Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park, Queens is the last racetrack in New York City. Across the Belt Parkway from Kennedy Airport, it has its own stop on the subway, and virtually from the day of its opening 1894, it has been disparaged, the down-market cousin of the upscale tracks that used to populate New York City, tracks like Jerome Park and Morris Park in what is now the Bronx, and the extant Belmont Park, on the border of Queens in Nassau County.
The major marketing and broadcast arms in Thoroughbred racing pretty much ignore Aqueduct. The only hats you’ll find there are utilitarian, not decorative: baseball caps or, more commonly, wool hats to keep warm the heads of the hardy who frequent the track from November to April. You’ll be hard-pressed to find the celebrities so prized by the sport’s promoters.
Instead, you’ll find an ethnically diverse crowd, mostly men, whose wagering dollars keep Aqueduct near the top of the league table of monthly handle during the winter months. You’ll find people who have arrived on the A train and who don’t much care that no red carpet awaits them. You’ll find horseplayers.
11 national and international artists.
“Aqueduct is my favorite track,” said Paul Kelleher of the New York Racing Association’s corporate development department. The project is his brainchild.
“I love the grittiness of Aqueduct; it’s got a city vibe to it,” he went on. It was a perfect venue, he thought, to display street art, which often takes the form of murals on urban buildings. He contacted a well-connected friend, Joe Iurato, who agreed to curate the event.
The artists have taken over the track between 8 pm and 4 am this week, creating art on the walls of the track with stencils and spray paint, incorporating racing themes, horses, and jockeys. Iurato is documenting the installation on Twitter and Instagram.
“Part of the beauty of street art is its impermanence,” said Iurato in a press release. “A piece might last an hour or a few years, but every artist accepts that it won’t last forever. An exhibition like this, where works of this scale are housed indoors, isn’t something you see happen very often. In a sense, it preserves a small piece of New York culture that is otherwise constantly fleeting.”
The ephemeral nature of street art has been highlighted recently by the painting over of the Five Pointz graffiti and by Banksy’s recent visit to New York, two events, said Kelleher, unrelated to the Aqueduct Murals project.
“We didn’t align our event with those,” he said. “We didn’t even know Banksy was going to be in New York doing installations, and Five Pointz is predominantly graffiti art, while this will be murals.”
“But,” he added, “it ended up being really well-timed.”
