratives take time to unfold, and there is an inherent drama in the real life personal accounts… Crossing the BLVD offers an object lesson in the new aesthetic—how it looks, how it generates its meanings—as well as a window on the lives of people who, mostly unnoticed by the rest of us, are steadily enlarging the concept of what it means to be an American.”
The Baltimore Sun Glenn McNatt

“Based on the 2003 book of the same title, this exhibit shares stories and images of men and women who came to the United Sates after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments…. The exhibit is full of stories of heartbreak and hope, told by immigrants in their own words through text and audio, accompanied by bold, color portraits taken by Lehrer… When you cross the BLVD, you’ll meet men who left their families behind for their beliefs and lawyers who now deliver food. You’ll hear prayer and song, words and wisdom. You’ll see an Egyptian man who spent seven years turning his restaurant into a mosaic-encrusted work of art. You’ll meet a woman from Tajikistan so renowned for her dancing that her image was woven into tapestries, printed on posters and glazed on ceramic urns and plates. She now runs a dance studio that can only be accessed through a subway station… An unbelievable journey…”
Bangor Daily News Kristen Andresen

“Crossing the BLVD is spectacular in its commitment to documenting the artists’ exploration of their own neighborhood… with exquisitely detailed portraits of the people who live around them… The experience of wandering through this exhibit was astonishingly rich. Of the highest technical quality, it can also be so intimate it almost has a smell. The artistic expertise displayed in the deft oral-history gathering, the jewel-like photography and the immaculate sound work can lead directly to a tender familiarity with each of the people wrapped in the heart of this work… One imagines that Queens is now full of celebrities thanks to Lehrer and Sloan.”
commmunityarts.net Linda Frye Burnham

“In their extraordinary attempt to document ‘signs of migratory life’ …[Lehrer and Sloan] undertook the impossible task of telling the story of modern-day Queens while providing a window into the geopolitical and cultural history of the postcolonial world. Undeterred, they succeed because they focus on 79 powerful individual stories that deserve telling… The stories selected counter a prevailing trend toward oversimplification of American demographics and cultural history. Crossing the BLVD is an important project encouraging people to listen attentively to rarely heard stories.”
The Next American City Anika Singh

“In Lehrer’s and Sloan’s Crossing the BLVD, the role of oral narratives defy the caricature of migrant ethnicity perpetuated in popular culture… Lehrer and Sloan juxtapose the lived complexity of the New York neighborhood of Queens: the ways in which various (new and old) immigrant communities coexist, and how they encounter the “mainstream” and vice versa… Where the cabdriver in [an episode of the German detective series] Stubbe sees only the Indian driver’s imbecility, Sushil Rao’s narrative in Crossing the BLVD reflects the taxi driver observing his customer. Where the camera’s gaze sees an Indian taxi driver “illiterate” in the ways of an increasingly transnational world and world economy, oral narratives such as Rao’s restore the immigrant’s lived presence and the multi-facetedness of his life. Where Stubbe insists on the one-sided nature of the gaze—the elderly white lady glancing at the foreign driver, Lehrer and Sloan’s setting of Rao’s words shows us that the gaze is far from unreturned. Where in Stubbe, the lady provides her disinterested taxi driver with a history lesson, Rao’s narrative assures us that the conversation is always mutual, and, if anything, the narrative situation may be differently one-sided. Rao’s biography is the very idea that the Stubbe episode rules out: the idea that the man who drives the taxi may in fact be a poet…”
The IntraNation Project, Emily Carr Institute, Mita Banerjee, Ph.D.