WHAM!
The Woodside Heights Art Museum
NYC Department of Records Municipal Archives, c. 1940
MISSION
The mission of WHAM!, the Woodside Heights Art Museum, is to have fun, build community, and instill pride in our neighborhood by highlighting local culture and history in a museum open freely to the public 24-7-365.
WHAM! celebrates the hyper local and contextualizes Woodside art and history within the greater New York City narrative, bringing local histories and accomplishments to light, with equal emphasis on celebrated and emerging local talents.
WOODSIDE & THE ARTS
When Salvador Dali visited NYC he often stayed in Woodside, Queens because he liked the working class nature of the neighborhood. The famous surrealist frequented local hangout Donovan's and local lore has it that he paid an overdue bar tab with 12 of his signed silkscreens prints - still on little-known public view in the pub's Library Room. Woodside was also home to actors James Caan and Edward Burns, Pulitzer-prize winning author Frank McCourt; Jack Mercer, the voice of Popeye and Felix the Cat; jazz great Bix Beiderbecke; and Charlotte E. Ray, the first Black American female lawyer in the USA.
1909 NYPL Atlas Plate 13