Christine Schmitt Weaves Art into Broad Channel
By Dan Guarino
The images, large, crocheted and colorful, dance across the outer fence of 17th Road Park along Cross Bay Blvd. in Broad Channel. Traditional woven sunflowers and squares, mesmerizing circles, bees and spiders weaving honeycombs and webs from opposite directions, and sea creatures that frolic in the deep-sea fauna ruffling underwater-like when the breeze blows.
All are the creation of Broad Channel artist Christine Schmitt in her first public art installation in Queens. Schmitt has “been creating art for fun” since childhood. After a detour into music classes in high school, she went on to major in Digital and Studio Art at SUNY Oneonta, where she graduated in May.
Beyond crochet, she notes her favorite mediums include drawing and acrylic painting. “I learned how to crochet in 6th grade…in the Crochet Club at PS/MS 47,” she says. “I then never picked up a hook again until 2020, when the world was in isolation. It started off as a fun thing to do…then it started to snowball and I just wanted to create more and more. It made its way into my art, and I never looked back.”
“Crocheting pieces bigger than me” and taking her art to a grander scale during her spring last semester, she says, “I covered 24 trees across campus with my crochet art (titled “Beauty in Simplicity”) as part of a public art display there! I was so inspired and proud of how that display came out and was received by the community, that I wanted to do another one as soon as I returned home in May!”
After applying for and getting a NYC Parks special events permit to mount her art on the fence, she began creating and assembling all its components, most done within one month. Each panel measures five by nine feet. The “water” and “flowers” pieces were a combination, she says, “of past work that I rearranged together to create something new,” with some elements first appearing in her Oneonta exhibition. “I enjoy the art of repurposing material and giving it a new life and meaning!”
The new project, “Colors on the Bay,” hangs just down the block from the Broad Channel library where the school crochet club met and she learned her art. Schmitt notes, “I wanted it to be colorful and fun, something that anyone, old or young, could look at and enjoy. I want to brighten people’s days with this piece. It’s right at a bus stop, so that even people passing by could take a quick look and enjoy it. I also wanted to bring my art to my hometown.”
A note explaining the work also gives thanks to NYC Parks Rockaway Administrator Eric Peterson, Broad Channel’s Margaret Wagner, the Bollman family, Michael, Michelle and Thomas Schmitt and her mother Shelly Schmitt.
“If people look at ‘Colors on the Bay,’ and feel even a bit happier,” artist Christine Schmitt reflects, “then my job is complete!
“Colors on the Bay” will be on view through August 19.
Photos by Shelly Schmitt and Dan Guarino.