City as Muse, curated by Hyewon Yi, features works by five emerging New York artists, who respond to the urban landscape through the mediums of drawing and painting. The exhibition will be significant in opening up Elmhurst Hospital Center’s main lobby to visual stimulation as well as a dialogue on the show’s theme. Through the juxtaposition of five diverse artistic visions, the exhibition seeks to examine the theme of the city as a site of cultural, social, and political discourse.

City as Muse features five young American artists actively involved in questioning urban life, the dominant experience of the twenty-first century. Incessantly exploring private belief in public space and land use, Jessica Cannon presents cityscape as a harmonious and continuous environment in her paintings of subway tracks and cities seen from bird’s-eye view. Jeff Faerber celebrates our favorite city in the Rembrandt-inspired warm hues and fuzzy edges of his small canvases. Faerber’s quiescent poetic images of water towers and bridges contrast with Warren Holt’s horizontally elongated (90”) abstract canvas conveying the exhilaration of car lights, speed and noise at night that we urban citizens experience daily. Holt’s response to the intensity of sights and sounds is further echoed in Dan Levenson’s depictions of crossroads and signs, which the artist considers universal pictograms. Levenson’s renderings of the impersonal system of traffic regulations direct us where to go or not to go amidst the bombardment of chaotic stimuli. Such a paradox of urban life is embodied in two large drawings by Lucas Monaco. His labor-intensive topographic map drawings of the LA valley, the gigantic city of the West Coast, allow us to view the cities that we live in from a distance, as a whole. Rather than experiencing these cities from within, we look at them and to read them like a map.