QView #198 | March 11

President Frank H. Wu went to Albany on Tuesday, March 4, to make rounds with state legislators and seek budgetary improvements.

President Wu with Assembly Member Alicia Hyndman, chair of the Higher Education Committee and part of the Queens delegation . . . .

. . . Assembly Member Rebecca Seawright, chair of the Aging Committee . . .

. . . representatives of PSC/CUNY . . .

. . . and Assembly Member Catalina Cruz, a member of the Queens delegation; Arturo Soto, president of the Committee for Disabled Students of Queens College, and his guide dog; and students from the CUNY Coalition for Students with Disabilities.

President Frank H. Wu met postdocs, fellows, and visiting professors at a reception in Kiely Hall’s 12th floor conference room on Thursday, March 6.

From left: President Frank H. Wu, Education Dean Bobbie Kabuto, Biology Postdoc Venkatakrishna Lappasi Moharan, Physics Postdoc Kevin Dagoberto Zelaya, Chemistry Postdoc Muhammad Rauf, Interim Dean of Asian American / Asian Research Institute John Chin.

Later on Thursday, the President’s Office, the Office of Compliance and Diversity, and the Office of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management hosted an iftar event at Agora Café. Muslim and non-Muslim students and faculty shared a meal, learned about the significance of Ramadan, and connected with peers from diverse backgrounds.

At QC’s third annual Arts Leadership Bootcamp last weekend, students from CUNY campuses in Queens learned about career options in arts fields. President Frank H. Wu spoke at the bootcamp orientation on Friday, March 7.

Knights Playoff Run Ends in ECC Semifinals

The Queens College men’s basketball team saw its East Coast Conference (ECC) playoff run come to an end in the semifinals on Saturday, as they fell to St. Thomas Aquinas College, 91-82.

QC held a lead against St. Thomas Aquinas until midway through the second half when St. Thomas went on a 20-4 run to pull ahead. Despite the loss, it was a successful season for QC, who made their first ECC semifinal appearance since the 2010-11 season. The Knights advanced to the semifinals after winning their first-round matchup against Molloy University, 95-86, last Wednesday.

While basketball season ended last week, the Queens College softball season got underway. The Knights traveled to Clermont, Florida to play four games over the weekend and earned their first victory on Sunday, a 6-2 triumph over Concord University. The Knights will remain in Florida for the rest of the week where they will play six more games against various opponents.

The men’s tennis team picked up a pair of victories last week, winning 4-3 over Assumption University on Wednesday and then defeating University of the District of Columbia, 6-1 on Friday. The Knights are 4-2 on the young season. They will host Adelphi University this Friday at 1 pm in their only contest of the week. 

For the latest Knights news, be sure to visit queensknights.com

Spring Outlook for Jobs and Internships: Fair

QC students and alumni are encouraged to attend the Spring Career and Internship Fair next Monday, March 17, from noon to 2 pm in the Student Union Ballroom. Representatives from more than 40 employers will be in attendance. Bring multiple copies of your resume and your student ID, and wear business attire. RSVP here.

Planning for Summer

Summer Session gives students the chance to earn up to 15 credits. Registration began yesterday—Monday, March 10—on a staggered basis. View the full schedule here.  

Operating at the Intersection of Art and Social Justice

Artist and public practitioner Chloe Bass (ACSM) is building an international career through works that encourage people to think.

Her first institutional solo exhibition, Wayfinding —presented in 2019-20 at St. Nicholas Park by the Studio Museum of Harlem and most recently mounted in Buffalo—posts questions (“How much of life is coping?”) and observations (“I want to believe that approaches can be different without being threatening”) on a series of mirrored billboards. The shiny surfaces reflect their outdoor settings and sometimes obscure the texts, emphasizing words and their impermanence. “My grandmother was dying of Alzheimer’s and confused by the new glass buildings being built in the Upper Westside neighborhood she knew,” says Bass.

In October 2024, Queens College held a screening in Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library for we turn to time, which Bass completed as a Kupferberg Arts Incubator fellow. Part of a larger project, we turn to time features video footage submitted by four multigenerational, mixed-race American families; participants were asked to document themselves for themselves, without imagining outside viewers. Edited into a loop, the installation shifts from one stream to two, three, or all four running at once, evoking home movies and in the process normalizing mixed-race people

It's Complicated

“All of my projects are inspired by my interest in intimacy as a complicated thing,” comments Bass, who uses film, signage, photos, glass, mosaics, and other media, but doesn’t paint, sculpt, or make objects. “The more I do, the more complex I think it gets. What I’m really good at is language.”

A New York native, Bass—“pronounced like the fish, the shoe, the beer”—grew up in Manhattan in a creatively inclined family. “My mother, Erica Mapp, is an artist and poet; my dad, Alan Bass, writes and publishes books,” she says. The former is an immigrant from Trinidad, the latter a Jewish second-generation New Yorker who lived in the Electchester complex and commuted to the High School of Music and Art.

The niece of the late conductor Robert Bass, who led the Collegiate Chorale, Bass studied piano at the Mannes College of Music’s pre-college program. She continued with music at Hunter College Campus Schools, which she attended from pre-K through 12th grade. But of the arts, she most enjoyed theater. “I was involved with that as early as I could be,” she recalls. “I wanted to go to Yale because of the theater school.”

After graduating from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in theatre studies, Bass returned to New York and found a position with the Wooster Group, a celebrated experimental theater company. “I was also working for the Department of Sanitation’s Golden Apple Awards program,” she says. (Golden Apple Awards, no longer issued, recognized K-12 schools in New York City for recycling, waste reduction, or neighborhood cleanup initiatives.) “I was not very good at my job, but they were nice to me.”

From Theater to Grad School

A few years later, drawing on her experience in avant-garde theater and city government, Bass matriculated at Brooklyn College’s MFA program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). “I applied on a whim,” she says. “I was in the third incoming class, [then] the biggest so far: 14 people. It was a good time to be there. I was exposed to other forms of art education. This was a chance to enter the art world.”

Bass’s theatrical background was a distinct asset. “PIMA was all collaborative,” she notes. “It was about understanding the value of theater as a practice, that the skills you develop in the rehearsal room are valuable politically, creatively, and intellectually.” Her exhibitions, installations, performances, writing, and activities—such as organizing artists who like her lived and worked in Bushwick—reinforced each other and shaped her practice.

After the Queens Museum presented Detroit Disassembled, Andrew Moore’s large-scale photos of urban decay, Bass wrote the museum, raising concerns about “ruin porn” and, it turned out, opening a dialogue. “[Then-director] Tom Finkelpearl invited me in to talk about it,” she says. “He brought me into the social practice world. I continue to work with Tom at the CUNY Graduate Center but started with social practice at Queens College. When Greg Sholette went on sabbatical, Maureen Connor was already retired; I was brought in as a full-time visiting professor.” Bass has never held an academic appointment outside of CUNY and apart from her undergraduate years at Yale, was educated almost entirely within the university.

Now an associate professor at QC, with Sholette she also co-runs Social Practice CUNY, which receives support from the Mellon Foundation. In effect, she’s managing a nonprofit; meeting institutional needs takes up a lot of time. But she’s proud of the results. “Social Practice CUNY operates at the intersection of art and social justice to make projects beyond the CUNY community,” Bass says. “We made a network to do just that,” comprising to date 100 faculty, students, and alumni, with fellows from 19 of the university’s 25 campuses.

“I love the people that I teach,” Bass concludes. “New Yorkers are my people. The way they learn together is one of the most interesting things in the world.”

Farm Museum Cooks Up St. Patrick’s Celebrations

Queens County Farm Museum is preparing corned beef and cabbage, as well as bacon and colcannon, for colonial-style St. Patrick’s Day Feasts on March 14-15. Music will accompany the meals, with bagpiping on Friday and fiddling on Saturday. To partake, buy tickets in advance.

Commemorating the COVID Lockdown

Five years to the day on March 19, the COVID lockdown began. The Queens Memory Project | Queens Public Library—in collaboration with Queens World Film Festival and MetroPlusHealth—is marking the date with Looking Back to Look Forward: 5th Anniversary of the Lockdown and QWFF’s Historic Online Pivot - Queens World Film Festival. Taking place at 7 pm at the community space adjacent to the bar and café at the Local NYC (13-02 44th Avenue, Long Island City 11101), the 90-minute event will feature stories from Queens Memory, A short film from Queens World Alumni and The Listening Tour Compilation, and an interactive map that allows audience members to share their accounts of life under lockdown. Admission is free but reservations MARCH 19TH LOOKING BACK TO LOOK FORWARD Tickets, Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite are required.

Queens Memory, created by Queens Public Library and Queens College, collects oral histories, photographs, born digital content, and other materials documenting the experience of people in the borough. Queens World, founded in 2010, responded to the lockdown by becoming the first film festival anywhere to go entirely online, showing 191 films from 31 nations and related digital events from the founders’ apartment in Jackson Heights.

Adrien Brody, a QC alumnus, won an Academy Award for The Brutalist. It’s his second “Best Actor” Oscar; he previously received the trophy for his role in The Pianist . . . . Pete Calandra (ACSM) won “Best Brazilian Song” in the Clouzine International Music Awards for this spring; Antonio Hart (ACSM) is featured on the track . . . . Jamie Cohen (Media Studies) appeared on “CBS News Mornings Plus” on March 5, discussing rage bait online. He was also quoted in JD Vance’s face has become a meme for the right and left. Here’s why. - The Washington Post . . . . Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and TESOL Kate Menken is the recipient of the New York State Association for Bilingual Education’s Gladys Correa Memorial Award for 2025, recognizing her outstanding contributions to the improvement of bilingual education, and the Center for Applied Linguistics’ 2025 Charles A. Ferguson Award for Outstanding Scholarship . . . . Emily Wilbourne (ACSM) received the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America for her recent book, Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence. Last year she won the Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award - American Musicological Society for the same title . . . .

Chuixiang Yi (SEES) led the international team that published “Principles for Guiding Future Research on Resilience and Tipping Points” in Environmental Research Letters.