#Newsflash | Woodside Artist to Exhibit, Give Away Furtive Fruits in Flushing – QEDC

#Newsflash | Woodside Artist to Exhibit, Give Away Furtive Fruits in Flushing

BY QEDC It's In Queens

This is a berry ap-peel-ing event. In fact, it’s almost pear-fect.

Harley Judd Spiller will discuss and offer samples of lesser-known fruits on a Flushing sidewalk on Saturday, May 20, from 1 pm to 3 pm.

Expect Cacao, Longan, Loquat, Mangosteen, Passion Fruit, Rambutan, Wong Pei, and a few other seed-bearing items.

Spiller will also share his multilingual books about fruit and fruit-paring devices, such as the cow bone pomelo peeler. The artist will speak English, but he’ll provide translations in Cantonese, Fujianese, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, and Taiwanese.

The event, dubbed “Free Fruit for All,” is free (naturally) and open to the public in front of the Glow Community Center at 133-29 41st Ave.

Spiller is the Ken Dewey Director of the Franklin Furnace avant-garde art archive at Pratt Institute. He has many interests. Unique interests, that is.

Also known as “Inspector Collector,” the Woodside resident owns award-winning assemblages of menus, flags, maps, and spoons that have been in exhibitions in such diverse places as The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and El Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas, Venezuela.

He has more than 6,000 takeout menus from Chinese restaurants, as well as hundreds of chewing gum packs, and countless yarmulkes and unusual neckties. He also wrote Keep the Change: A Collector’s Takes of Lucky Pennies, Counterfeit C-Notes, and other Curious Currency (Princeton Architectural Press, $19.95), which explores his passion for mutilated paper money and coins.

Free Fruit for All is part of What Can We Do?, a micro-grant program from the Asian American Arts Alliance that supports Asian American and Pacific Islander artists with their community projects. Created in response to a spike in anti-Asian hate and violence in NYC, the program is supported by public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. (Think: Council Members Christopher Marte and Sandra Ung.)